“i hid under your porch because i love you”

Hello, morning. 34 degrees outside and it’s supposed to snow today so it’ll have to get colder if it’s gonna stick and it better stick because the county’s already gone and closed school three hours early.

So far, the things I’ve thought about since opening my eyes have included peeing, and peeing again, if Doug would want to meet the lady I used to volunteer for, how long the beeping will last outside now that it’s one long constant beep and not rhythmic, who to call about beeping from somewhere, how much water to add to the measuring cup and coffee grounds to fill up the extra wide mug, and the new picture Avatar cause JB wants to see it bad today and he hollered from the bedroom to turn on the kitchen radio to listen to the review. I would also like to see it but gestation makes it hard to sit somewhere unmoving for too long. Considering Mister Cameron hasn’t made a straight-up feature since Titanic I imagine this one’s a doozy where running time’s concerned.

Speaking of pictures, and good ones, we watched Up last night. I loved most everything about this movie. It’s sad — I kept wondering if little people, even the little twenty-two year olds I work with, would really grasp the whole passage of time/aging/regret. My buddy Claudia wrote about this movie twice in her blog — the first was after she and Jane went to see it and how much they adored it. She told her parents to go see it and they did. Then Claudia’s mom died suddenly, several weeks before my dad died, and she and Jane were down in Ecuador. They came back to be with Claudia’s dad and to help prepare a memorial service, clean up the house, etc. She wrote about cleaning out her mom’s pocket book and finding the 3-D glasses from Up. Like when Mary and Philip went to take Sali and Elijah to see Where the Wild Things Are, she said she and Philip wept and this confused Elijah. She said Sali Rae got it because of their own recent tensions and then later said in the car, That wasn’t exactly a movie for kids. Elijah liked the muppet monsters.

Gotta figure out whether to go to work today or not. Friday consists of a half day and I’ve got comp time to use up — do I save it for after the New Year or just celebrate the possibility of anywhere from nothing to seven inches of snowflakes. I do not know, Maynard.

the noise/the crawl

The noise conditions of the house this morning are of the kind that have, in the past, convinced me to forgo writing in the wee hours. But JB’s up this morning, tackling portfolios in his office. The odd, old Frank DeFord’s on the radio (and four radios are on: the stereo and three clock radios) and almost every light in the house is lit although I’ve been slowly turning them off behind him. This is how he WAKES UP, yep, which is entirely different from how I wake up which is to watch the dark sky get light and not have the radio on til later (they repeat this mess every hour so there’s no chance of missing anything) — I like to hear the train, the dogs cleaning themselves, even that strange giant alarm clock beeping that’s still going off somewhere beyond Elwood Street that now sounds like it could be coming from Freeman Mill or as far as the interstate. However, I’m trying to practice; I mean, just as baby girl probably won’t be too fond of epic samurai movies, she may like to be a noisemaker herself in the morning. I don’t know. Making coffee, I thought of MP telling me about the time he went to the writer’s retreat in Montana and almost lost his mind, said it was too quiet, that he needed the sound of the si-reens traveling up and down Aycock Street and Emma asking him a question every ten minutes.

I do come bearing this tidbit: the City Council voted yes last night to build that dadblamed multi-million dollar swim center. Also: Ed Asner’s gonna be around these parts to shoot a movie.

Strange dreams all night so I reckon it was Philip’s chili. Also, baby cut flips hourly, felt like a foot was up near my jejunum. Dreamed I was at Meagan’s new apartment on Mendenhall Street, and she lived above a bar, and I had two beers before remembering I was pregnant and felt terrible. I walked home cause somehow Meagan disappeared and the walk home was full of strange evil in the air — nothing happened, I could just feel presences or something all around. Then I dreamed that there was some sort of hybrid May Day/Easter festival (egg rolling, Maypole, lots of white clothes) at a park owned by the college; I was crawling on the ground, on my hands and knees, making faces at kittens and babies when an old student from a couple years ago came and climbed on my back, laid down like a monkey, and rode around with me. I just kept crawling. It was a vaguely sexy dream even though there was no sex, just the crawling, but that was enough. I felt sorta weird when I woke up, like I’d been two-timing, but then decided that was just plain silly. Nobody knows where they’re gonna go when they dream and, besides, the books tell me that the sexy parts of my endocrine system are amped up right now. I usually see said student at free lunch Wednesdays so I’m just hoping I don’t blush today — I mean, in the dream, he did stick his thumb in my mouth.

