It's Friday I'm in Love

I've spurned Silence and his awkward embraces and returned to my first and true love - Language. And now that I've groveled and begged for his forgiveness, my lover is showering me with gorgeous wordy gifts -- displaying the roomy generosity of his heart and reminding me that I should never try to survive in the world without him.

Look! there are so many ways to suggest how we move from here to there.

This is how I get through the week:
Monday I stumble
Tuesday I shuffle
Wednesday I stomp
Thursday I stalk
Friday I strut
Saturday I skip
Sunday I saunter

And those are just the S words. What about prance and wander? Tramp, tiptoe and trudge? Perambulate?

Language baby, you've got it in spades over Silence! He'll never match you in subtlety, nuance, and sophistication.

My cup runneth over.

Parenthetically: this morning, driving back to the city from CC and listening to Kings of Convenience and thinking of my favorite Norwegian from Mostrehamn-in-the fjords, I was blown away anew by people who can write delicate, subtle lines in languages beyond their mother-tongue. In college, I wrote a clever little ditty in Japanese about his eyes being stars and wanting his stars (which, you see, is a play on the fact that the words for star and want are almost the same. And this fact, as you might guess, turns me a little starry-eyed). I was more than a mite pleased with myself until I realized that the only person within miles who could fully grasp the brilliance of this was my favorite Norwegian who was doing the assigned reading instead of drawing love poems in the margins of the chemistry textbook.

the lady of shalott

Mitzy & Jinx are be-bopping around Belize with Devetta & George for the week so we borrowed a car last night and tried to race the sun down the county and home to bed. Gramcracker is here from Jerusalem to stay with Little Rat which means answering to Katie again, but it also means chocolate cake and explanations about the minor prophets and the best way to make sausage gravy. Little Rat gets slightly, silently unhinged when our parents leave; a twinge more melancholy & solitary than usual. His skin is clearing up, though, and Gramcracker bought him a case of Sierra Mist for his stomach which are reasons good as any to perk up for a spell.

I haven't slept well all week and I don't know why. Sleepless nights take different forms. There are nights of delicious sleeplessness -- when you're in love and dreaming awake of the promise contained in another person, when you can't put down a book, when it's dark and cool and summer rain starts to fall as Friday night slips into a lazy Saturday morning. The possibility & hope of these nights restore the soul more than REM. But then there is the another kind of sleepless night --the nights when all the decisions that aren't yours to make grind the gears of your mind or you've been cruel to someone and can't make it right or when someone has been cruel to you. These nights leave you creaky and spent the next morning, often unable to see beyond your own nose.

But last night the moon hung just so in the picture frame window, looking down as the old truck sidled up to the tree below. It was perfectly round, I think, and cast a pool of light for me to float on through the shadows, awake, toward morning. Laying there, I thought of my parents and of all the trips they've taken over the years, leaving me in charge of the crew at home. Inevitably, after they left for the airport, I'd fling myself on their bed and cry at the thought of them dying in a plane crash. I would mourn their deaths and the premature end of my childhood, my wedding without my father to give me away. Then I would pull myself together and begin rehearsing my plea before the judge to take custody of my siblings away from my well-intentioned but clueless relatives and give it to me. I'd keep us all together in a house that I bought with the insurance money and we'd live of the royalties of the book I'd write about my struggle to keep our family together. I'd send the kids to college after Lifetime made the TV movie staring Sam Waterson and Lucille Ball as my parents and Winona Ryder (ha!) as me. We'd make it somehow. I'd looked tragedy in the face and made friends with the shadowy future.

Now there is no one left to take care of besides Little Rat. Everyone else is all grown up, even though my sister still calls and asks me questions that I haven't even found answers for yet. I try to nudge Squirrel with this thought to see if she's only pretending to sleep, but she makes the soft whimper signaling that it's time to keep my thoughts to myself. Last week at lunch, Mitzy made a comment about something happening to them on their trip and Little Rat said If you die I will hunt down your killers and avenge you. We all laughed and tried to explain about accidents and no-fault deaths, but he would have none of it. After all the hard parts of adoption over the past months, I was happy for this display of simple love tinted with vengeance. Somebody'd pay; Little Rat would see to it. And then he and I would eat cereal in the living room and watch cartoons and run out of Kleenex and generally fall into complete disrepair.

