And They Swam And They Swam All Over The Dam

I was hit by a car when I was sixteen. I've written about it before, it's old news, it happened a long time ago. I broke my left fibula in 14 places, broke my collarbone, my cheekbone. Took the Percocet, the morphine, dreamed the dreams, had the visions. Learned the lessons of the hospital. Morphine burns when it goes in. When they ask you to rate your pain on a scale of 1 to 10 it is meaningless. Percocet makes you nauseous but it is pretty. Nurses are nice when you are nice to them.
       [Be nice to them. They are the lifelines. They are the angels and the demons. You get to choose which form they take for you.]
          Ask for the food your caretakers want because you won't be able to eat it when it comes. No one cares if you shit or not, but they will ask. Understand that you are the center of the universe, but be a benevolent god. It hurts worst in the morning but don't worry about crying. Everyone does there. Buckle down. Wait.
     I understand pain and hospital and drugs. At sixteen. I do not know what it is like at 86. I think it is hell. I now understand that I have not yet gone to hell. I appreciate that.
     My grandmother, my Granny, fell on Sunday and broke four ribs. Four ribs. Just think how much they move, how much they contain. All your guts, all your gizzards. Every breath and yawn and cough are inside those ribs. Hiccups? Shut the fuck up. At 86. I spent 8 and 1/2 hours with her today. I watched. I remembered.
      I remembered how it was with my broken collarbone, and how every breath hurt. So you don't breathe deep. So you develop a cough. So it hurts more. Like a knife in you. Like a stabbing. The drugs they give you (I still feel nauseous when I hear about people using these for fun) are not perfect, they all have their tricks. A burned out vein or seasick dreams? A waking sick smile and an all-forget or a heave-ho and the knife we go? You get to choose. Or, I suppose, nothing, and wanting to please-let-me-die every minute. You ask for relief and they give you something. Something.
      So. When my Granny laughed and then moaned, or when she forgot and tried to use her bad-side arm and then moaned, I knew. But.
      She's got a touch o' the dementia. We don't have a name for it really, she just gets the forgetfuls in a bad way. Also a case of the out-to-get-mes. We all (and by all I mean family and hospital staff) have a part in the paranoia play in her reality, and it is, it is her reality. I didn't have that. I had the pain but I knew where I was. I knew I was loved. I dreamed of the ocean, and of falling, but I woke up and knew it wasn't real. She dreams that she's been forced to go in a locked room in a building half finished and it is dirty and cold, she dreams that she's been strapped down, she dreams that she's been bad and so she's been left out over night to sleep outside and she cannot sleep. She wakes and believes it is real. It is real. She experienced it. She has never been treated like this. She cannot believe that this is happening to her. And yet, she can. She does.
       I am in on it, but she still loves me. This made it easier for me because I could get her to tell me stories. I even mimicked her because I didn't know what to do. At one point, when a nurse was doing something she didn't like she said, "This is a change of subject, but where did you go to school?" and the nurse humored her and talked for a while about college and eventually forgot that she was supposed to get Granny to pee. I used that. When Granny would start to talk about being in restraints I would say, "Hey, this is a change of subject, but why did your parents move to Roseland?" and we'd be off. I learned a lot. I have no idea how much is true but I heard some wonderful stories.
       At one point she even told one about me. She said, "One of you girls was in an accident. I was there, at the hospital, and something was sticking in her head. She kept saying that her head hurt, her head hurt. And then it turned out that something was. It was her hairpins! They were sticking into her head!" "That was me, Granny," I said. "I was lying there all broken up and it was those damn hairpins that were irritating me the most." "Yes," she said, "I remember. I was there."
      She is very bitter, my Granny. Very angry. She is wrasslin' those demons of the past and blaming everyone and herself too. That is something I have to think about now. I don't want to end up like that, so bitter and blaming about things I could have changed. I need to seek satisfaction and contentment. I am luckier than her, I don't need to seek love, I just need to hold on to it. I need to understand my disappointments rather than swallow them and hold that poison. God forbid I blame those I love for my own sadness. I don't judge her for doing so. She taught me songs about fishes and how to wash my hair in a lake. She's teaching me this now. She made a lot of mistakes she didn't know how to rectify, and now she's stuck in a bed and all she has is time to think about that. It sucks. A lot.
        Today she said:
         "If it's this hard to die I don't think I'm going to make it."
          She's actually very strong. I love that quote, it's so her. I wrote it down when she said it to make sure I got her words right. Mama told me tonight that even though Granny wants to be cremated, she does want a stone somewhere saying that she was here, she existed. I think we should do that and inscribe it with her name and birth and death dates, and maybe the words, "She made it."
       Death is hard but we'll all make it eventually.
     I learned more hospital lessons today. Dirty jokes are okay. In the face of dementia and paranoia there are no right answers, but I Love You doesn't make you feel bad at least. If you are itchy they will give you lotion. Talking in a baby voice to a Grandma makes you sound like an ass. Bring your own coffee. Steal all the tape.
     We have good genes in our family. I told her, "You think you feel bad now? Think how you'll feel when you're 96! Or 106! Just wait 20 years and tell me about pain then!" This is not the end, not nearly. This is just the end of the beginning of all of this.