Maizie’s taken to sitting by the Christmas tree but neither she nor Demus are Christmas tree attackers, I reckon because they got a whole neighborhood of trees. Last year, I did find the same wooden soldier clothespin ornament on the ground every morning so I figured it was in batting range.

My mom has this whole new social life which is excellent for her but makes the holiday this year a little bit lonesome. I don’t know why. I think I’m just missing my dad asking for coffee, cider, sweets, help switching the channel to the 24/7 Christmas songs. Last week, I was in the cafeteria at school and went to drink my milk, thought to myself, I wonder if we’re gonna ride over to the country store this year, looked through the bottom of my glass, realized he’s not here — the whole thing happened in, like, four seconds but my eyes filled up and my heart raced. Mott’s hanging out with all her lady friends, going to the Living Christmas Tree, to the wassail tea thing at somebody’s country club, luncheons, Christmas parties, and this Saturday she leaves for the beach with her friend Margie and Margie’s daughter, Kathy. She hasn’t decided whether she’ll come back before or after Christmas. Either way, I won’t see her again until the 28th — which, yeah, for most people who don’t live near their folks is no big thing but it’s weird if you do — I feel like a baby for even writing this, like a foot-stomper and that’s not how I mean it. JB and I watched that picture Away We Go, the Dave Eggers vehicle with Office Jim and the lady from SNL and C.J. and Maggie Gyllenhaal, and it wasn’t a great movie but the beginning I liked a lot, like the first twenty minutes before they away we go. She (SNL lady) and Office Jim are pregnant and there’s a scene at his parents’ house and his parents announce their plans to move to Belgium for two years. Office Jim’s reaction killed me. I feel late to the game in my family having a baby — not his fault but my dad couldn’t remember, before he fell and broke his hip, that I was even pregnant, and my mom is excited but she’s going through something entirely new for her, a freedom that she’s never experienced. My sister, she loves babies, but she’s going through a lot with Sali Rae and she’s in school at community college and she’s having health problems — three surgeries in three months and possibly more to come. I’m not close to Mark and Monty is far away in snowy, twenty below Montana. What I need to do is pull my head outta my ass because the truth is I’m just adjusting to my dad being gone and somebody else arriving. It’s kind of scary, the in-between, but it’s good and will be alright.

What I need is another cup of coffee, my limit for the day, and I need to read some Mark Twain because he helps. And tonight after work I think I’ll watch the repeat Frontline that JB recorded last night, From Jesus to Christ, about the early Christians. It’s so dadblamed good, yep.

the single effect

Sleep was better last night than the night before — not that sleeping was better or worse, I guess, but waking. Last night dreamed about The Seven Samurai which I dedicated three hours and forty-eight minutes to yesterday (including the intermission which I couldn’t fast forward through or advance, but had to listen to the overture), broken up into two sittings, one pre-advent and one post-advent. I was up until eleven! Haven’t seen eleven too often since June except for when my dad was in the hospital and we saw 11, midnight, 1 then shift change, or 3, 4, 5. Somehow I’d never seen this picture before even though I’ve seen boatloads of Kurosawa movies. Probably always the 3:48 running time got me. But it’s also like I think La Dolce Vita was one of the last Fellini pictures I saw — I had even watched the one with the clowns before seeing it. I’m trying to get some epic stuff in before baby girl arrives — can’t imagine babies are really into epics. Tried to get Infinite Jest read but those three months of nausea pretty much ended that project. I figure I might be sixty before — if ever — I make it through that book.

