someday

A. has been bugging me all week to come up with something to put in his time capsule. He plans to bury this box tonight and draw a map so that someday--ten years from now-- we can discover something about our today selves.

A. is nothing if not persistent. I say no to him so often that when I can, I try to say yes. Even if stopping and examining my current life is the last thing I want to do during this week that has felt like a decade.

My participation in this activity is an act of faith. I am hanging my hope on lines of longitude...if you follow them far enough into the future, everything ends up okay. He will be okay. I will not lose him and he will not lose us. We will dig up the proof and laugh at our silly former selves.

Remember how I was so crazy and angry? he might ask, when he pulls out a page of notes detailing his daily routine (He is the embodiment of OCD), scrawled in his cramped and anxious handwriting that makes me think of the Unabomber.

Being 18 wasn't easy, was it? I'll shrug. Maybe I'm balancing a baby on my hip. Maybe we just buried our faithful old dog.

I'm looking around my life, trying to figure out what to pick out and place in a box in the ground. Today in class we went over similes and metaphors and when I asked for an example, L. said Ms. S, your eyes are as fresh and green as apples. I'd like to remember that moment and the way it stopped me dead in my tracks--not only for the unexpected compliment, but also for the reminder that both poetry and kindness show up everywhere, all the time, if you're open to it.

classroom confessions

When P makes fun of other teachers I can't help but laugh and I'm very bad at remembering to take attendence during Study Hall.

If you were my student and asked me to go to the nurse I would probably let you go, even if you'd already been once this week.

Sometimes I am sarcastic in the face of their genuine confusion and most of us are chewing gum, even though RULES are posted everywhere.

If I had a dollar for everytime someone says "We can't read your writing!" I'd be rich enough to retire young. Or hire someone to keep track of all the papers I lose.

I don't always follow through. I throw pop quizzes that the whole class fails in the trashcan on their way out the door. We get off track and end up talking about surfing, childhood nightmares, my imaginary boyfriend in New Jersey almost every day.

Instead of making B show up for lunch detention, I let him play double or nothing --guaranteeing that he either comes to class prepared tomorrow or next week I will pay for my few moments in the sun this afternoon, trapped in my office with an angry boy and his lunch.

I will make you hand over the note you've just stuffed in your book, but chances are, if it says more than Wassup? I am so bored? Friends 4 Eva! Write me back! I will probably hand it back it so you can find out if your four-day relationship is still going strong or if 5th period will mark yet another tradgedy in your narrow world--the very end of life as you know it.

this much I do remember

By Billy Collins

It was after dinner.
You were talking to me across the table
about something or other,
a greyhound you had seen that day
or a song you liked,

and I was looking past you
over your bare shoulder
at the three oranges lying
on the kitchen counter
next to the small electric bean grinder,
which was also orange,
and the orange and white cruets for vinegar and oil.

All of which converged into a random still life,
so fastened together by the hasp of color,
and so fixed behind the animated
foreground of your talking and smiling,
gesturing and pouring wine,
and the camber of you shoulders

that I could feel it being painted within me,
brushed on the wall of my skull,
while the tone of your voice
lifted and fell in its flight
,and the three oranges remained fixed on the counter
the way that stars are said to be fixed in the universe.

Then all of the moments of the past
began to line up behind that moment
and all of the moments to come
assembled in front of it in a long row,
giving me reason to believe
that this was a moment I had rescued
from millions that rush out of sight
into a darkness behind the eyes.

Even after I have forgotten what year it is,
my middle name, and the meaning of money,
I will still carry in my pocket
the small coin of that moment,
minted in the kingdom
that we pace through every day.

handle with care

Little Rat finds a flashlight and walks me to my small house on dark nights when there is no moon. Brothers have to take care of sisters he says, and then pats me on the back real hard and fast and calls me "Kathy" because he knows both those things drive me up the wall.

I tell myself and others that I am just fine but my body is registering high anxiety on a cellular level. Isn't it funny how something intangible, existing only in the air and moments between us, can affect you right down to the marrow, literally. I've developed a twitch. I can't sleep.

There was a package waiting for me yesterday--filled with good things from G. who is exquisite, impeccable. The best part was Jenny Lewis's cover of Handle with Care. I suggest you listen to this song if you're not already humming it to yourself while waiting for the elevator.

4 boys have asked me to the 8th grade dance. They are tall and short, shy and funny, 2 B's, a C and a D. If only I could find the perfect dress.