This line of thought takes me in the wrong direction and the moonlight doesn't help either, because I am a sucker for moonlight, especially when it filters through the trees. For a moment I am sad that there is no one special boy who would want to take my sleepless call (or even text message in this day & age). I think about writing a letter to a stranger but I am tired of writing equations for a future with so many unknown variable, so instead I try to recall all the times when someone was needlessly kind to me. For some reason I land on Mr. Morrow, the librarian at Marcus Whitman elementary. I think I was in fourth grade when Jinx was the principal there -- right before we moved to Japan -- and I wandered into his library one day while waiting for my dad to finish his meeting. Mr. Morrow asked me what I was looking for and I said please, do you have a copy of the Lady of Shalott? If he was startled by my request, he didn't show it. And he didn't try to hand me a copy of If You Give a Mouse a Cookie or whatever book was supposed to change young lives that year. He didn't have any Tennyson and my dad came looking for me and that was the end of it. Two days later, though, my dad brought home a pink little book from Mr. Morrow. He'd gone to the public library and found the poem, folded it into a little booklet with a line drawn cover of a beautiful lady, and laminated it just for me. I've taken that book everywhere with me since then and I used to know it all by heart, just like Anne of Green Gables. I try to remember it but I only get as far as But in her web she still delights To weave the mirror's magic sights, For often through the silent nights A funeral, with plumes and lights And music, went to Camelot; Or when the Moon was overhead, Came two young lovers lately wed. "I am half sick of shadows," said The Lady of Shalott before sleep delivers me from myself.

Dejeuner du Matin
Jacques Prevert

Il a mis le cafe
Dans la tasse
Il a mis le lait
Dans la tasse de cafe
Il a mis le sucre
Dans le cafe au lait
Avec la petite cuiller
Il a tourne
Il a bu le cafe au lait
Et il a repose la tasse
Sans me parler
Il a allume
Une cigarette
Il a fait des ronds
Avec la fumee
Il a mis les cendres
Dans le cendrier
Sans me parler
Sans me regarder
Il s'est leve
Il a mis
Son chapeau sur sa tete
Il a mis
Son manteau de pluie
Parce qu'il pleuvait
Et il est parti
Sous la pluie
Sans une parole
Et moi j'ai pris
Ma tete dans ma main
Et j'ai pleure.

greener grass, under the snow

It is a day in a day -- a cummings sort of day the sends my dad straight to quoting i thank you god for most this amazing day and my mom into the garden. The kind of day that drives everyone up from their desks and out the door, sporting equipment in hand. If you're not careful, this day will add a bounce to your step as it turns the young man's fancy to love. There are robins on every branch of every tree.

I am looking out the window, though, wishing for a meadow covered in snow with a dark brown dog ambling down the rickety line of the old wood fence. You know, the fence along the far edge of the meadow where the trees grow and then thicken to a forest. And if that is not enough to wish for (o greedy heart!) I want a quilt made of green and orange patches around my shoulders and a grey grey sky. Finally, I'd like a small cardinal to land on the window sill just as Will Oldham walks in the room and hands me a mug of red rose tea with splash of milk and then starts to sing One with the Birds.

love will tear us apart again

my love for my sister is fierce and irritable.
my love for my parents is the sympathetic nervous system.
my love for squirrel can't keep secrets.
my love for crazy a is an egg timer that always flips over as the last grains filter down.
my love for my grandmother wears gold shoes.
my love for my husband smells like limes and grapefruit.
my love for little rat keeps me awake at night and brings me tea in the morning.
my love for my brother is an inside joke, too smart for everyone else.
my love for charles rides the rails, surviving on biscuits and ham.
my love for my enemy picks fights just to make peace.
my love for my boss works overtime.
my love for my neighbor hides under the bed.
my love for my bus driver is born of necessity.
my love for norman mourns the rain.
my love for myself is supposed to die.

all these years i've been moonlighting as a mimic

Squirrel snorted and maybe spit milk all over when I told her that it might be that I lost my personality when I turned 25. She chalked it up to melodrama too and the possibility that I was confusing this with an inability to lay my hands on those damn keys every morning when it's time to run for the bus. You can't lose your personality the way you lose your wallet or shoes after too many martinis. You can lose your teeth and your hearing, your virginity, your sanity, and your ability to run a 4 minute mile...but who's ever heard of losing your personality? Do you mean your identity-like your social security number? Maybe you have to face the facts that you never had one to begin with. (That's how Squirrel shows concern: equal parts derision and laughter.)

###

If it weren't for my mother's weak heart I'd take a foreign lover and move to Brooklyn. Ettienne & I would spend our days lounging in bed in our underwear, drinking red wine and smoking gauloises. Reading Le Figaro, too. If it weren't for my father's relentless limp Phileas Fogg & I would fire up the hot air balloon and sail away, cutting the ropes and watching the sandbags smack the backs of the circling sharks in sea below.

###

Last night we went to Dios es Amor Iglesia around the corner where the women in long skirts and men with moustaches sell pupusas real cheap. After giving our order we sat in sky blue room at a long table with people eating food from Styrofoam bowls. The walls were cracked and all the appliances were mismatched except in their humming and smoking. The air conditioning unit strapped to the ledge over the door leaked rusty water on my head. Streaks of everything swirling around me I could understand: the smells, the fistful of dollars collected by the man with the calculator, the chatter of the little kids and their tamarind juice. A couple to my right and two solitary men to my left and I've never studied their language beyond the CD that promised to teach me how to communicate from the safety of the driver's seat in rush hour. Mira los colores de mi vida. Una mesa para dos por favor -- that's it. But what I'm trying to tell you is that I've been in that room most of my life.

A real martyr for love knows not to wear pink and red together.