Night before last, I dreamed I had a baby boy with fuzzy hair and even though he wasn’t born yet, the doctor said I could take him out for an hour or two here or there. He was fun, all spastic arms and drool. At one point, me and him were sitting in a lawyer’s office, a waiting room, and he saw a sticker of Charlie Brown and Snoopy and he said, “I love Charlie Brown. I need him.” I was all, mankind, how the heck do you know who Charlie Brown is and you’re not even born yet? Then somehow the dream shifted and the lawyer who was now a doctor told me the baby didn’t make it and they gave me a dot-matrix print out of him smiling in utero. I cried and cried and when I woke myself up I could feel that my throat had been constricting from the dream crying.

This dream was the culmination of a day of freaking out. I’d seen a girl at the grocery store who couldn’t have been more than nine or ten and there was something strangely sexual about the way she carried herself — not like she was wearing hoochie clothes, just a self-awareness that disturbed the crap outta me. The same feeling I got one time when I was with my sister and Sali Rae and her friend down in South Carolina at the beach — Sali Rae and friend were ten and we were somewhere where there was the possibility of males even though I saw none in the immediate vicinity. Sali’s friend ate a candy bar — a small corner of it but it took her half an hour — in a way that really freaked me out. I can’t describe it because I don’t want to relive it that much but maybe you’ve seen it in the movies or on music videos usually involving lollipops. But lollipops have almost crossed over into the comical, can’t-take-it-seriously-anymore realm. This wasn’t comical. The whole thing gave me the shivers. So then after grocery store girl, I had a mild panic attack in the parking lot — throughout the day, kept resurfacing, and I was all ten years gone into this child-rearing thing, not even gotten through my third trimester yet, Maynard.

Yesterday, I tried to reign it in. Made gingerbread cookies and biscotti with JB, did laundry, hung paper snowflakes we cut out at last advent in the windows, watched the samurai help the peasants defend their village and their barley from the bandits. The sound of the horses in that movie, holy crap. Not to mention, the battle between the village and the bandits is almost an hour and a half long which sounds too long but it’s gripping as hell, broken up by nighttime, some respite. One of the very first lines (a subtitle actually) in the movie is about how the villagers lived in fear of the sound of hooves and I thought about Poe’s single effect because, until those bandits show up two-thirds into the picture, you’ve almost forgot if you ever paid attention to that subtitle to begin with. When I finally went to bed, I thought about when the second LOTR picture came out and everybody complained about how long the battle scene was. I actually liked the scene but I think all these new period piece movies mostly feel romantic, like a scene has been set. It’s all grandiosity and sweeping shots from cranes or helicopters. Whereas this movie actually feels like the product of an older time, much older than the ’50s, but there aren’t sweeping shots — occasionally you’ll see the fields of barley fill up the whole screen and the wind blowing through the fields and it’s beautiful, but the camera is still. I don’t know, there’s something so claustrophobic about how you can’t see the landscape clearly, from dipping helicopters, that really gets out how vulnerable the villagers felt at the mercy of the bandits. And then just how this old way is dying, on many levels, and the modern world is coming fast. But it’s all in the small details, as it should be and is. Like the bicycle leaning against the tree in Things Fall Apart.

Alright, it’s cold in this house. Something has been beeping across the backyard and alleyway over on Elwood for three days now. I hear the train and a little while ago when I let the dogs out, everything was still covered in fog. It’s warm enough to go out in it — I will now make coffee and go sit.

no good sleep/bellyache

Mostly nonsense dreams: in a house with a chef who was making salads from ideas we put together (why we weren’t just making them, I dunno) and he kept passive-aggressively making snide comments about them under his breath. I just wanted to make my own and be done with it. Sick with a stomach ache in the night, I’m pretty sure from the work Christmas party treats.  I think I dreamed about babies but since I was up and down, can’t recall too much.