So, Christmas comes but in three days and I am not ready. A month ago I felt sick, nauseous, just thinking about Christmas. I'd think of the presents, and getting together with everyone and cheer, and the candy cookies cakes, and whoosh, I'd get vertigo, have to sling those thoughts away. It's much harder to ignore things when you are unemployed. Much easier when you don't leave the house.
         The boyfriend and I would be in our house and one of us, in despair, would say, "What are we going to give people for Christmas?!" and the other would say, "Hmmm, let's think of something we can make everyone that's not too expensive." Then we would go and get snacks and watch another episode of Battlestar Galactica and pretend that time was not passing by while we did this. (Snacks. I have a snacks problem. Snacks are much, much better than alcohol when it comes to ignoring pressing problems. Alcohol, when taken in excess makes you think things like, "I am a hopeless piece of shit and I'm going to talk about it." Snacks make you think things like, "My, this is a delicious pretzel. I wonder what it would taste like dipped in ranch?")
          Then, slowly and quietly, (probably because I was looking away) the feeling of Happy Christmas crept up on me.
        We can't afford a tree this year, which is sad. I love a tree in the house. It's like a marvelous, magical mistake that you can have an entire tree to bring inside and light up and hang pretty things on. Isn't it strange? Isn't it lovely? There are some tiny cypress trees down the road that someone planted too close together and too close to an old oak tree. They will not all grow big, which is what cypress trees want to do. I thought it might be a kindness to cut one down. Especially the one that has such a very nice shape and is only six inches from another one. I thought that the boyfriend could be the look-out and I could do the dirty work with the saw from my multi-use pocket tool, or perhaps a bread knife and then we could nonchalantly walk it home. "Ho hum, nothing to see here, hummy hummy hum, la la, not stealing a tree oh no, ho-di-ho-hum." I knew, however, that because I am not a child I would get caught. I imagine the fine for cutting down a tree (even a tiny one that would not grow anyway) is larger than the price of a Christmas tree.
       [I got caught once trying to cut mistletoe from a tree in the Ross parking lot. A cop came out of nowhere and said, "Ma'am, you need to get out of the tree." I was wearing floral gardening gloves and clutching a knife in my teeth. It was embarrassing.]
        So one night, while the boyfriend was out driving his cab, I pulled the box of ornaments out of the closet and decorated a corner of the apartment. I have a room divider that someone made by hinging three screen doors together and then replacing the screens with muslin. In my house it doesn't divide anything, it just stands up against the wall in the corner. I've pinned photographs of my family on the doors, and a map of the world. This is what I decorated instead of a tree. I hung lights along the tops, and draped behind so the colors shine through the fabric. I pinned glass balls and tiny treasures to the muslin. I made a snowflake banner out of pages from The New Yorker. I hung ornaments from a branch and placed it on the top of the doors where they come to a V so that they drip down and sway in the breeze of the fan. While I did this I played Youtube jukebox, typing in "Otis Redding Christmas" "Bonnie Raitt Christmas" "Al Green Christmas". Bruce Springsteen, Dolly Parton, Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Dinah Washington, Willie Nelson.... It does not matter. Everyone has done a Christmas song. I danced and decorated, decorated and danced. It is a small corner. It is beautiful.
        Then there came the night that I was bored and so I called my brother (who was to play Evil Santa at a party the next night) and said, "Have you made your hat yet?" and he had not, so I got out my red velvet and plush white felt and dragged the sewing machine table into our living room. My Lady Day came over bearing Pabst Blue Ribbon and Guinness and she drew skulls as I sewed and we gossiped and laughed so hard it verged on hysteria and I wanted to clutch her to me and say Thank You Thank You Thank You I needed that so much.
       After that came Granny's holiday party at the retirement home where I fed my three year-old nephew fake champagne under the table like he was a champagne guzzling dog (but classy, because we had those plastic champagne glasses that are shaped like a courtesan's breasts).
       A few days later I started on my other nephew's first stocking. He is nine months old and a right jolly old elf he is and last year when my sister was pregnant we all said "Next year we'll have another one!" and so this year is next year and how could he not have even existed before? It is a mystery. We cannot live without him. It was an honor to make his stocking, as it was when I made Owen's before him. I looked around me while I was making it and thought about how many people were making this stocking with me. Mama taught me how to thread a needle and pull the thread through my fingers to make a knot. Granny gave me my first sewing machine. Grandma Dot gave me the sewing basket I pull my needles, thread, sewing machine oil, pins, and notions from. The velvet came from old curtains from Mama's house and it is the same velvet from which I have made stockings for the rest of his family. The same fabric, thread, and strong knots tying us all together. I hope he has it for the rest of his life, even when the velvet sheds and the jingle bells throw their bindings. I hope he will look at it and know, Aunt May loves him. Always. I whispered that into every seam and sang promises with the jitterbug hum of the sewing machine. Always.
       Lately I have been making the boyfriend a pair of pajama pants. He knows that this is what he's getting for Christmas. He picked out the flannel himself. I thought that this would be a good gift because 1) he doesn't have a pair of pajama pants and he has to wear his jeans all the way up until going to bed, and 2) I have made pajama pants before, so easy peasy, right? Ha Ha! No! May makes plans and God laughs! I have always prided myself on my ability to look at someone and at a piece of fabric and just cut and sew the right size. One year I made everyone pajama pants, even Mr. Moon who is 6'10". Mama says that he still wears them. This time, I don't know what happened. I was almost all the way finished when I got him to try them on to make sure the waistband was right and well, at least the waistband was right. They were huge. HUGE. He's standing there in our living room and going, "Do you really think my legs are this big?" while pulling the excess fabric away from his body. I mean. You could have fit six puppies and a ham in those things, while he was wearing them. Then, because he is so sweet he's like, "No, it's not that bad, I can wear these..." and I, I am laughing so hard I'm snorting and I make him take them off so I can start ripping seams. It took me two hours to get the waistband off. They may have been the wrong size, but those things were solid! So that's an ongoing project. They may be done by Christmas. Or Spring.
        Night before last I went out with my brother and the sister who lives here. This is very very rare. I hardly ever go out, and Sister has the babies, but Hank is the one who Makes Things Happen and so it was. I got up pretty, I don't know why, in a swingy dress and tall shoes and lipstick. Hank wore his finery and looked very fine indeed. We picked up our sister and she looked beautiful as she always looks. (I have no children and I am the one who walks around in holey yoga pants and a cut-up sweatshirt, and Lily, who has a three year-old and a nine month-old somehow manages to wear attractive, well-kempt clothes and has hair that is always shiny and perfect. She is gorgeous.) So we were a good looking bunch. We went to karaoke night at the oyster shack and can I say, it was just the best time? There were old friends and new friends and people singing their hearts out (no, we did not get up and sing. we sang along, quite boisterously, but we did not get up on stage) and all the time, my brother and one of my sisters sitting there with me. I saw pretty ladies and tough young men, I saw older folks singing songs they should and younger folks singing songs they shouldn't. I saw records and posters on the wall and the poetry of bathroom graffiti. I even saw a man who was so drunkenly moved by my lipstick and tall shoes that he got up on a table and literally showed his ass. But the best thing I saw by far, were Hank and Lily's faces, smiling at me and laughing and knowing that right then, right then and there I was exactly where I wanted to be in all the world. If the world had ended yesterday I would have gone easy, with a smile on my face.
      And so no, I am not ready for Christmas. I am not ready for the lights to be taken down and the songs to stop playing. I am not ready for the going out nights to end, or the staying in and sewing nights. I am not ready for the big family get togethers to be over or for Mama to stop making cookies. Christmas is crazy, but it is big and beautiful if you ignore the malls and the money and the consumerist bullshit. It can be a very merry madness, it can be a grinning mess. It can be a good reason to get together.
       My family is not Christian, but I understand that Jesus was all about love and so I think he'd be alright with us. Our Christmas is not about Jesus, but it also isn't about getting a bunch of stuff or fighting crowds or watching "It's a Wonderful Life". We have a wonderful life because we have each other and we have love. Every day we have love. Not everyone is so lucky. So blessed.
      Bad things happen. Pain and horror and questions that will never be answered no matter how many times asked. We can't hug and kiss away all the pain that exists in the world, but if we have those we love around us we can hug and kiss them. We can hug and kiss them and hold onto them in our arms and in our hearts and cherish every moment we have. That is all we can do. All I want for Christmas is to look around the room at all the faces of all the people I love most in the world and be right there, right there in that moment, exactly where I want to be. I believe I will get it, and isn't that fine? Isn't that good? Isn't that a Goddamned Christmas miracle? I think so.
      I hope you all get a Christmas miracle this year. I wish you all a merry madness. I hope you all have love.

In Which I Talk About Anxiety

         I don't know how to do this anymore. My typing skills (HA HA! Skills! As if!) are rusty and so is my screen writing brain (by which I mean the brain I use to put words on a screen rather than on a page). But, where there's a will there's a May, so it is written, so shall it be done.
        I've been catching up on other people's blogs (are you down with OPB?) and I see that there is a lot of crazy going around. A lot of Going Through Shit. This I find reassuring. Now I know I'm not the only one. I've been in hiding, because I am anxious, and I am ashamed at my anxiety, and I don't want folks to worry about me, so I become reclusive and don't talk to my friends, which makes me more anxious, and so on. It's funny because it seems like everyone is anxious these days and they talk about it blithely and with humor on NPR and in the New Yorker and so you would think that I would own it and laugh with the world at all our silly fears. Only, it is not funny to me. It's scary. I don't like it.
       Two years ago I was tall and strong and brave. I walked with legs longer than my own and owning, I owned the floor. I managed the floor actually, I was the Floor Manager. Managing things was my job. Then one day (actually, this was a little over two years ago) I got the shakes at work and had to walk away for a little while. It happened that one time, and then I was fine for a while, and then again a couple of months later. It was during brunch and I was fine, I was fine, and then all of a sudden the floor tilted and my hands wouldn't stay still and I could not carry those damn bloody marys to table twelve so I passed off the table and went to lie down on the floor in the office. I didn't know what was happening. I'd never experienced anything like that before. I thought I was having a low blood sugar attack or something and I called my brother and he came picked me up, took me to lunch, and then to his house where I fell asleep on the couch and woke up feeling much better. See? Blood sugar, right?
        That was the worst it got at work, the worst, but it kept happening every once in a while. I made sure that I had snacks and if I got shaky, well, I'd just take a little break and eat something and come back and everything was fine. Still, I hated it. I was the manager! I had to manage! I was the one who, if everyone was else was in the weeds, could get thrown to the wolves and I'd be fine. I'd be smiling.
         Meanwhile in my personal life, my long-distance relationship fell apart and I got together with my neighbor/ coworker's best friend and all was topsy-turvy and my simple and quiet life was being pulled from my hands. I was trying desperately to catch the pieces as they blew away.
        It wasn't all bad. New boyfriend turned out to be sweetness completeness who would pull me into him at night in his sleep and stop whatever he was doing to kiss my face. I needed that. I still do.
       I made an appointment, and he drove me to the doctor. The doctor was kind and listened to my symptoms and told me that it did indeed sound like a blood sugar problem (even with snacks, it is hard to eat when you are a waitress. Waitresses don't eat. Not really. They are robots). He scheduled me for tests. The blood work girl was beautiful and wore a turban. There was a poster of cartoon cats on the wall. As she drew the blood so gently from my arm I tried to pick my favorite cat, while my boyfriend held my other hand and told me which one he liked best too. Then he took me to breakfast.
       Two weeks later and back with the kind doctor, he told me I was absolutely fine. Perfect actually, couldn't be better. He punctuated his findings by taps on the table as he read from his laptop. "Kidneys? Great. Liver? Perfect. Thyroid? Wonderful. Iron? Most women your age start to go down in iron, but yours is ideal. Blood sugar? There is no evidence that you have any problems whatsoever." The doctor was Indian and his voice had a beautiful upwards lilt. It sounded like he was reciting poetry. Then he told me there was something else that carried the same symptoms as hypoglycemia, and that was anxiety.
      I left the office feeling let down. And relieved. I didn't want to be hypoglycemic, but I wanted something concrete, something physical that I could pinpoint and fix and be well and move on. The brain is so slippery, so sneaky and smart, it will do what it wants. It will tell the heart to beat fast, it will call out danger, it will tell the feet that the earth is sliding and the feet will listen. Now here is where I'm going to sound really crazy: I know that I am my brain, but I sort of think of it like an Other, like I and Brain are separate. If Brain was going to be an asshole, I was going to bitch slap it into submission. "Stop it, Brain!" I would say. "Stop it right now! There is no danger! We have done this a thousand times before!" And actually, that worked. For a while.
      I wasn't the only one having anxiety at work, particularly around brunch. One of our waitresses would wake up at 5 AM with a pounding heart every Sunday. One of our food runners had to throw up more often than not before his brunch shift. Another waitress one time had to sit on the floor in the beverage station with her head between her knees while I stood there and rubbed her back and said, "Breathe. In and out. Just breathe." I can't tell you exactly why it was so bad. It just was. It still is, I hear. I'm glad I'm not there.
       The anxiety started creeping back, and though that was not the only reason I left, it was a factor.
        I had hoped that it would lessen if I was away from all the pressure of that place. All the craziness and the stress and the troubles with the upper management, but it didn't. Not really. It changed, for sure, but it's like my body got a taste of terror and now I am afraid of being afraid. I had an anxiety attack while driving recently and now every time I get into my car I feel that sickness, that sweaty leaden dread. It ain't pretty and it ain't fun.
      I'm working on it. I'm writing about it, and that feels good. Writing feels like medicine. Reading the blogs of strong ladies, ladies I admire, ladies who are also experiencing or who have experienced something similar is medicine too. I hope I can give that back. Or at least let someone else feel a little of that, "Well, I'm not THAT bad" feeling. I'm also looking into support groups which, if nothing else, will give me more blog fodder. Being unemployed I need something to write about.
       Right now I'm going to go on a walk. I'm going to walk hard and sweat. I'm going to feel how strong my legs are, how strong my back is. I'm going to suck the sunlight into my skin and get up that one damn hill that is a bitch every time and when I get to the top I will raise up my arms and cheer and jump up and down like a champion (like I do every time) and I will feel that wild feeling that the world is beautiful and that no matter what I love it, I love it, I love it. This too shall pass, it won't be like this always. All the people we have ever been are still inside us; that strong, long girl is still inside me. I take comfort in that.