Norman the cow stood in the rain and bellowed all night. This morning the hair on his flat head stood straight up like a mowhawk. On my way to school I rolled down the window and reminded him that it's going to be okay.

All the irises are open. The whole world is purple and green and delicate.

important distinction

She stops to tie her running shoe by the wide ditch. Crouched down, she can not see the large, black dog (she is bad with breeds) flying through the field, headed straight for her back. An arrow and a target. A date with destiny in the bottom of a ditch.

In the next instant there is a man standing over her. And he is gorgeous (no, seriously--he looks like George Clooney) and smiling as he pulls her up by her sweaty elbow. I'm sorry Miss. I hope Buck here didn't do any permanent damage. (no, seriously--these are the exact words that come out of his mouth).

Now, you tell me: is there truth in fiction? Does life imitate art (always poorly) or is it the other way around?

Does he invite her in, pick the gravel from her palms and bandage her scraped knee? Does he offer a glass of wine to go along with their witty banter? Do they live happily ever after--you know the drill--as they would in a romance novel (or even some place as filled with cliches as say...San Diego)?

or

Does she give a cheery No problem (even as he is turning around and walking away from her, his big black dog bounding along beside him), wipe Old Buck's drool from her face, and wince along the next two miles , trying to convince herself that her tailbone is not broken the whole way home.

alphabetical order

Allergies: full blown.
Busywork, corporal punishment, military school...I'm starting to believe in their value.
Can't find my journal and am starting to panic.
Diet coke.
Everything is funny when you're this tired.
Fire drill first period. Pretended that the thick fog was actually smoke.
G. is wearing red today. I am wearing pink. This is not usual.
Hey Jude.
It sounded different inside my own head.
Just kidding!
Kathryn! Get ahold of yourself.
Little Rat is looking for some good pick-up lines. Got any?
Midsummer Night's Dream is a nightmare.
Now what?
Over me? When were you under me?
Passing notes in class isn't much different from emailing your best friend all day, is it?
Q without U = error. Let Q = you; let U = me.
Remember when...?
Sheets of interesting postage stamps make me happy.
Teach us to care and not to care; teach us to sit still. - ts eliot
Useless information - I wish I could delete it from my brain.
Violet & Eva play on the shore while their mothers drink lemonade & gin and remember.
What's the point of this assignment Ms. Smizzle?
Xenon - one molecule or so in every 20 million molecules of air
Yes. Just say Yes.
Zip your lips.

DEAR advice columnist

Dear Advice Columnist,

I have a quandary. I think I'm falling in love, yet the daunting prospect of countless sacrifice and deep gains is too scary. I am fighting it with every fiber of my being.

Help me!
In a Tizzy, Oklahoma City


Dear Tizzy,

With her sterling and well-documented ability to convince herself to fall in love with the human equivalent of a rock (on more than one occasion, sadly) this Advice Columnist may not be the surest source of guidance for you.

Thankfully, one only has to go so far as a textbook to find an answer-- for the principle of Opportunity Cost is not only a profound economic truth, but also quite useful as a means of governing L'affairs de les couers, as well. How does what you stand to loose stack up against what you stand to gain? Take this answer, cross check it against the definition of "reciprocity" and apply Just War Theory and you should be able to determine whether you are fighting a losing battle.

All My Love,
ac

tencentanswers@gmail.com

M is for Mansion

Very bored and not-so-secretly riddled with anxiety about the future and all its ambiguous promise we play the girlhood game of MASH on the long trip home from the beach.
She chooses first for me four boys-- past and present lives mixed together, ignoring geography, forgotten numbers, lost time & opportunities, lining them up on paper in a way they never lined themselves up on my front porch. How many kids? 12, 7, 4, or 1? Where do you want to live? We record our options with real concentration; she means it when offers up Spain, New Jersey, Montana, Orlando as possible places to raise my rough & tumble crew. Will you drive a station wagon, a dumptruck or pick your husband up from his job as a pet groomer on the back of a Vespa, a relic from your Italian honeymoon (beating out an African safari) all those years ago? Not wanting to be outdone, I fill in her page with fantastical options-- some horrifying and others worth pinning a bit of hope on. After the final counting and crossing off, we settle the score and unlock mystery doors for each other. She is married to a playwright -- the illustrious Mr. Y (the best option on the page) and resides in a mansion in Yuma Arizona with a white PT Cruiser Convertible and a bakery of her very own, the walls painted blue and purple, the front case filled with scones. At night, when she calls, one of my 12 children will pick up the phone hanging on the kitchen wall in our shack in New Jersey. Is your mother there? she will ask Harry, my eldest son. No, he will say. She is probably standing in front of Waffle House now that her shift is over, waiting for dad to finish his speech on the Senate floor, so that he can whisk her off in the old truck to a second honeymoon in Las Vegas.