Woke up thinking about Sali Rae, worried about her. She dropped out of school almost two months ago, I guess, she’s been court-ordered to a wilderness program but it’s taking so long to get the Medicaid thing approved, she keeps getting into trouble in the mean time. Or taking off — slept in the woods in a tent night before last, which is alright, but the only reason my sister knows that is because she came back, was planning to hit the road but it was 25 degrees.

Out back with the dogs a little while ago, I heard this beeping, like a giant alarm clock going off in somebody’s yard. The sound even stopped Buddy Black. When he hears alarm clocks, it means somebody’s fixing to give him breakfast.

What I need is some lettuce, roasted sweet potatoes and brussels sprouts, gallons of water. And some bananas. No more Christmas cookies.

last stop: ugh city

Beneath my scapula(s?), I can feel how much I don’t want to be at work.  Feels like out there in the world, all the important stuff is happening.  Little critter, new to the world, I can’t wait to meet and smell and hang out with.  An undecorated, unlit tree leaning on our back porch.  Aunt and cousin in Galax I’d like to spend some time with.  Instead, here I sit in the dingdang library, waiting for some asshole with a crisis.  Plus class tonight and they’re all so bored.  This Monday today is full of good times.

The other night I dreamed Buddy Black chewed the fur off his paws and underneath he had baby hands.  I said, Buddy, I never knew your paws looked like that.  He just stared at me, wondering if I was gonna give him a snack.

Last night, Mott and I went to the hospice candlelighting service at the church downtown across from the courthouse.  The church is round and made of wood and brick and all the windows are ornate stained glass.  The First Korean Presbyterian Men’s Choir sang a song that sounded like the Mills Brothers and I grinned through the whole thing because it was so good — they even had a shaker thing for percussion.  The Episcopal priest made me cry what he said about losing all the significant men in his life by the time he was seventeen years old.  The Market Street bell ringers played an out of tune rendition of “Carol of the Bells” and I liked it more because it was out of tune.  There was some other stuff but I forgot it all because everybody sat in the dark with lit candles.

I’d rather think about Christmas lights and take my camera over to the neighborhood with all the balls of chicken wire covered in lights hanging from the tree branches.  That seems infinitely more important in the scheme of things than sullen James and the beotchy lady who just blames blames blames, all the time blames.  I’m stuck in Ugh City.  I want to be in your town.

saint of the 4th of december/saint of kids

A little while ago I heard Nicodemus howling, sounded like he was climbing the screen door like he enjoys doing in the mornings but I didn’t get up right then. Had I known it was raining (again), I would have gotten up and let him in, the poor fella.

I don’t recall enough of my dreams to make them worth documenting — a mixture of making refrigerator rolls, putting up a tent in the snow, and Andrew from Dawn Chorus driving stakes in the ground and hanging Christmas lights.

Yesterday afternoon I went to the Moravian candle tea. Mott was supposed to go with me but she fell asleep in her easy chair and when she woke up it was getting close to when Aunt Becky and Uncle Dewey would arrive for date night. They all still do Friday date night even though PNW has gone. Sometimes the night includes barbecue, other times the fish house, and other times entertainment by Elijah.

I believe the last candle tea I attended must have been with Angie, maybe in Asheville or Winston-Salem almost twenty years ago. What I remembered from then, and from when I was little, consisted of a quieter gathering. This was loud, with lots of kids who could give a crap about 26-point stars and beeswax candles and teacake, save for the fact that they could shove the sweet stuff in their mouths. The bright part came in the sanctuary with the tiny kids from the Suzuki music school plucking “The Holly and the Ivy” and “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” on violins. The older ones had bows, but the whole lot of them out of tune and completely into it. Watching them made me excited to have a little critter.