It's Been A Long Time Since We Rock-n-Rolled

          I woke up this morning after too many gray days, after not feeling well and time on the couch only interrupted by time in the bed and lo, the sky is blue and lo, the air is clean and cold and oh, I have to wash my hair. I want to burn my pajamas. I want to get on the good foot. I want to take a walk.
         I wish I could write about all the changes that have occurred in the past year and a half. I don't have the energy right now, it's too much and somehow not enough. I will try. Soon.
         I quit my job. I wish I could write about that, about the bittersweet about that place and also the miseries, but I don't want to tell tales outside of school and if I can't write the anger then I can't write the sublime. It's just not truth that way. Maybe I will though, you never know. Lord knows it would be nice to get it all out and move on. Weird when something is your life for so long and then it is not and you walk around empty for a while- hands empty, brain empty, a strange light feeling in your skin and nothing to say, not at all, to anyone.
        I can hear the boyfriend turning in the bed, and the house ticking into late morning, and the cats playing rumble-stomp, and for now that is okay. There is a walk to take, and hair to wash. I'm sorry it's been so long. We'll talk soon.

Baby Waiting

My sister is having a baby. I should be eating, and then sleeping, but I am not. I am writing, I am smoking, I am sipping a glass of wine (to sleep, perchance to dream), I am waiting for this baby to come. It is better than Christmas.
And isn't that what Christmas is all about? A celebration of a child being born? I am not Christian and so it is completely right that my sister's baby's upcoming birth would be better than Christmas. Besides, we are all children of God, and every birth is a miracle birth.
I left her tonight in bed. I had just rubbed her feet (come on, Baby) and kissed her face a million times. Then kissed her belly (come ON, Baby!) a million times, and her husband (whom she caressed as I walked out the door and I heard her say, "You've been a good Daddy today..") was getting tucked up beside her and Owen, oh Owen, our (their) two and a half year old about to snuggle in between....
Lily. Beautiful Lily. You are resplendent. The way you are so calm and cool, the way you take this world, this motherhood and wear it like silk on your skin. You ask for a kiss and the boy comes a runnin'. Who knows what this next child will do?
I joke and I say, "I can't wait to see what this baby will be! A zebra? A dinosaur? A fairy?". It is not so much a joke because as Mama said earlier today we could not have imagined who Owen would be, and I said there's no use imagining. We don't know the sex, but really, who cares about the sex? Who will this person be? I hope our sense of humor is there, I hope for health and beauty and that lovingness we in our family have for each other is there. Those are my hopes.
If she (he) is half as beautiful as Lily we will be blessed. If he (she) is half as smart as Uncle Hank we will be blessed. If she (he) is half as healthy as our Mama we will be blessed. And if he (she) is half as Zen-like as Pop-pop, as half as determined and loving as Aunt Jessie, as half as funny and just a damn good person as is Jason, we will be blessed, we will be blessed, we will be blessed. No matter what, we get a new person to love, to grow a new heart for, to make our great days even greater and deeper and fuller, and we will be blessed.
Oh Baby, I love you. You have a family who will always hold you up and keep you strong. You have a Mama and Daddy who will always be there for you. You have grandparents who will teach you amazing things and love you unconditionally. You have aunts and uncles who will play rumble-tumble with you and spoil you rotten and teach you the dirty words. You have a brother who is the most amazing soul (so deep, so funny, so true, so smart) who will guide you and protect you and know you better than anyone else.
Come ON, Baby, come on. We are waiting for you. We love you.

My Girl

Today is the day my babiest sister graduates from college. I don't know how that could have happened, not that it is strange that she has accomplished something like that, but that she could be old enough to do so. Isn't she a tiny girl, rollerskating around the house? Isn't she a little thing, packing a plastic suit case and declaring that she's off to Meximo City? Isn't she our baby girl? Isn't she our girl? I will not cry. (The tears are already in my eyes.) I've been crying for a week straight.
As the storms that swept through the south were just starting to kick up wisps of leaves and hints of what was to be such total devastation, I started to feel off. Irritable, ornery, sassy. I wanted to pick fights, I felt like I hated everyone who walked through the door at my work. I said mean things. I had to mentally restrain myself from dashing full plates to the floor and smashing water glasses. My arms longed to knock something over. Preferably something big that would make a very loud bang and would break in an irreparable way. Then came the tears.
I cried because people were leaving at work and I had to replace them and it was too hard. I cried because not only are they leaving, but they are going off to better and brighter things, and I stay here and what to them was a job to get them through school and supply them mad money for nights of vodka luge, new panties, and marijuana, appears to be my career. I cried because my man is so far away and loves his job so much. I cried because I'm getting old. I cried because my legs hurt so much. I cried because I have a cat and I do not pet her enough. (Seriously, just looking at her little face was enough to set me off.) I cried because I do not have a baby. I cried because I was on my period and oh the storm was building and my sister, my baby tiny little sunshine girl is leaving.
A couple of nights ago after she played at the restaurant, one of my co-workers said, "May, I think I have a crush on your sister." He said it real plain and earnest, and not teasing in any way. "Yes," I said, "She's a good one to have a crush on." and then we talked about how fine she is. Which is one of my favorite things to do.
Many years ago I started waxing poetic about her at a party in St. Augustine. I had had several glasses of wine at that point and I remember gesturing with both hands and saying how beautiful she was and how talented and how marvelous. My then boyfriend leaned over to me and whispered that no one cared, that I was embarrassing myself. I sank back into the couch exhausted and said, "I just love her so much." The funny thing about that is the people I was talking to, the people hosting the party, are the people who my sister now calls her Fairy Godparents and who love her almost as much as I do. Ha! Suck it, ex-boyfriend! It's not overly effusive if you have to be in order to be completely honest. Kiss my ass, I just love her so much.
My sister Jessie is very tall, and very talented, and very smart, and very beautiful. That's all true, but it's not enough. She has an angel's face, a perfect oval, with big blue eyes and a mouth that could have been painted in the Renaissance. She is Aphrodite, she is Diana, she is the Virgin Mary, she is one better, she is herself. Her fingers are delicate and tapered and I like to take her hand when I talk to her and hold it, and bring it up to my lips to kiss because even just that hand is so precious to me. When she is playing mandolin her face smooths and her body relaxes and it is like watching something intimate and magical and completely natural taking place, like the unfolding of a flower or a sunrise, so languid, so.... yes... sexy and yet not so, and then she smiles and the clouds you didn't know were there part and the sun bursts through. She shines so brightly sometimes I have to look away.
Her grace is something that is not just held in her body but also in the way she moves through life. She is graceful with people, she is graceful in situations that most would find difficult or uncomfortable. Children and animals follow her with blind love. She is the kind of girl you want near, just because her presence makes the air feel better. When she is around I know that everything will be okay, not because I need her to take care of things (though she does) but because when I look at her face I am soothed. She is balm, that girl.
Which is why it is so right that she is graduating from nursing school. I can't think of anyone I would rather have by my side if I was in pain, or afraid, or having a baby. She will be using those lovely hands to provide succor to those lucky enough to find themselves in her care. I almost envy their broken bones, I almost envy their labor pains. It is right, it is good, so is she.
She is in love. If I thought she was beautiful before (and she was and I did) now she is even more so and grows more lovely everyday. Could she be any more beautiful? She is so beautiful that only she could be a thing more beautiful than she is now, so I suppose that is possible. Maybe when she herself has a baby, as our sister Lily has and who has herself grown more astonishingly gorgeous since.
I am so glad that she is in love, and that she is doing exactly what she needs to do for herself and her life. They will be moving in together, in another town, in another state. They will make a home. They will nest. They will sleep well together. As I told her not too long ago, there is nothing that makes my heart happier or more at peace than knowing that her heart is taken care of. I believe this man will look after her heart. I believe he may love her enough to keep loving her and to love her more.
Now I am crying again because this is so big to me- this girl, her love, her accomplishments, my love for her. I am not heart broken that she is leaving, I am heart-mended, and I am finding that a full to bursting, happy heart can be just as painful as a broken one. I am so glad for her that I cannot stop weeping.
Jessie Girl- you are leaving but you are not leaving us. We travel in you as you ride in our hearts and minds, and it will always be that way. There is nothing you could ever do that would lessen my love for you and your absence will not cause your face to fade in my mind. You are imprinted in me, you are the wallpaper in my heart. I am so proud of you. I just love you so much. Now go be free, you sweet little thing.