paradox

Tonight, we sat around the small corner table at my favorite restaurant, just the three of us. My mother laughed my favorite laugh, the one where she puts one hand on her chest and the other on my father's arm and tilts back her head--the laugh that colors her lilac in my mind and always makes me realize how young and lovely she truly is. My father ordered catfish, poured glasses of German wine, and made his signature jokes which, like him, are wryly clever, wise, and mostly good.

If they looked up from their plates and conversations, the other diners might have thought My! Look at this couple, this matched set, laughing with their mostly grown daughter in her pink skirt. What a calm, contained family of three they are--so happy and at ease with each other and the world, they might conclude.

And they would be partly right and also somewhat wrong.

spring

in time of daffodils
e. e. cummings

in time of daffodils(who know
the goal of living is to grow)
forgetting why,remember how

in time of lilacs who proclaim
the aim of waking is to dream,
remember so(forgetting seem)

in time of roses(who amaze
our now and here with paradise)
forgetting if, remember yes

in time of all sweet things beyond
whatever mind may comprehend,
remember seek(forgetting find)
and in a mystery to be
(when time from time shall set us free)
forgetting me, remember me

answers: 10 cents

I've decided to become an advice columnist.

It is a practical calling -- helpful, with room for common sense, creative thinking, gentle admonishments, cheeky replies.

Do you have any quandries?

I will help you solve them.

Little Rat seeks Web Designer

Little Rat is looking for someone with web design skills:

Kate, Do you know how to like make a website or be on-line or whatever you call it?

Not really. Why?

Super Monkey* just needs his own website. Like www.supermonkey.gov would be good maybe.

I think that you have to be a government agency to have a dot-gov website, Little Rat.

Well Super Monkey could just be the President's secret weapon to protect him from terrorists and Democrats.

His political socialization is breath-taking.


*Super Monkey is his alter ego - a super hero who speaks his own superior monkey language and fights to protect his sister from Dr. Evil

...

"I believe I made you laugh a little last time we met," he said.

She liked his tie.

She did not like his tone.

"A little," she said and smiled before moving on.

Florida was ___________.

I still can't come up with the right word. Lots of people have asked and I've faltered through every answer. Yes, it was fun -- at times. And yes, being away from 8th graders was glorious. Yet there was something sad and unsettling, too, about standing in line with the entire populations of Britain and the mid-West, waiting to get a glimpse of a manatee in its glass cage, to buy postcards or keychains--to hang suspeneded for those few seconds, weightless and free above the world below, before hurtling down the track to whatever loop or spin comes next.

stop & think

WHEN I stop and think about it, I find the following things quite unnerving:

Canned Food: I seem to think about this most when eating canned green beans, which I love. My mother almost always served canned green beans with spaghetti because my father's mother did this and it seemed like a convenient tradition to follow. Invariably, mid-bite, it will strike me how odd it is to be eating a plant in the first place--something that started as a seed, a living thing. All those cells with cell walls multiplying up through the soil under the farmer's eye. Then: stranger still, that someone took this green bean, cooked it, and locked it a way in a metal container so it could sit on a shelf for a long long time before the lid's pried open and the contents are re-heated and served. The mason jars of peaches, tomatoes, beans, pickles, jam my grandmother and I put up every summer don't incite this reaction at all. There's just something about all that food, wrapped in metal, sitting on shelves across the world that gets to me.

The beach: Hmm. What a beautiful day. Isn't the sun lovely and look at those waves. This is a great book and I'm so happy to be here, lying in warm sand. Wow, there sure is a lot of sand. What are all those statistics about the number of grains of sand vs. stars in the sky? Maybe there's too much sand. And there sure is a lot of water, too. My arms feel funny just thinking about treading water long enough for someone to attempt a rescue, should I get swept out to sea. The water just goes on and on and on until suddenly, you sputteri and stagger on to the shores of Japan. And everyone is just lying here, almost naked, in all this sand, on the edge of a vast expanse of water filled with treacherous creatures. I think I need to go home now.