The whole day turned out to be full of things that made me excited about this. Not that I’m not excited — it’s that I’m often wary. I don’t expect it to be miraculous and I often imagine it to be really hard. This is how I approach most situations in which I don’t know the outcome. Some might call it negative thinking but it’s different than that. Take Christmas, for example. I have the regular excitement that other folks have but if I only feel that then I start to feel outta sorts, like I’m being hurled toward this one day and then afterwards comes the 26th of December. I started doing this when I was little, thinking about other stuff besides the thing that excites me. It’s also if I spend too long in the happy then I feel unbalanced, like I don’t know how to navigate the days. I’m sure all this is rooted in some pretty deep memories of really hard times around holidays — like the time my dad’s friend John showed up on Christmas Eve with the big jar of moonshine and the two of them got plastered and, later in the night, I woke up to Mott crying and my dad and brother, also drunk from his own night out, screaming at each other downstairs. Anyhow, the same is true for too much thinking only about dark things — that’s worse. Then I forget about all the things I love — I forget about Buck Owens and Otis Redding, cutting and gluing paper, words, tree frogs, walks with dogs in the woods. So I’m saying there’s got to be a balance to all these things and then I feel alright.

The thing I fear most about having a kid is somehow ending up with somebody who’s just mean, not in a rough-and-tumble way, but a snooty way, who gossips and laughs at other kids. This is my nightmare scenario. Some extreme narcissism or something, scares the crap outta me. She could emerge with six fingers like great-grandmother Addie Duckworth and I wouldn’t blink as long as she was good to others. And considerate. And didn’t value herself over everybody else.

But anyhow. Yesterday. At the bakery, the hardware store owner came in with her granddaughter, who looked to be about three, and the little girl had one of those side-to-side arm pump runs that makes it seem like if she was running in a straight, narrow corridor, she’d hit the wall not too long into it. She also had a messed up ponytail sticking off the side of her head and some godawful lavender sweatpants covered in cracker crumbs. At the counter, she asked if they had strudel but they were out. Besides all these things I liked about her, I especially liked how she just asked for two cookies and a muffin — she wasn’t trying to be older than she was and she most certainly wasn’t doing baby talk; she just straight up had some questions and so she asked them. All I could think was, you go, strudel-loving, crooked-running three-year-old.

The other thing that got me yesterday was Elijah’s ceramic turkey gravy boat, his strange man made out of a box, paper plates, cardboard tinfoil innards, and styrofoam blocks, and! his paper-maché volcano. Also, also I had told my sister about the movie Jason & the Argonauts, the Ray Harryhausen stop-motion animation/live action picture from the 60s, how much I loved that, and Clash of the Titans, when I was little. She got it for him and she said he sat with his bowl of popcorn and didn’t move the whole time it was on. So yesterday he drew picture after picture of scenes from the movie, kept bringing them in to Mott’s apartment. He was full of questions about stop-motion animation. I love when the New Yorker arrives in the mail and he sits on his knees on the stool at the kitchen bar counter thing and reads all the cartoons out loud and, if he gets to one he doesn’t understand, he asks who’s ever there, to explain it.

Lastly, JB and I went to the grocery store late last night and ran into Emily and Claire. Claire’s now in 10th grade at Grimsley, had Mary last year, and she talked about how much she misses her. She said, It was hard but I liked having to stay up til 4 in the morning working on a project for her. We also talked about that song from the Hotel Chevalier short, the prologue to The Darjeeling Limited, “Where Do You Go to, My Lovely?” by the French singer who’s name I can never remember.

Somehow the time has moved from 6:40am to 8:08am and I need coffee and to call in the cats who are most likely hiding in their cave under the house.

meet on the ledge

4:06 am and I finally think that the eye twitch in my belly must be the little critter kicking. I’ve been feeling this off and on for a couple weeks but it was so subtle I wasn’t sure. So I’m up and JB’s trying to sleep but we think he might have a broken toe. He doesn’t want to go to the doctor cause it’s so close to Christmas and he wants to spend his money otherwise. Maybe insurance will cover at least part of broke toes?