I steal flowers, figs, and berries...

I see that I've lost a follower. That's fine, perhaps even good. Inspiration to write and less pressure. Not that anyone pressures me to write. Not that I don't love that anyone follows me. I'm amazed anyone does actually. I'm so spotty and dissatisfying.
I feel blindsided by this spring. By work. By love. Is it love that keeps me away from the keyboard? Is it love that is making this spring so crazy beautiful? I don't know. I don't want to stop writing, and I haven't actually. I just can't seem to finish anything.
This spring: first it was the Japanese Magnolias. I blame it on them. There were not blossoms and then there were, an explosion of blossoms, a proud of blossoms, a murder of them, and fat they were and dripping from trees. The smell was overwhelming and high inducing, and at one point I stood between two on a carpet of spent petals with the blue sky overhead and the buzzing of bees as loud as lawn mowers and I thought "Does it get better than this?".
But yes it does.
Then came the dogwoods. Snow. Snow with leaves, and tiny green centers, and gray zig-zag branches that alone would be enough. Then came the azaleas, regular and miniature, in all the bridesmaid colors. And then came the cherries and the pears (blossoms, not fruit), and tung, all fast and furious and garish and wonderful.
Add to that the birds that pass through these parts in such numbers that you wonder what it looks like in the place they eventually perch. Finches, wrens, blue jays, cardinals, geese, woodpeckers, yes. Those are the ones I can name. Bluebirds- I saw them at my boyfriend's mother's house. I said I'd never seen one, and there one was. There was one day while walking to work when I saw such a flock of birds, so many I had to stand and look and was late for all my standing but I did not care. I was on a canopy road and they filled the trees, all those great big Spanish moss dripping trees, they filled them and then lifted off, and then filled them and lifted off. Again and again, and when they took to the air they did so in a great scrawing formation. They made a blow fish in the air, and then a dragon, and then a bearcat, and then settled on down only to do it again. I could have stayed and watched for hours. I felt like calling in well, as Tom Robbins would say. "I'm sorry, I can't come into work. The birds. Yes. They are too beautiful." Some days it feels like a sin against God to go into work.
But that was months ago. Maybe two. It's all different now. Flower sex has caught, and everything is fecund. The first fruits are swelling, the mulberries are already ripe. Not quite fall-on-the-ground-and-stain-your-feet ripe, but ripe enough to pluck on the way to work and arrive red handed and berry mouthed. The fig trees smell like figs. The loquats and kumquats are heavy. We have a lemon tree at the restaurant that I've been promised is a rare variety that is so sweet you can eat the fruit off the branch. I miss the blossoms (they smelled like heaven) but I love the tiny green marbles that get bigger every day. I love that the pear trees have lost their petals because I cant wait to roast the pears in brown sugar and butter. Vanilla. Lemon zest. Ginger. When the world smells like honey how can you help but be hungry? I swear I gain 10 pounds every spring.
The roses are almost done, but the jasmine is blooming. Entire walls of it that proves that nature is the queen boss of us all because we know it will pull our fences down and yet we plant it there and let it go wild. Soon it will be so florid with tiny white pinwheels that the scent, when walking by, will make me feel so light headed and high that it will honestly make my knees go weak. I will want to sink to the ground. I will want to lie on the sidewalk. I will want to look at the sky spinning above my head. It is not the sky! It is the jasmine and the bees! I shall have to tell myself this firmly. I shall have to walk on. It does not do to lie on the sidewalk. Spring fever or no.
I can not remember a spring so beautiful. I forgot to mention the wisteria. And the honeysuckle. And the camellias. There are camellias that look like ripped open organs, tattered and fat and blood red. There are also those that look like roses or virginal fairy dresses. One for every lady. Maybe this is why we love them.
So love. Maybe it is love making everything smell so sweet. Or maybe it is love allowing me to be open to the spring, to the flesh of it and the beauty of it and the smell of it and the great great opening of it all. Just like a lonely girl eschews sex scenes in movies so does one turn a blind eye to spring. Non fate guerra al maggio, my friend. War not with May. And May is coming. So soon. In a couple of weeks. For the first time in a long time, I am looking forward to May, and accepting her as she may come.

The Rage

Got my period today
seven days early as though the
world of lady laws follows our
tricky calendar and takes notice when it
is not a leap year
and earlier too my friend
Abi and I helplessly drawn together
like magnets and pulled again
by the inevitable tide of another friend
a girl her eyes wide
hands folded over belly
we all got the rage at the same time
and ate candy out of each others hands
while violently cursing the world
and who knows who else we know
but here we stand- small, medium, and tall
all bleeding and cursing and pale
no wonder men think
we are beautiful monsters.



(If you want to see more beautiful photographs like the one above, click here.)

My Yes Love Story

Chapter 1
It is the day he leaves and I am a mess. I am feeling my heart, and I don't know what to do with it. It is this cracked open, wet and heavy thing. It is inside my chest, but also in my belly, in my brain, in my fingertips. My eyes are wet as I serve brunch, because of course the day he leaves is a Sunday and brunch waits for no man. What do I care for your coffee? Your bloody mary? Your eggs well done and bacon crispy? I feel like Frida Kahlo with my ribs open, my heart blue and red, lurid on my chest. No one seems to notice. That night the sky is dressed for dancing and my fresh new skin is in love with the air. I stand outside and look up for a long, long time.

Chapter 2
Two days pass. I call my Mama and she tells me that a friend is dying. She asks me if I am in love. I don't know, I say, I don't know. All I want to eat is yogurt and soup. I am on the heartbreak yogurt and soup diet. I tell her that even though it's a broken-hearted feeling, I am glad to feel my heart again. It's about time someone turned the lights on, she says.

Chapter 3
I call him. I tell him how I feel. He sees my bet and raises. Rather than hide my beating heart I expose it, I open it's windows, I let the air in. I find that all the songs are true. We agree to start from here and get to know each other. We see each other as endlessly amazing, and inside that endlessness he sees I stretch out my arms and it feels good, and I wonder, How far can I go? And the rest is now, and the rest is now, and the rest is now.

My Almost Love Story, Succinctly Put, In Chapter Form

Chapter 1
We meet at a bonfire (was it a bonfire? perhaps a parade) at The Fives. He is my brother's neighbor and they have quite the little Bro-Town happening, of which my brother will later become the mayor, but not just yet. They are all buds. I think he is sexy, but what of sexy? I have a boyfriend, and I believe he disappears to have sex with some girl. It is a beautiful night. Later I hear he thought I was cute. I also hear he thinks my mom is cute.

Chapter 2
I see him unexpectedly at a show at the Cow Haus. I am surprised to see how happy he looks to see me at the same time as I am surprised to feel how happy I am to see him. His smile slays me. He gathers me up in his arms and hugs me so hard he lifts me off the floor. I don't remember what band was playing, but I remember that hug.

Chapter 3
It is some years later and my life has fallen apart. I no longer have old boyfriend, or any boyfriend, or a job, or a place to live. I have just abruptly left a dangerous relationship and I am lost and ashamed and determined to A) get myself together, and B) drink enough to forget what I have just been through. My brother scrambles to get me into the safety of The Fives, where the brotherhood can keep an eye on me. The man of whom this is about is now my across the sidewalk neighbor and he also enjoys drinking, so we spend many wasted nights talking and talking and talking. We kiss at a pirate party. I say "Kiss me." and he does.
Sometimes he knocks on my window at sunrise for a ride to work.
He moves out. I keep his cat for one day.

Chapter 4
I still live at The Fives. I am still a mess. He calls one night and says, "This is it, let's get together, I want to see you." He comes over and we make out, but before we close the deal he leaves in such a hurry he left his shirt. I am confused and worry he will be cold.
He moves away from town.

Chapter 5
It is a year later and I have moved out of The Fives and into the apartment wherein I currently reside. I have quit drinking and have started to get myself together. Really, finally. It is after New Years and I have just gotten home from a work holiday party and he calls. He is in town visiting, and the people whose couch he is staying on are having a very loud argument. I ask if he would like to come over. I make up my couch.
We talk. We talk far into the night about getting our lives together, how great our families are, what we are up to these days. We make each other laugh. His face makes me happy. I go to bed alone, and wake up glad that he is in my house. The next day he leaves, and we promise to keep in touch.

Chapter 6
Thanksgiving and he is in town to visit his family. He comes to my apartment and a pop song about love is playing. He walks through my door, takes me in his arms, and kisses me. The music swells. He sleeps over.
Same thing happens around Christmas.