It makes me very nervous.

Famous people/saying goodbye: One time I was at a very swanky, intimate party with the governor of the state. He was working the room, shaking hands, making small talk, asking intelligent questions. I was on the far side of the room, by the grand piano, standing with a friend. The governor kept getting closer and closer. People were strategically positioning themselves in his path but he was coming right towards us. I couldn't take it. I ran out of the room, right as he was turning to talk to us. This has happened repeatedly with other people of major/minor celebrity status and often times, even with friends. When it's time to say goodbye after an afternoon together, a drink in the evening, or even after bumping into each other on the street, I always think that I can handle it but I never can. For some reason, my desire not to be awkward is my very un-doing--illiciting supremely strange behavior.

For the record, I have no hang-ups about bugs, hotel beds, or commitment, though.

start with the beginning

Before the door is even open, Ruby can hear the cat. Once inside, Boots follows her into the kitchen, weaving in and out of her gait; not caring when she drops the bag with the carton of half & half and block of part-skim mozzarella on his head. Accidentally, of course. Cats have never been her cup of tea. Something entirely too needy and sinister about them all at once. And she hates fur. Well, that's not true. Ruby longs for a fur coat, but that's beside the point. Especially now that she's here, alone -- where it's never cold--with no prospects of going out.

For a few minutes she see-saws in her mind, going back & forth between wanting to flee this empty house and wanting to roll up her sleeves and fight back lonliness with a scrub brush and a paring knife. She starts by re-doing her ponytail and tries not to imagine the color of his new girlfriend's hair. She probably loves cats.

The counter is covered with breakfast crumbs -- a week's worth, at least-- so she rinses out the checked cloth and wipes the stale bits of bread into her hand waiting under the lip of the counter, the way her mother taught her. Next, Ruby unpacks the paper bags, puts the summer squash in the fridge, empties the tomatoes and apples into the broad-brimmed bowl. Does cilantro need to be refridgerated? She's not sure but guesses the chilly inside of the crisper might be a luxuary and not a necessity in the life of an herb. C'mon, she thinks. Stop talking to your groceries, girl. You're not that insane yet. It's going to be okay. She tries to believe herself as she stacks the yogurt and rinses the strawberries. Mostly she does.

Even so, later that night, as Ruby reaches into the closet before stepping into the shower, she can't help but wonder. The single green towel left on the shelf--so self-contained by its own terrycloth folds-- how did it learn to love its solitude? To keep company so well with itself on the bathroom shelf?

soundtrack

Chances are, if we have spent even a little time together, I have a secret song for you.

Maybe it plays in my mind when we walk down the street in the late afternoon.

Or when I am alone in the car and hear your song on the radio, I can see you standing at
your kitchen sink eating an apple, sitting on your bed tying your shoe, clear as day.

Sometimes it's about the lyrics -- words I would say to you or want you to say to me.

Other times, I can hear you in the drumbeat that propells the moments forward.

There are other reasons and then also, for some, no rhyme or reason to it at all.

Maybe you know the secret song I have for you. If you ask, I will probably tell you.

In other news: I spilled a huge cup of coffee all over my desk this morning.

eyes to see

TODAY was horrible. The 8th graders were killing me, moody and unresponsive, flopped over on their desks one minute and then chasing each around the room the next. C. (from 3rd period, most difficult class) came to my office during lunch and cried. Just bawled and bawled without saying why. I don't know. You tell me what you'd have done. I had a hard enough time not bursting into tears myself.

And then, after the final bell, the fun really begins when I pick up A. and drive to Falls Church for his weekly appointment. I spend the next 5 hours with a psychotic former citizen of the Eastern Bloc trying to be my life coach-- overflowing with helpful suggestions as to why I'm not married, not a homeowner, and have bad hair. Don't try to reason with him--it's no use, the good doctor in the cowboy boots warned minutes earlier. So I sat there. Sat in traffic that would not move and tried not to listen as he compared my life to a Kraftsman mower (virtually worthless) and his own existence to a John Deere tractor (a thing of worth beyond compare).

It goes like this all day. You're not an ATM, he pointed out the other night, in his good & practical way; as usual, reeling in the rambling and spinning it into a useful object lesson. He's right. My reserves of grace & good cheer, patience, pith & insight are awful low lately. Can you find an armored car dealing in currencies this foreign--this rare and valuable?