Also I was having dreams. In one, my cousin Pat (California Pat) had a job helping another cousin (a dream cousin) bathe and get dressed and such but she ended up pooping all in the shower and I was cleaning it up. This looked a lot like the time Elijah ate the plates of french fries at Golden Corral and then woke me up with diarrhea in the middle of the night and I had to hose him off in the tub. Later, I felt something on my ear and I’d gotten diarrhea on the back of my head, all in my hair, I guess from his hands. I mean, he was only two — the stuff was daggum everywhere. Anyhow, in the dream, Aunt Lois comes in to the bathroom — which is like a fancy hotel bathroom, about the size of our entire house — and starts singing “Side by Side” and wants me to join in except I’ve got all this poop to clean up. But I sing because I haven’t seen her since she had the stroke.

Another part of the dream — before or after this, not sure which — Mary and I are on some mountain road that I’ve dreamed about before, seems like not too long ago. We’re in the middle of a rainstorm and driveway roads are mud slicks and part of our job is to post signs warning folks of this.

When I actually was waking up, to the belly eye twitch, I was thinking about RIP, how I like Rest in Peace, but how I haven’t dreamed about my dad in a while and in some ways I’m glad because I wasn’t sleeping before. But that’s because I kept dreaming nightmares, him and the sheet and not being able to understand my questions.

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At work, I’ve been trying to settle my innards down, because my annoyance is up and tolerance for foolishness down. But then yesterday something happened with a lady I’ve been trying to help and it hurt my feelings a lot. In theory, I know you can’t please everybody and you’re gonna have conflicts, even things you didn’t know were gonna be conflicts (like in this situation), but when they happen, they feel like shit anyway. Doug talked to me and told me about this student several years ago who hated him and he had no idea why. She talked junk about him to other students, to the English department, all over. He said he tried not to worry about her but, in truth, the situation with her bothered him on and off for about a year until he slowly let things go.

I think where I ended up yesterday (or maybe today, at 5:10am) was I don’t need to think either way about this — there are times when I’m grumpy or get mad and I do things and I know I’ve not been so good to people and I try to be aware and apologize (like with Elijah the other day, I was grumpy and he was in a robot mood and I felt like I was snapping at him — even though later when I told him I was sorry I was grumpy he said he didn’t notice — doesn’t matter because I noticed). But this is a situation where I could search and search and try to figure out where things went wrong but unless she wants to actually communicate with me, I don’t really know. Everybody has had conflicts with her and I know that she has trouble with lots of people — teachers, other students, her family — but I like her and I thought things were going well. What I mean about thinking either way about this is I can feel bad but I don’t want to turn it in to more than that because that would be letting my ego get the better of me. And I don’t care to hate her or myself, thank you very much. It just is what it is. Human beings go through this, Maynard. Maybe squirrels do too.

In other news, I got a raise which means about a hundred extra dollars a month, hallelujah.

J.Ortega came in to work the other day and she was talking about when she was pregnant how she felt this secret thing, like the baby was hers and only hers while it was in her belly. She said, I was huge! And I kept swirling my hands around my huge globe! and she did this thing where she grinned and rubbed her phantom stomach. I love working with her. She made me a strawberry pie last year.

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When I watch old episodes of The French Chef, I love how Julia Child makes messes — I mean she flat out destroys that kitchen — and how she sweats and keeps wiping her face with dishtowels. The French Chef vs. Big Head/Big Hands de Laurentis = The French Chef slaughters all the food porn. I haven’t seen the Julie/Julia movie so I don’t know if all of Julia Child’s mannerisms are picked up by Meryl Streep and I may be talking about something that everybody already knows. My friend Tammy who runs a patisserie up in Ithaca told me about the time she was in French pastry school in Brooklyn and Julia Child dropped by one day. Tammy said she was so nervous with Julia Child in the kitchen that her hands shook so bad she had to stop what she was doing.