Chapter 7
It is Thanksgiving again and he calls. I am at my Mama's house for the ever fabulous pre-Thanksgiving party. I say, "Come out, if you want to." He does. Out by the bonfire he tells me that now is the time. He loves me, he wants to be with me, we can make this happen. I walk him around Mama's house and he loves it. He loves her. He loves my brother. He sees my sister playing mandolin with her band and is now a fan for life, he films them with his phone he cannot believe how amazing they are. He keeps his hands on me, we keep looking at each other.
Between Thanksgiving and Christmas we talk on he phone almost everyday. We will make this happen, We can make this happen, we say over and over. I feel like something is off, though I can't say what. If there's anyone I would jump off a cliff with it's him, but still.... I'm wary. I don't know why he likes me so much. I don't think I am beautiful so I don't trust him when he says I am. Why now? I think.
Christmas comes and we spend one night together. Then family time and I meet his mom on Christmas day. Also his sister, his brother-in-law, and his nephews. They are all wonderful. Just the best people you could meet. I sit on the floor with his Mom and we talk. I play with his nephews. They make me feel comfortable. It is very sweet and easy. I see how he is with his family and he is a boy and there is so much love there.
That night is his last night in town and he is going to go have a beer with his best friend and then come to my house and climb in bed with me. He never shows up. I feel like an idiot in my chilly silky nothings, and he calls to apologize on his way out of town. I say it's alright, I understand.
Then I call the next day or the day after that and say that it is not alright and nothing is alright and I am breaking up with you. It was his birthday. I am so mean.
I was not ready. I don't think he was ready either. You don't start forever with an apology.

Chapter 8
We don't talk for a while. Half a year maybe. Then he calls, says he's coming to town. We talk about getting together. I don't call back. Or I do, but I get the dates wrong and it is the day he is leaving. We do this a couple/three more times.
(I really did get the dates wrong. That wasn't on purpose.)

Chapter 9
He emails me, says he'd like to see me before he "really gets out of pocket". My heart drops. He has planned a grand culinary tour of the country, cooking in some of the best restaurants for the best chefs. It will go on for a couple of years, and then who knows? He visits for Christmas and we see each other at my brother's house for maybe an hour. Then he comes back to town for a week and a half before he leaves for good. I am still wary, still confused. I am happy for him, I am angry with him, I am being a silly girl. Finally, when he only has a few days left we get together.
He takes me to Tom Brown Park where we sit on the grass and remember how much we like each other. We are the funniest, smartest, sexiest people we know. We like to sit on the grass. The sky has never been so blue. I cry a tiny bit while trying to explain something. I laugh more. He tells me that he is sorry, he went too fast last year. We look away, at all that beautiful Florida day. The sky gets in my eyes. When I get home I look in the mirror and I am beautiful.
The next night he comes to a birthday party. We sit next to each other and he rests his arm along the back of my chair. I peek at him. I catch him peeking at me. Everyone is leaving the pizza restaurant to go to a bar and I bow out. He offers to drive me home. I accept. At home, in my parking lot, we kiss.
We kiss and it wakes up all my sleeping cells, he makes my insides quick. Oh, I think, it's been a while. I'd forgotten.
Then he leaves because he has agreed to drive everyone to the bar. He's good like that.
The next day he drives away for good, and all I can think about is that I didn't smell him enough.

Rambling, Rambling, New Year's to Now

On New Year's Eve I worked all day and wore a gold crown. I like that paper party crowns have not changed in style since the early 1900's, it's a good look and it makes you feel like you live in the Emerald City, which is a way I like to feel and don't get to often enough. After working that long, long, 15 hour day, I came home and wrote an equally long post detailing the entire thing with side bars and footnotes and hoohaws and then deleted it and went to bed for about 12 hours. The post was just as, if not more exhausting than the shift itself and no one who is not getting paid should have to go through that. Work, work, work, champagne blah-blah. That sums it up.
The highlight of my New Year's was after the restaurant was clean and the lights in the dining room were turned low (although the bar was hopping till three in the morning), I took off my crown, took down my hair, and sat on our empty patio with two of my coworkers (who are also two of my favorite people) and we talked and laughed so hard in PTSD hilarity that Lovely and I had to clutch our faces to keep them from falling off our heads.
Lovely has a new boyfriend (who had also worked a double at his restaurant) who was there and I got to hang out with him for the first time. I was watching him closely, because Lovely is my work-wife, my beloved girl, and her last man did not treat her right, but I came to believe that this is a good one and I am so glad. I may be at my best, socially, after I have worked for 15 hours because it's a bit like being drunk. All bets are off! My-give-a-fuck meter is at zero! I am not attached to the results! Being at my best socially is not saying much, I am, as I have said, an Awkward Girl, and I tend to sit on the very edge of my seat and leap up to empty the ashtrays. That night on the patio I was so tired that not only was my hair down, my shoes were off, and I was tucked up curled in the patio chair and I did not get up once to empty an ashtray or refill a drink. I saw their drinks getting low and I said nothing.
At one point, Lovely's date went back to the bar to re-up and she tipsy whispered to me that he was funny, wasn't he? And that he felt like a socially awkward person. Sometimes you get two socially awkward people in a room and conversation just goes to shit and all the air gets sucked out of a party and then it is time to leave. Sometimes the magic happens and the two people (or three, or four, because we're none of us exactly smooth) find that these people are their people and the night opens up and you find yourself making dirty jokes in Irish accents and saying, "Oh Danny Boy, THIS pipe is calling..." and it is exactly right and an old man in a bow tie wanders out with a cocktail in his hand and tells you that you are a beautiful girl. It's amazing what hair down does. It makes men silly. And the gold hoops, Mama, the hoops. Well, anyway, that is what happened.
A week later I was sick. I think the holidays caught up with me and all the long hours at work and doing really the bare minimum of taking care of myself. My heat, for example: It's an old furnace and tricky to turn on. I tried to light the pilot myself and could not. I asked my friend Sanchez to come help me and he tried, really he did, but mostly he tried to play romp with me on my bed, slap me on the ass, and ask for a sandwich. Then he sat and looked beautiful in front of my window as the sun set and we smoked my cigarettes and talked about dirty nuns. After he left I went to Target and bought a space heater and some tampons and thought, "I am really taking care of myself now." A space heater does not an entire apartment heat. Since then on the really cold days I have camped out in the living room while the cat sails her pirate ship around, and bracing myself every time I needed to go to the bathroom or get a change of clothes. I am sure by now that all of my neighbors have seen me naked. It's like it's included in the rent.
I knew that either one of my fathers could probably get the furnace working. I knew that. I also knew that my brother-in-law could do it because he did it last year and the year before, but that was why I was especially not going to call him. I don't want to be a bother. I really really don't. I am loathe to ask for help. I would so much rather make my brain figure it out and make my body somehow do whatever it is I need it to do, and if that means it takes a long time to get the thing done, well, so be it. If that means I have to experience slight discomfort, so be it. I don't mind, generally, I really don't. I am very good at distracting myself from discomfort and so it's not like it's really all that bad, and I get such a charge from doing things myself that it's worth it in the end. Usually. It's amazing what you can do by yourself.
Or if you are sick and cold, you may find yourself passing out in your living room and really trying not to because you have a cup of tea in your hands and you don't want to have to clean up the mess later. Not in your weakened state. Which is of course what happened.
I hadn't been feeling right for a while, but I kept thinking that if I hadn't gotten sick yet I wasn't going to. Then I started coughing, and my temperature rose, and I had to admit defeat and call in sick to work. It was a little like the heater situation. I felt worse and worse, but never actually horrible, not like I was dying, and there was no one around to look at me and tell me I looked awful because when family called to see if I needed anything I said no, no, I have everything that I need. I wasn't bleeding out my eyes or anything. Then came the morning of the dizziness and the world going black like an old TV set switched off and I sat on the floor with my head between my knees and thought, "Well shit. How am I going to drive myself to the damn doctor?" Which is when I sucked it up and called my brother.
There have been a few times in my life when I really have felt like I needed a hero and those are the times I have called my brother and he has always come, and he has always done exactly what was needed to be done.
He left work and came and scooped me up. We went to the doc in the box (who ended up being very nice and told me I wasn't getting enough air because I had Bronchitis, hence the dizziness and I was like Oh Good, Bronchitis! I was afraid I was maybe dying. I thought it was the end of times) and we went to get my prescriptions filled, and we called Mama and she said "Come Here So I Can Take Care Of You." and I said, "Yes, ma'am." So he drove me all the way out to Lloyd where Mama was already making soup and all I had to do was curl up on the couch and pillows and blankets and tea would be brought to me, like I was a little princess, watched over by Mama and deer heads and giant fish.
[An aside: Not only did my brother leave work to come get me and do all this but the whole time we're going through the fun process of doctor and pharmacy and what-all, he's making me laugh and I'm laughing and coughing and laughing and coughing and I'm sure scaring everyone at the doctor's office and the store into thinking that yes, the plague has arrived. But that's Hank. He is funny as shit.]
It was so nice and so cozy at Mama's house. My nephew Owen, Our Boy, came over and brought me flowers and brushed my hair and called me May-May for the first time that I have heard in his perfect little bell-like tiny boy voice. Mama made the best soup I have ever had and that is all I ate for about three days. I felt coddled. I felt loved. I felt safe.
Their drugs were quick and by the next day I was ready to come back home, except... Oh it was so nice to sleep in a warm house and walk freely from warm room to warm room and not shiver and cringe when I had to use the toilet. I had asked my brother for help. I had asked my Mama for help. And so that day I called my Daddy Glen, my tall-man dad and asked him Please, could he come and get my furnace to working? Which he did, and was happy to do so. I told Mama that when I walked in the house the next day and it was so warm it was like Dad's arms were wrapped around my entire apartment, just holding me safe, keeping the warm inside.
I don't know why it is so hard to ask for help. I think I have a fear that once you ask for help people will think you are helpless or weak, and then treat you as such, or not trust you, or not respect you as well. Now as I write this I see that so much of my own identity is tied up in being able to take care of everything alone, being strong and independent, and so perhaps I am afraid that I will think of myself as weak or helpless, that I will lose respect for myself and it really has nothing to do with how others perceive me. I honestly don't know how others perceive me, which is probably a good thing. So if one thing I rely on for self esteem is not really helping me out in the long run, perhaps I need to reevaluate what might be my better qualities.