By the time we reach home I have slipped from uncharitable, to annoyed, to downright frightening and mean. I can barely look my mom in the eye when we sit down to the meal that she timed especially for our late arrival. Foregoing lingering conversation--even basic pleasantries, I slip out the door and across the deck.

OUTSIDE, the sinking sun looks strange above the river, almost surreal. The sky is mostly blue with a wide band of brightest red directly above the water. Normally I don't care too much about sunsets beyond sitting and letting their light fall on me while I read a book. Too common and overdone, I lump them in with boquets of roses, store-bought Valentines--all those unconsidered displays of sentimentality. This sunset holds me for a moment. For whatever reason. Maybe just a cheesy reminder to stop, breath and look, I figured.

And then, back in my room, a perchance flip through a book in search of a phone number and this, suddenly under my nose:

We Used to Grade God's Sunsets
by Rod Jellema

Why we really watched we never said.
The play of spectral light, but maybe also
the coming dark, and the need to trust
that the fire dying down before us
into Lake Michigan's cold waves
would rise again behind us.
Our arch and witty critiques
covered our failures to say what we saw.

The madcap mockery of grading God as though
He were a struggling student artist
(Cut loose, strip it down, study Matisse
and risk something, something unseen--
C-plus, keep trying--that sort of thing)
only hid our fear of His weather
howling through the galaxies. We humored
a terrible truth: that nature gives us hope
only in flashes, split seconds, one
at a time, fired in a blaze of beauty.

Picking apart those merely actual sunsets,
we stumbled into knowing the artist's job:
to sort out, then to seize and work an insight
until it's transformed into permanence.
And God, brushing in for us the business
of clouds and sky, really is a hawker
of cliches, a sentimental hack as a painter.
He means to be. He leaves it to us
to catch and revise, to find the forms
of how and who in this world we really are
and would be, to see how much promise there is
on a hurtling planet, swung from a thread
of light and saved by nothing but grace.


Maybe this won't make sense outside the firing of my neurons, won't hang together in any sort of meaningful way beyond the walls of my own thick skull. Then again, I could be wrong--maybe it might.

love lies bleeding

Enoch or Dorothy?

There is a tornado watch until mid-night tonight...maybe you should sleep up here in the big house, just to be on the safe side my mom says to me.

What she doesn't know is that I'm planning on running out to the road and hitching a ride to heaven, or--at the very least--the other side of the rainbow.

parenthetically: For years Little Rat couldn't say tornado-- toenailer always emerged instead and, along with helihopter, Wal-Marth and hairport, has become indelible in our family vernacular

monday

Today I'm wondering: if the roller-coaster ride is inevitable and how preachers of mind over matter account for the heart? Why do I get zits in the exact same place, over and over again? Can you really see 23 miles, straight ahead, gaze leveled on the plains, until the curve of the Earth's surface steals the land away from your path? X marks the spot to stand on, right? Can I borrow your map?

Leaving for work in the dark this morning felt like a horrible defeat, 12 giant steps back from all the progress made with the passing of each day -- the tearing of each loop from my paper chain. Is it possible to say let's hurry and get this over & done with without wishing everyone else's life away in the process? She promised that it will all come out in the wash one day and my grandmother, her prayers stictched round me like a quilt, speaks of mountains moving & plans beyond imagining. Must April always live up to its reputation as the cruelest month? Will this be the year?

survey says

Cast your vote for the highlight of the evening:

- C.W. rolling in with a six-pack of shlitz
- the goats on the 10 mile hike
- J & J doing contortionist tricks around the dining room table

proposal

I will write all Christmas letters, thank-you notes,
and pick out birthday presents for our parents,
if you iron your own shirts, my skirts
(or at least take them to the cleaners)
and unscrew the lids from jars I can't manage.

Feel free to make more money
and have a hobby suitably removed
from the day to day to day pattern of our life.
I, naturally, will bear the children
and pray they come by your good sense,
my ear for languages, honestly.

Like my mother, I will want to paint
often and buy shoes, a new dress for a party.
Unlike her, I am willing to drive in the
city, at night, and through the dust and nothing
of Texas (when we move to be near your
aging parents). My driving might
make you nervous but it's a standing offer.

I'm willing to cook, but if you'd rather, standing in
front of a sink filled with warm soapy water
suits me, too. Please remind me that clouds
are a shaky foundation, of the danger of
drowning in a pool of my own whimsy. Because
I love you I will remind you to be kind
even when you are tired, to suffer fools gladly.