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I don’t know whether the rain has stopped but I hear the wind blowing the chimney cap. The temperature’s back up — about an hour ago, the thermometer read 52 degrees and that was around 4:30 this morning. So it doesn’t matter that I left my coat at work. Nope.

rain/tuesday/december

I’ve had that old Linda Ronstadt (when she was with Stone Ponys) song “A Different Drum” stuck in my head for days. Good gosh, I do love it. It’s one of the few songs that I know the melody and the lyrics simultaneously — usually I have to learn the lyrics unless it’s something obvious like the chorus or I keep a close watch on this heart of mine. Even though I ended up not using “A Different Drum” it was my jump off song to finally make the mix for this Mouse Deer cd exchange I’m a part of — my contribution is about three months overdue. But so are other folks so I’m not too worried. One woman handstitched all the cd covers and hers was a 3-volume set to make up for not contributing in the first two rounds of Mouse Deer. So I’ve made the cd in terms of the playlist; I figure in a couple months I’ll get around to burning and making covers.

So, it’s raining again. We’re now part of the Seattle-Eugene corridor. I’ve always read those statistics about how North Carolina gets as much rainfall as Oregon but ours is spread out over the year and includes thunderstorms as opposed to a wet/dry season. When I first moved to Seattle in January 1991, I believe my feet stayed damp until June. The only shoes I had were a pair of Converse and a pair of those Chinese shoes. Both smelled. I went to the picture show with my sister and her old boyfriend David and I’d gotten so used to the stink of my own feet that I didn’t notice, had them propped on the seat in front of me. Mary picked them up and put them on the floor and said, Those shoes are going in the trash when we get home.

In the middle of my upper back, feels like a fireball sitting along my spine, especially from 3pm on. I believe it’s a combination of lack of patience with students these days and their inability to do much of anything for themselves and full breasticles. Those suckers hurt, man. Can’t imagine three months from now. Those are my updates from the complaint department. It’s like I hate feeling like that but sometimes that fireball is so persistent and aching, I have trouble shaking it and thinking about anything else.

Last night when I got home from work, I watched the rest of Sense and Sensibility, that Ang Lee Jane Austen adaptation from the mid-90s. Holy crap, I love Alan Rickman and Emma Thompson. And even Hugh Laurie, pre-obnoxious House doctor star. Anyhow, Emma Thompson plays it so quiet and bound up throughout the whole picture that, at the end, there’s this part where she literally weeps — not regular old movie crying that’s pretty — I mean, full on weeping. It killed me, how painful it sounded and how she looked away from the camera. Later, when JB got home, I told him about it and he’d seen that movie almost fifteen years ago and he said he still remembered that part, that it tore him up.

The dogs are sleeping beside me on the sofa. Buddy’s damp from his jaunt around the yard which was to convince JB that he went to the bathroom but I have a feeling he didn’t. He came back too fast. Severn is always a good girl and does all of what she’s supposed to do. We always say she’s such a good student. If Buddy could chew bubble gum, he’d stick it under his desk.

“it was there i found, beside the Alamo, enchantment strange as the blue up above”

Hey, 4:13am. It’s amazing I made it this long. Thanksgiving and pregnant flat out hurts. My ribs feel like they’re squeaking, fixing to snap. I woke up worrying that Mott was gonna give my pictures of PNW away to somebody else. The ones I put on the board for the funeral — I let her have the board for a while to look at but then I haven’t seen it and she’s on this give everything away kick, which is fine, it’s her stuff, but those are my pictures, old ones that Cousin Allison got me copies of.