I have quite nice hair.

My legs are very strong.

I can make jokes in many accents.

This may require more self reflection than I am up to right now. I am on very aggressive steroids and antibiotics. I am not supposed to be doing anything that requires coordination. They may cause dizziness and light-headedness and I am encouraged to avoid operating heavy machinery or driving a car. (I just read that on the label yesterday after having worked brunch and feeling all day like I was serving in a fun house with trick floors and wondering, wondering why I felt like I might fall down at any minute.) Serious self reflection may have to wait until I am well enough to walk to work again, which is the best time for thinking.
Today is my normal day off and it is rainy and gray. I have heat, I have food, I have drugs to make me well. I have sunflowers by my bed. I have everything I need. I believe I may do a lot of sleeping, so the getting better goes by faster, like a car trip in the night when you are a child. So safe, so safe, and when you open your eyes you are there. The world goes by very fast outside those windows, but you don't always have to watch it. Sometimes other people can watch it for you.

Thoughts On Decorating

I banged my way through some redecorating this morning. That is how those of us in these old Florida apartments do our redecorating- we bang some nails in the walls, hang some shit up, step back to look, and then bang some more nails in the walls. This is technically against the rules of every apartment I've ever lived in, but it is not one of the hard and fast ones. When you leave you can either fill the holes with white toothpaste, or you can leave them for the next occupant which is really the most helpful way because there are only so many places to hang pictures in a hovel. Three of my paintings are actually hung on nails that were already in the walls when I moved in, and the placement is perfect. No banging necessary.
I put up the amazing calendar that my brother, Downtown Guy, made for me. If you haven't stopped by his picture blog, I've Had Dreams Like That, I recommend you do so now. My brother is an artist and a writer whose words put my scribbles to shame. His picture blog combines that fine eye and that way with words with his love for discovery and his hunger for history and lays it all out there for us to see. Strange beauty, children with swords, dancers, fighters, ships, shanties- all that spins the imagination with some cock and titties thrown in for good measure. He picks images that my eyes want to look at and my brain to wrestle with, and he has, he has had dreams like that. For Christmas he made us calendars with pictures from the blog, and all along the days of the months he put in the songs and poems that fleshed out the pictures, and sometimes wrote his own words when no others would fit. When we were children he taught me the definition of 3-D by holding his threatening fist to my face, and now he has done it again by making something flat go in all directions at once. So I am three days late but now it is on the wall.
The calendar shares space with a Degas print that he found at the flea market for me and is the same painting that hung above my childhood bed until I moved out and was then lost in some move or the next. It was given to me originally by a boyfriend of my mother's who worked in or lived in or was connected to somehow a house with green velvet striped walls. The boyfriend was not important, it is the Degas that remains. The original hangs in the Musee de Orsay in Paris, and when I turned the corner and saw it there I burst into tears.
Also on the wall with the calendar and the Degas is a painting of girls with sensible shoes, another of a coffee cup (that one an original from my father to start my collection of original art, ha ha), a spray of coral from Dog Island, a pencil sketch of a bird by Alex "Feather Fingers" (a tattoo artist I know), a wash board (also given to me by DTG for our jug band we never quite got together), and a photograph of a family from the early nineteen hundreds where the mom wears glasses and a giant bow and the baby has parted hair. Bang bang bang, I promise they all go together.
Bang bang again and next to the front door is now a circular art deco mirror in a wooden frame that has on it two tiny shelves. One holds a blue teacup and the other a glass box of treasures. These are the treasures that are so precious they can only be put in something so magical as a glass box: a heart locket from Daddy Glen (aka Mr. Moon) that contains shell particles from St. Augustine Beach, a piece of shoelace from the shoe that was cut off of me by EMTs the day I was hit by the car, a screw removed from my leg that formerly held together my internal hardware, a medal earned by my Grandpa Fish, animal teeth of unknown species still in partial jawbone, and a platinum pin with a champagne diamond given to me on my wedding day by my Granny Ruth. The mirror that holds the shelves that hold the treasures was given to me this Christmas by my stepmother and so there she is too along with everything else.
A mirror is a tricky thing to hang, even one so small. All of the mirrors in my house are hung in such a way that you never have to accidentally see yourself when you don't want to. I don't like catching my reflection unawares, she looks so startled and so strange, not like me at all. Also, when I was a kid I had an imagining that when I looked into a mirror my best friend Django could see me in his, and I still look away when I don't want him to see my face.
The redecorating reminded me again of how much I like my apartment and also how I am sick to death of it. Everything is dusty. Everything is old. I have my past hung around me like thumbtacks that hold my place in his world and prove that I have been here. I have a green cabinet that holds pictures and obituaries of people I have lost and it grows busier and busier. Joe, Jarryd, Grandma Dot, Aunt Lynn, a valentine from a boy named Demetri now gone, and more. It also holds shells, a music box, a doll I made, some beads, all things they touched and now gather dust even though I still hold them in my hands sometimes. I need to hold them in my hands sometimes. Not often.
I think of my decorating style as tree house decorating. The scavenged chairs, the secondhand pictures, the hand-me-down tables, the yard sale lamps, the Flamenco dancer, the mannequin head, the multitude of books, the cups of pens. The newest thing I have is a kitty pirate ship Mama gave Lupita for Christmas, and now that she is a pirate, the cat is even harder to live with.
Until you have your own children, every new apartment really is just another tree house to live in. A place to put your treasures in. And read sometimes by candle light. And bang bang bang the nails in walls.
I do prefer the old things though. I'd rather have a scavenged chair than one from the store bought to match. I like things that are heavy and ornery, even if they lean to the side a bit. I want the things that tell a story, which is why I love my brother's blog, or a scuffed table, or a portrait of a family I do not know (as long as the baby's hair is parted so).
My ex husband and I did not argue much (until the end, of course) but one thing that always came up was the furniture and the furnishings and how they were arranged. He believed that it did not matter what something looked like, it was its use that was important. If we needed a computer desk he would go to Walmart and buy the cheapest one that served, while I was more apt to put the computer on a spindle-legged side table that I found in the trash on the side of the road because I liked the way the paint chipped or the way the shape of the thing fit into the room so nicely. I learned through living with him that he could not see a room as a whole, but only saw the individual things within it. So if I brought in a lamp with a water stained shade, he saw only a lamp with a water stained shade, whereas I saw how the shape of the base mirrored the shape of a vase on a shelf that was the same color as the skirt of the girl in the painting on the wall who also held a vase that was made of green glass and that is why I put the plant by the window where the light would shine through. It was a different way of seeing things. We could have found common ground I suppose, or compromise, but divorce came first. We did not divorce over decorating, we divorced over sex and money, but decorating was my first freedom's pleasure.
It has been so long now since I have lived with a man that I cannot imagine how one would fit in with all my things. Would he find my altar to lost people macabre and ask me to take it down? Would he see how the angle of the butt of the little girl painting in my bathroom matches the angle of the butt of the sexy pin-up girl in the advertisement for St. Germaine I hung next to her? Would he bring a giant leather chair? I would have to hide the tampons and stop hanging my bras from the doorknobs. Would he come into the bathroom to pee while I am shaving my legs? How do people live together at all?
Now I am curious, and I ask this of you: How is your house set up? Is it very important to you that things be just so? Do you share your house with others, and how does that work? Do you see individual things, or do you see it all as a tapestry? Do you have a physical reaction when you rearrange? I remember how that computer desk from the Walmart made my stomach hurt, though I don't remember if I told him that or not.
What is important to me is that my house is set up to be held easy in my eyes and soft in my heart, tells oh so many stories, and can take a little bang bang bang.

