ensure

My grandmother posted on facebook tonight that she had cookies and Ensure for dinner.  First, I laughed. Then, struck by the reality of the situation, I cried.

definition

guy 1  (g) n. A rope, cord, or cable used to steady, guide, or secure something.

Lord Knows Best

that I don't give a damn

about anyone but you. 

I forgot my shirt at the water's edge

The first night swim of the summer.

The moon a perfect lonely arc, a bracing shot of bourbon against the midnight air,
and everyone asleep apart from me and the guy playing old Springsteen down at the fish camp,
far beyond the dark edge of the deep end.

I still need to lean to/somebody I can sing to

Goodbye is too good a word, Gal.

wasting the meaning and losing the rhyme

It’s time to move on, time to get going
What lies ahead, I have no way of knowing
But under my feet, baby, grass is growing
It’s time to move on, it’s time to get going

Broken skyline, movin’ through the airport
She’s an honest defector
Conscientious objector
Now her own protector

Broken skyline, which way to love land
Which way to something better
Which way to forgiveness
Which way do I go

Time to move on, time to get going
What lies ahead, I have no way of knowing
But under my feet, baby, grass is growing
It’s time to move on, it’s time to get going

Sometime later, getting the words wrong
Wasting the meaning and losing the rhyme
Nauseous adrenaline
Like breakin’ up a dogfight
Like a deer in the headlights
Frozen in real time
I’m losing my mind

It’s time to move on, time to get going
What lies ahead, I have no way of knowing
But under my feet, baby, grass is growing

but one man loved the pilgrim soul in you

When you are old

When you are old and gray and full of sleep,

And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

William Butler Yeats


If I am ever loved by a man for any reason, let it be for my pilgrim soul. 

theme music

And so begins 2013, humming this melody softly under it's breath. 

on desire, in Northampton

                                            This is the use of memory:

           For liberation--not less of love but expanding 

 Of love beyond desire, and so liberation

                                From the future as well as the past. 

                                             T.S. Eliot - from The Dry Salvages 

it will all come out in the wash

I almost bought an old double washtub from the 1920's at the junk store this morning.  It was about waist high, sitting on its castors, and the word "IDEAL" was stamped into the tin sides.  I liked it immediately, could think of at least ten different uses for it that would make my home (and so clearly by extension, MY LIFE) just a little cooler, more nifty and interesting. In the end, I decided to see if it's still there next month and got back in my car empty handed.

On the way back into the city I imagined the woman who used the washtub for its intended purpose, perhaps beside a small wooden house on the edge of a very big plain.  Who knows how many sets of coveralls or flour sack dresses she had to get through, or if she rationed the water in the summer, but I imagine her scrubbing and beating and rinsing all day.  The clean clothes on the line wave in the breeze, a flag flying high against all the lonely unknowns beyond the bounds of the homestead. 

I spent the rest of the morning attending to the small details of my own housekeeping.  I paid my bills, bought coffee and cream to get me through the week, swept the kitchen floor, and bleached the sink.  All in under an hour.  Then I wandered around a museum, read my book in the park, and went to the movies for the second time in as many days.  So much of my life is stamped with the word "IDEAL."  And yet has the hollow ring of an empty tin tub.

Tonight I will gather up my clothes and sheets and towels and go to the laundromat down the road from my home.  I will feed the machine quarters and it will take care of most of the scrubbing and rinsing, leaving me to fight only the loneliest spots that never quite come out in the wash.  

Some lines along Secession

More Tired

I'm more tired than I've ever been in my whole life I tell Squirrel after a particularly harrowing string of days. Go to sleep, she says before hanging up. The next day she sends me a plane ticket to visit her at the Left Handed Captain's house on the shores of Lake Secession.

Packing List

4 dresses with pockets, 6 books, 2 aprons, pens & hairpins, ibuprofen. 