Sitting here thinking about systems, as in systems of organization, and how anyone ever comes to agreement on something astonishes me. Like Netflix, that’s a very well-organized website. Or LastFM. Wikipedia for the most part. Most systems seem subjective, like whoever was in charge kept thinking of things on the fly. The reason I think of this is because Mott’s tearing up these boxes of pictures and letters and such that JB and I organized several years ago, stuff that we took care in preserving. We talked about what the best system would be and decided on something that we thought would make sense to more than just us (since it wasn’t for us but for my mom). Not only does she undo the whole thing but she puts it back together with her own, in my opinion, nonsensical system that includes tabs of paper with blue magic marker writing and scotch tape. The tabs say things like Taylorsville! Christmas! Mom and Dadoo! 1957! and might be filed under D for Dadoo but then Summertime! Gertie! Lois! Chipper! Broken Arm! might be filed under B for Broken Arm. In the grand scheme of things, this is not a big deal and her system undoubtedly is more interesting than mine — it’s only when you want to find something that it makes you crazy. I think this is a question of audience — them with the best systems are those who are aware of who will come a-searchin’. Most folks don’t think about it. Mott has a history of not being able to decipher her own systems which is why she asked me to organize those boxes and boxes in the first place. Oh, and while she’s undoing them now, she keeps telling me how easy it is to find things. Thank you and you’re welcome.

This must be some kind of holiday depression I’m in. Thinking about my dad, I don’t know if ache is the right word. More like an emptiness that’s exposed to the elements. I keep listening to these Hit Parade songs I have — Vera Lynn, Bing Crosby, Artie Shaw — because I can’t abide much else. My whole life I’ve read about folks who experience this loss and I’ve heard people talk about it but it truthfully doesn’t make much sense until a person goes through it for themselves. Not that even “go through it” is the same for everybody. There are some people where I imagine it’s a relief, if they had parents who were mean to them, say, and spent their whole lives in fear of them. So I’m not saying this whole thing is the same for everybody. For me, it’s like a deep sense of home or grounding has vanished and all that’s left is what I can seem to conjure in my head. And it freaks me out because as quickly as it feels like it’s slipping away, I know I need to create this for the little girl who’s coming. At times, I know enough to realize that it’ll all get easier with time, less ache and emptiness; other times, I fear it will feel like this forever, some ever-widening hole of loss, or even if it doesn’t widen, it just sits there like an old broken-up chair in the side yard.

Reading Jane Austen helps. As does Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys and pumpkin pie.

rumble/thanksgivingtide

It’s Thanksgiving, 6:09 am, raining again. Even though it’s dark out, I could see a thin layer of fog just over the outbuilding, lighting up the dark. I keep worrying Maizie’s gonna jump on the table and have her paws land in Maggie’s pies. They were on top of the washing machine but that was a particularly precarious spot seeing as how she thinks anybody who is not us, Mott, or my sister, is either a strange dog or has a dog. She’s behaved like this ever since Martin and Ann went to New Mexico over three years ago and Chope and Zorba pinned her in our kitchen on Carr Street. Catpaw Pie would make everybody sad.

Somehow the only thing I can recall dreaming about was this naked man who was covered in those kinds of moles that are flesh-colored and hang from skin — my sister calls them hangers. This man was walking around a cabin that felt like it was in Colorado, or Vermont, like a naked L.L. Bean ad.

Yesterday at free lunch, JB and Bill and Doug and I sat together. It was abbreviated, most-kids-are-gone-anyway, all-sections-closed pre-holiday free lunch. The big boy who carries around the tote bag on which he’s written UNICORNS ARE REAL in magic marker kept saying, Salad! Salad isn’t supposed to be near the waffles! Bill talked about all the Humphrey Bogart pictures he’s planning to watch and described for a retired history professor who sat down with us his box that lets him get MLBTV so he can watch all the Phillies games. Every time Bill tells the story about finally getting to a Phillies game, last year, and them finally making it to the World Series, I almost wet my pants. Just my luck, we got froze out in the third inning, everyone covered in frozen rain, I couldn’t believe it. Doug had his gray shadowbeard coming in and he’s even funnier than normal when that shows up. It being Thanksgiving and all, I felt mighty grateful that I work around flat-out funny people. Back at the library, all the bosses were gone for the holiday so Doug blared Link Wray’s “Rumble” and Bill blared his Philadelphia radio station and Esta watched “Smallville” at the helpdesk. In between tutorings, JB came down the hall and said, It’s a cacophony in here. I do love it when the library closes down early.