Time it was and what a time it was it was

Last night my high school had a giant reunion, a reunion for all the people who had ever attended at any point since they opened in 1975. It was a reunion, but it was also the retirement party for the principal, the incredible Roseanne Wood. I was not there. I was at work in my ill fitting blacks, walking the floor and serving the pretty people.
One of the tables I had the pleasure of serving was the family of one of our chefs (the best hired gun in town) who also went to my high school and whose brother was the valedictorian of my graduating class. The brother was there, in town for the event, and we saw each other for the first time in 14 years. When he walked through the door my heart banged against my ribcage and rattled the blood to the roots of my hair and I had to hide a minute, I felt so shy. This man, this boy, he looks exactly the same, only more handsome. Perhaps it is the beard.
We were friends back then. The kind of friends who were brought together primarily because he dated one of my best friends, and so were almost always together but never alone together. My best friends- I wish I could list their names. I would pull out their names like a rosary and tug each one as it went by, but it has been 14 years and I am so different and who are they now and would they want to be named by childhood name here on my morning scribble to everyone and no one? Even if I say the names with a prayer and a tug on each one, would they cringe? Besides, I so rarely name names here it seems far too intimate. Here is all I can say: J and M and E and H and K and C. There were other friends but those were the ones. They were the ones. Oh Nyna.
Most of us still or again live here in Tallahassee. K is in California and H is in New York (I believe) but the rest of us yes live here. J and M and E have babies and children. All of them have done amazing things. Whenever I hear of what they are doing all I can say is Damn.
This friend I saw last night, he and his beautiful wife are both ologists of fascinating subjects, furthering the good of humanity. They are Super Scientists and I am glad they are on our side. If they were to use those giant brains for evil we would all be fucked.
He told me that he was looking forward to seeing so many people from the past. I struggled to voice what I was feeling and said something about how it is different to move away and drift apart from those you were close with in high school than it is to be in one's hometown and do the same. I had been on my feet 10 hours already when we were talking and my words were not satisfying to me, though they never are when I try to speak of what is in my heart. He didn't seem to mind my struggle, he listened and he looked into my eyes.
Here is what it is:
My high school was different. We were a Magnet school, we were a public school, we were a drop out prevention school, we were 200 people strong. We were in the bad part of town. We were the druggie school. We had a bad reputation. We were not allowed to be fools. We were taught respect by being respected. We were from every neighborhood in Tallahassee. For some of us it was a last chance and some of us fought to get in. For all of us it was a choice and it was the only place, the only place for any of us.
One time when I was going through a hard time, my dad was worried about me after he dropped me off. He called the office and asked if there was anyone who could talk to me. The office ladies, in all their wisdom, called not the school counselor but the drama teacher who was beloved to me. She came and got me out of math class. We went into a tiny room that was used as a computer cubicle, shut the door, sat on the floor in the dark, and we talked. That was the kind of school it was. Still is, I hear.
They didn't expect us to work hard and do well because that was what you were supposed to do to be a Good Student. They expected that because we were all smart, we were all worthy of greatness, we were all able, and so of course we could. No excuses for lameness. Not the charges on your rap sheet, not the alcoholic parents, not the baby in your belly. You choose your future. You can you can you can.
Roseanne Wood built that house and her I can name because I know she claims me as one of her own. She claims all of us. She is proud of what we have done and who we are. Even when we are not.
I did not go to the reunion because people requested off for the holidays and I put myself into the empty spot they left behind. That and I knew, in my maudlin way, it would tear my fucking heart apart.
J and M and E and H and C and K. Back then there were times I did not know where my skin stopped and theirs began. I could reach out and fill my hands with their hair, I knew what all their toes looked like, I knew all their smells. We swam naked, we all slept in the same beds, we wore each other's clothes, we broke each other's hearts. I wasn't the best of them, and I acted badly and took their love for granted and I regret it so much. I was a kid, I was learning what it was to love. That's my excuse for lameness.
Now I see some of them sometimes and I almost cannot bear it, I can't imagine what it would be like to be in a ballroom with all of them at once, all of us so different now and yet still the same. The people we were still in us somewhere. All of that and the meeting of spouses and the talk of work and the la-di-da and my stupid heart would be beating so hard and my arms would literally ache to pull them to me. There would be nothing I could say to explain what I would have felt, and the need to do so would have been so strong that it would have hurt. To try would have been inappropriate bordering on crazy, which is how I am generally anyway. At least I see that. At least I know.
At our graduation, the top five students (of which I was one, and that boy last night another, and J and E as well) were asked to give a small speech. After having come through all four years of that amazing school and having inside us all that they taught us we felt that this was silly, that we'd accomplished nothing compared to those who had come to the school with no hope and left with a diploma, and so instead of the speech we were supposed to write we spoke the lyrics to a Simon and Garfunkel song, each of us taking turns reciting lines. It is even more perfect now, and I leave it here.

Time it was and what a time it was it was
A time of innocence
A time of confidences.
Long ago it must be
I have a photograph
Preserve your memories
They're all that's left you.

(Bookends, S and G)

A Day Today

I am glue. I am duct tape. I am glue. I repeat this to myself all day, like a mantra. I am glue. I am duct tape. I can help hold together the machine, but it is not my job to fix it, nor can I change the intrinsic nature of the machine. I am glue.
It has been a day. A day and a half of a day and still a double at work tomorrow and brunch (oh fuck a bunch of brunch) on Sunday, and I have yet to have my supper. (Which is soup. Which is simmering on the stove. I love soup. I love it so much I think I'll marry it.) I fired someone today.
I should say WE fired someone, because I am not the boss (I am glue) but I am the manager and I hired the man so it fell to me (I am duct tape) to let him go.
It was like breaking up with someone I never really liked in the first place. It was something I wanted to do, something I needed to do, but not a comfortable thing, no, and dreams were shattered. His dream of having a job. His dream of having a job where he could play with his phone all day, come in late, and disappear for long periods of time for whatever reason to do whatever it is he did. He asked for another chance. He was shocked, confused, hurt. He said he didn't understand, and that this was so unexpected. An hour after he left he called and asked again if there was anything he could do to change my mind. No, I said. I am sorry, I said.
There is that, and then there is this illness that is going around. Our sous chef was out sick and told me today that he threw up thirty times on Tuesday night. Thirty times! I did not ask if he actually kept count, although that is what I was thinking. Not that I didn't believe him but that is a pretty high number, and you'd think you would lose track around ten or so. He also said that he had a 103.9 fever. I told him that I was glad he was not brain damaged, and he concurred. His mother, our lady boss, has also been sick, which is why there was a reservation taken for 15 people in a private room for today at noon and no one told me. (I am glue.) Generally, when there is a private party on the books I schedule another server to take care of them. Today I took the party, as well as tables in the dining room and on the patio. The luncheon was a meeting of judges, and God forbid I ever get arrested (again) and have to stand before one of them because surely they will remember how I was tardy in refilling the iced tea and took forever to get their checks. There's a certain amount of pressure to get checks to people anyway, but when those people are expected in court, it ups the ante a bit.
The day shift ended as smoothly as it could, considering, and then the dinner crew started showing up. I sat and worked on the schedule for Thanksgiving week. I talked to the bosses about how the firing went, and how the judges were. I talked to the servers about the change of staff. A chef needed to talk about a hostess who sassed him. Our bar manager wanted an ear for her troubles with the bar staff. I explained to our new manager? office manager? assistant manager? about why it is necessary to put people on a wait sometimes, even when there are empty tables. I worked on the schedule some more. I made phone calls and cajoled the people who are not going out of town to work doubles over that weekend. I even made up a song about it to make it seem more fun. I said, over and over again, It will be Fine. It will be Great. I said Thank you, I love you. I filled in the head chef about the goings-on and we talked for a bit about his mom, who had passed early this week. It is very sad, and I told him that I was sorry to bring it up during dinner service but I didn't want to pretend I didn't know or that it did not happen. He said that it was alright, he thinks about it all the time anyway, and we agreed that it is nice to say things out loud. I hugged him, and I had never hugged him before, and it was sweet and funny.
I also hugged one of the hostesses when I saw her in the hallway as she came in and we both leaned into each other and sighed. She is a hostess, but she is also my baby sister's best friend and she is one of my little girls and her tiny bones are precious to me. It was good to see her face.
When our new server showed up to train for dinner I said, Hello Sexy-Pants! Come here so I can sexy your pants! Which doesn't make sense but makes sense for us because we have worked together before at another restaurant. To another server I said, No more talking. I don't even want to see your lips moving as if you are talking. Come move your face into my hand so I can slap you without moving my hand. Then I said, I love you. I am leaving now. And I hugged him too.
Then it was time for me to leave and so I walked around gathering my things and I hugged all the other servers. I told them all thank you, and I wished them a good night. I hope everyone is nice and you make lots of money. That is what we tell each other, and we laugh because we know not everyone will be nice and the money will be what it is on a chilly night a week before Thanksgiving.
There are things I can do, and there are things I cannot do. I can listen when people need to say what is resting heavy in them. I can reassure and be calm, even when I know that we will get our asses handed to us as we often do. I can work like a beast. I can tell people I love them. I can do that. And that is something that is not in my job description but it is something that, when said and meant, establishes loyalty and trust. They know that I will never ask something of them that I am not willing to do myself. I tell them they are beautiful, because they are so beautiful.
Here is the thing (I am duct tape): if you do your job well, people will tell you and thank you, but if you do your job really well, they will hardly notice what you do at all. That is the goal. That is the prize. To move through a space all the way to the end and touch but to not leave a mark, and when it is time to walk through the door everyone is smiling. I can't always do this, but when I can it is so fine.