Middle Seat

Sweetheart, can I buy you a drink? the man in the window seat asks as the drink cart rattles our way. Forget the drink, the other one says, she looks like she needs someone to buy her a good steak and a month of sleep. They are nice men, these two good old boys in their Clemson caps and fishing vests. They hand me each a bottle of Wild Turkey and then pretend not to notice that I can't stop crying. 

ipod: shuffle: first song

Sufjan Stevens: Seven Swans
A Good Man is Hard to Find
Once in the backyard, 
she was once like me, 
she was once like me. 
Twice when I killed them, 
they were once at peace, 
they were once like me. 
Hold to your gun, man, 
and put off all your peace, 
put off all the beast. 
Paid a full of these, I wait for it, 
but someone's once like me. 
She was once like me. 
I once was better. 
I put off all my grief. 
I put off all my grief. 
And so I go to hell, I wait for it, 
but someone's left me creased. 
And Someone's left me creased

Tenderness by the hand

Used to navigating the open seas by stars, the Left Handed Captain is at a loss when it comes to keeping the moving blue dot on the course charted out for us by google maps. We pass the exit for Fair Play, South Carolina 3 times before I fall asleep amidst the pile of bags and fishing gear in the back of the truck. When I wake, the truck has stopped at the end of a gravel driveway. Squirrel leads me with tenderness by the hand to the guest room of the house on the shores of Lake Secession. A real live dead alligator is splayed out across the floor and the collected works of Flannery O'Connor sit on the table by the bed, as though waiting up for my arrival.

Crawford's Country Store

South Carolina Department of Natural Resources: 7 day fishing license 90994213
Issued: Crawford's Country Store
$11.00

Yeah, Mang

The back wall of the country store is lined with jigs, lures, weights, hooks. Bait. Tackle. There, the Left Handed Captain, stands, talking crappie and bass with his high school buddy Dixon and another guy who stretches out his hand and says Max Crawford, ma'am with a nod. Their voices are slow and cool and deep and I find myself floating on the surface of this particular lagoon with no trouble at all.   

It doesn't take long

Aww hell, Kate, I whisper to myself. Don't you practically do this very thing for a living? Skin is skin and a needle is a needle. It doesn't take long before I can reach into the bucket, fish out a minnow, thread the hook through its lip, and cast in under a minute.  I let my line drift, let the tethered minnow think he is leading the charge. And then I reel him back in.

Certain Sensibilities/High Life

We pass the boiled peanuts back and forth across the boat and I marvel how much the afternoon tastes like my childhood in Japan, all salty legumes and dried bits of fish on my fingers.  The Left Handed Captain is a man of certain sensibilities, some of which extend to the lining of his intestinal tract, so he leaves the six pack of High Life to me and drinks something from a bright colored can that is supposed to taste like sweet tea, only no sweet tea your mama would make. When we stop to fill up the tank, he comes out of the shack with a giant dill pickle and my heart almost explodes trying to contain the perfection of the day.

All is indeed lost

The land is wooded, with gentle hills and patches of good pasture between the stands of trees. I watch for houses with handsome bunches of cattle and imagine knocking on the doors of these homes and asking for work or if there are any awkward, taciturn bachelor sons who need the love of a good woman. I'm a hard worker, I'd say, and what's more I'll make biscuits on weekdays and pies on the weekends. As we pull into Abbeville the Left Handed Captain points out the Burt Stark mansion and tells me this is where the Confederate Generals decided to surrender, where Jefferson Davis looked at the great price of secession and declared All is indeed lost. I picture his nice full head of hair and high cheek bones. I wonder if any of his great great great grandsons are awkward taciturn bachelors still farming these parts, hankering for a piece of good pie; secretly wanting a more perfect union with the north.

Handful of hushpuppies

Squirrel dips the crappie fillets in buttermilk and flour and drops them into the skillet while I stand over the kettle of bubbling peanut oil and wait for the hush puppies to roll over in their bath. The Left Handed Captain keeps the daiquiris flowing, his mother opens jars of pickled okra, and his father teaches us dice games. We laugh and laugh.  At the end of the night I put a handful of hush puppies, heavy as musket balls, into the pocket of my apron and sneak down to the dock to throw my edible rocks at the lake, my only weapons against Secession.  

Girls are shitheads, too.

Squirrel and I leave the Left Handed Captain to his book by the falls. We tell him we want to go shopping! and then over our drinks, laugh at how he believed us, two rumpled old gals that we are.  We find a bar called The Velo Fellow and I fall for it immediately, for the rhyming name, half french and half english, for the bicycles everywhere, for its cool dark sanctuary. Squirrel tells me all her sadness and worry about the Left Handed Captain and then I tell her of my exhaustion and fracture. The bartender listens as he dries a flat of clean glasses and doesn't even ask before bringing us another round. Men are such shitheads! Squirrel says after we've said just about all that needed saying.  Yeah. But girls are shitheads, too I remind her.