I went to vote yesterday and it was easy. There was no line, I just walked right in, showed the nice ladies my ID, got my ballot, filled it out, received my sticker, and walked back out the door. It's not as good as at my last precinct which was held at an old folks home and the ladies there would give you baked treats and day-old bread from Publix, but still, pretty sweet.
It got me thinking about change, about Change, and about how a few years ago we rallied as a nation and went out and voted for Change and we did it, yes we did it, Yes We Did. Lately I've been hearing talk and grumbling about "Where is the Change?", as if people feel cheated, as if they thought they voted for a Superman and what they got was a man, just a man, and how could that be? I don't understand this. Or I do, I do in my heart, because I know that the grumbling and the rumbling start with people who never voted for the change at all, they just dress in sheep's clothes and start up the whispering of dissatisfaction and that whispering is a mighty tool in our country. People like to talk shit, they like to rail, they like to repeat things that sound cool and smart without really having to think about things, or come up with anything original. Sometimes it works for one side (Yes We Can) and sometimes it works for the other (Where's My Goddamned Change?) but for whomever and wherever it works, it does. It's a game of sides, and I am tired of the game but there it is.
We are a swiftly tilting boat on choppy water and whenever we list to one side everyone runs to the other, and then someone shouts a panic and we all move on back, and the whole time there are whispers that the Captain is to blame, but it is a boat, and will list, and will tilt, and if we were listening to the Captain we wouldn't be running back and forth to begin with.
Real Change doesn't come fast, we know that. We like to think it does. We want the Slim-Fast and then we want the Ultra Slim-Fast. We want American Idol, we want the magic bullet, the two weeks to whiter teeth, the rocket to stardom, the lottery ticket to make us instant millionaires, we want it, we want it fast, we want it now. We are told that it is not only possible, but it is The American Way. We want what we want without having to actually change anything we like at all. That is why we are not happy with our Captain right now. Change is slow, and we might have to compromise.
When I was at Heartwood Institute taking classes in acupressure and Chinese medicine, my teacher told us that it would not be easy to get our clients to change. He said that people are sick the way they are because of the lifestyles they lead, and they like these lifestyles or they wouldn't live like that. So much of what makes us sick is that which we enjoy. To be healthy one often must have a deep internal change before a physical one is possible. If you develop diabetes because you love cake, and you are given cake your whole life to make you feel better and to make you happy, you must learn to love more than cake. If you don't, you can still stop eating cake but you might grow to be irritable and discontent. Or you don't stop eating cake, and you lose a foot. It is that simple on paper but I don't mean to be insensitive. We are not simple beings, the things we love, the things that we are attached to are deep within us, and make us who we are. To change who we are is difficult indeed. Sometimes impossible. I think we can all recognize that.
So if we cannot stop eating cake to save our lives, why do we expect one man to change a nation as quickly as one may change his socks? We love our money, we love our things, we love our air conditioning and our very fast and big cars, we love to bitch and blame and whisper. We love to have our Own, and God bless the child whose got his own, but where does that leave the child without?
Chinese Medicine also taught me that you cannot separate the body to heal it. If your head hurts, rub your feet. They are connected, it is one body. We are starting to understand this in Western medicine as well. If you have a sore throat and you are given antibiotics, the doctor may tell you to take a probiotic to replenish the flora in your digestive system. A sore throat and a stuffy nose are far away from a colon or a vagina, but they are connected and they affect the whole. It is a marvelous and complicated thing, the body. So too is a nation. Far too complicated for me to figure out.
I see how poverty provides a breeding ground for desperation, which in turn creates an environment ripe for fear and violence. I see how well funded schools feed minds and health care protects bodies and these two things are essential in ensuring our people a way up and out of poverty. It is common sense and yet it does not pay out as fast as giving money to big business and funding oil companies and creating bigger and better weapons to protect our giant assets. To improve the health of our nation we would do right to invest in the health and wellness of our children. Which of course would take generations to see any return on said investment and by that time those of us sitting here now will be dead and we are really really loathe to make any sort of changes that may improve things after we die.
The very smart and the very rich know these things, but we don't listen to the very smart and it is not to the advantage of the very rich to acknowledge them. The very rich are also safe in that the big picture is far too big to grasp in a satisfactory way. The money that it would take, the man power and the changes it would take to truly and properly fix our nation's ills are so vast that the human mind simply cannot grok it. I am an average human being, not stupid, not brilliant, and my mind makes a strange shift and shimmy when I try to imagine that sort of magnitude. I don't know what to do.
So I vote. I vote for people who seem to have the people's best interests at heart. I vote for the people who have fine minds and some sort of soul, who see this nation as one body, and who want to make some healing happen.
The people who have made the greatest contributions to change for the better do not live to see the full manifestation of those changes, but they do it anyway. Because they care, because they are far thinkers, because they passionately believe in what is right. Even when great and fast changes have been made it takes a very long time for us to sink into them and feel them. President Lincoln didn't just say, "I'm going to kick it up a notch. BAM! I freed the slaves!" and then everything was equal. It took people time and time again to fight and pray and speak and march and die and new people to be born in a different world to make an even more different world and still it is not perfect. That change is still happening.
I voted for my President because he spoke of change, but also because he is smart. I voted for him because he loves his family so clearly, and therefore I know he is capable of love. I voted for him because he speaks of health before he speaks of wealth and because he stands tall and is proud in his body, as I hope he is proud of our nation. Because I am not a foot or a hand, but I am my whole body. And I am not one person, I am a family, I am a city, I am a nation.
It took us a very long time to get sick, and it may take us a very long time to get well, and I am sure as hell not going to damn the man who I believe is going to fight with all he's got to make us better. No matter how long it takes.

On Taking A Bath

When I was a little girl and we would go visit my Granny in Winter Haven, sometimes she would take my brother and I to the lake by her house to wash our hair. We would go down to the lake, swim, sing songs about little fish, and shampoo. I remember the feel of her hands in my hair, on my scalp, and the soap swirling in the tea colored water while my toes scrunched the silty lake floor and the world all open around me. To rinse you swam again, and came out clean. So simple to swim and come out clean.
I have been taking baths lately and a bath is not like a shower. I love showers. I had a boyfriend once who was jealous of the shower for the noises it made me make. Step in and I would moan, a moan, a sigh, an oooooh and mmmmmm, he told me that I did not make these noises with him. I was not aware of the sounds I was making, and that's the point isn't it? A shower can be more intimate than sex and just as primal a pleasure. That shocking hot, your jumping goosebumped flesh, and then the release of tight and tired muscles as the heat sinks in. A shower can feel like a curtain from the world, the noise of it so loud in your ears and with eyes closed you just accept it and you are in it and there is nothing else you can be doing at that time and so it is a time out from life. You can cry or sneeze and not have to cover your face. A shower is forgiving.
A bath is exposing. I don't like to get in until the bath is full because I am cold and I don't like to be cold, and so when I get in the faucets are closed and it is so so quiet. I always get in and go straight to my knees and put my hands flat on the floor and close my eyes and breathe, as if I am in supplication, as if I have to be active in my letting go. My mind ticks quiet and then goes to the lake, or to the fantasies of my childhood. I am a mermaid, I am a sylph, I am an Indian Maid. The water is filled with flowers, the water holds tiny fish, I sling my mind from sharks, I try not to think of my thighs and knees.
I am so much bigger than I was as a child: I remember when I could sit under the faucet to rinse my hair. Now I take up all the space and have to rearrange all my body to wash. And my body is so close up, it is not that I do not like my body but that these are different views of it than I am used to so it is alarming all the same. I am so nearsighted that when I am standing in the shower I don't really see myself at all, just fuzzy bits that bloom slick and soft with soap, a realization for only my hands. In the bath I see myself kneeling naked, I see my bends and folds, I see the curve of my calves and my hip with my hair all down it. I have to look in a bath, to see the soap wash away. Clean is not a given in a bathtub, a bath does not do the work for you. You cannot stand submissive and be washed clean, you cannot swim the soap away.
When I was married I loved to take a bath. Once a week I would fill the bathtub, light candles, drip in oils of lavender, eucalyptus, and mint, or sandalwood and rose. I would shut the door and windows, I would shut out the world and lean back and close my eyes and that was my time in my head, a place I could be alone. My husband was a busy man and I needed that place away from his energy and his needs. Sometimes I would read a book, and then I would have to put the book in the oven to dry it out because I had dropped it in the water. I would stay until the water was cool, and my mind was quiet.
Now I live alone and I do not need a bath to shut out the world. Now I feel more alone in a bath than is necessary. I take note of the traffic outside, of my neighbors' TV, of the movements of my cat. I pull my legs in close and set my chin on my knees and contemplate the tile. It always needs to be cleaned. That doesn't bother me, everything always needs to be cleaned. I like to imagine other people in their baths, not them naked exactly but how they are when they are exposed only to themselves. Do they look away? Do they sit stiff and fidget? Do they lie still and sigh? Who uses bubbles? Who reads? Who smokes and sips wine? Who locks the door? It's an exercise similar to when I worked at the mall and I would try to picture all the ladies I saw with Victoria's Secret bags in lingerie. I always thought they looked great.
Soon I will call my landlady and invite the men who fix things into my apartment so I can shower again. I will have to shut my cat in a room and make small talk while a stranger is crouched in my bathtub. I will offer him coffee which he will not take and ice water which he might. A long time ago I gave a plumber a beer and discovered that his true passion was NASCAR. He did not like plumbing, but his daddy did it, and his granddaddy before him. Everyone has a story.
Until then I am learning myself away from a mirror, away from intention, at the age of 32. I find that my feet are beautiful. I find my scars and my stretchmarks and my blue highway veins. I find that I am ripe as a peach. I find that the voice in my mind is hummy and has timbre. And it echoes against the tile, and it comes back clear.