Moonshine cocktails

In Greenville we meet the Left Handed Captain's friend from college.  He has dark, dark hair and bright blue eyes and the best manners of any man I've ever met, a real southern gentleman.  He takes us to a distillery where they make moonshine. The rawness of the liquor burns its way down my throat and I feel the wiring of my insides, already stripped and frayed, spark. Back at his house the southern gentleman makes moonshine cocktails with strawberries and home-made ginger ale while we get ready for the party. I put on my new dress (pink and black flowers, pockets), pink lipstick, a brave face.  Outside hail the size and weight of quarters pelts the bathroom window, snapping the dogwood and azalea blossoms from their stems.  

This is how the conversation goes

He tells me he is 22, almost done with a degree in philosophy. I catch him staring at my breasts. I am in no mood to be charming and certainly no mood to be charmed.

So you're from Washington, DC? 

Yes.

There are a lot of great museums there. Do you like art?

It's okay, I suppose.

You know what city has great art museums?

Do tell.

Florence.

Florence, South Carolina? I've never been.

Oh...um...I mean Florence, Italy. It's beautiful!

Yes. Most of Italy is, I hear.

Do you like music?

Some.

You should listen to this guy called Sufjan Stevens. You'd really like him.

Easy now, Old Gal. Only spinsters call young men whippersnappers.  

I bite my tongue and smile for the first time.

Thank you for the suggestion. I'll have to look into that.

Yeah! He's great. Hey...are you on facebook?

Turn away and stamp your feet

It is Palm Sunday and the pews are filled with men in pastel polo shirts and women in sleeveless sundresses. The choir mistress is ancient and perches unsteadily on a stool, looking at the congregation over her beaky nose like an egret gazing over the water.  A woman announces from the doorway that there are lemon meringue pies and seven-layer salads left over from the church social on sale, a bargain at $7 apiece. Across the way I see Max Crawford from the country store. The minister notes how good it is to have Sister So and So back after all the trouble she went through with her sugar diabetes. We wave our palm branches during the hymns. You sing hosanna now, the minister booms from the pulpit, but when God's plan doesn't look like what you want do you turn away and stamp your feet and yell CRUCIFY HIM? At the end of the service we file down the aisle and leave our palms at the alter. 

 After church, sitting on the dock at Lake Secession, I think of the poem 
I read every Ash Wednesday, 
of reading it this Ash Wednesday, 33 days prior, in particular, 
in the poetry corner at a man's house.

And pray to God to have mercy upon us

And I pray that I may forget

These matters that with myself I too much discuss

Too much explain

Because I do not hope to turn again

Let these words answer

For what is done, not to be done again

May the judgment not be too heavy upon us

Secession, rebellion, submission, redemption. We turn and we turn and we turn again.  

Teach us to care and to not care

Teach us to sit still   

(from Ash Wednesday, by TS Eliot)

Spare half hour

The airport restaurant overlooks a sculpture garden. We eat salads and talk about the weekend in the spare half hour before I must go through security. I look at these two people across the table, people who I love so much, who are trying to figure out what it means to love each other. I wonder what will become of all of us, about all the ways we could die, or kill each other, trying. 

     

Middle seat, again.

Are you coming or going? the man in the aisle seat asks me. Both, constantly. I close my eyes and sleep.

--
(for Squirrel, JPB, and JLR).

continuing quest

In my continuing quest to better understand suffering, to somehow cultivate a gracious & wise response to disappointment & trouble, this is one of the most helpful things I've found.

further mystery

You have been given questions to which you cannot be given answers. You will have to live them out - perhaps a little at a time.
And how long is that going to take?'
I don't know. As long as you live, perhaps.
That could be a long time.'
I will tell you a further mystery, he said.  It may take longer. 

Wendell Berry,  Jayber Crow

faith, hope, and jungle cats

Oh, but Kate! A tiger doesn't change his stripes! my father says.  He says this because it is mostly true and because he is my father and its his job.

And yet...my Father also says The lion shall lay down with the lamb which is also true and so beautiful a promise, and real, that I am able somehow to step outside myself and continue believing that there is nothing better than this feral, ferocious love and that it is my job to share it.

(Yes, I know that the the real verse is about wolves and leopards.)

thirty

I cried for the three days beforehand then looked around my life threw away the clutter made peace

once and for all with every moment each decision that led me to this place.

But walking away from you stepping out of the cold wordless morning into an anemic beam of winter light I see how this was really only child's play;

that the next thirty years at least and then probably the thirty after that will be the long hard work

of learning to live peaceably and wisely among other people's choices and the

nothing and everything

they've to do with me.