Deep Dixie

LESSONS FROM THE CAT

 

                          

                         

                         "Art and music will survive without you."

                                  – Eliza Doolittle (to Henry Higgins), My Fair Lady

 

A friend asked me today what my inspirations are, as a writer, my literary "influences." I thought hard for a moment, the way I do every time that question comes up. I hesitated because of the qualifier, "literary."

I know I am supposed to have been – to be continuously – "influenced" by the great ones who have come before: Dickinson, Yeats, Keats; Dante, Milton, Auden; Sappho, Kipling, Millay; the Psalms of David, the prophets (those brooding malcontents of the Old Testament), the hymns and spirituals and sermons of my Southern childhood. If not directly "influenced" by these, I have certainly been encouraged by them. And these have set a deep music in me, a music and a cadence which rises again and again like a phantom in my own writing. Because of these who came before, because they did their necessary work and it survived them, I have been strengthened and comforted by my return to those writings, discovering and rediscovering what has risen from the solitary minds of those who spent their lives wrestling with the human experience and making of it a kind of dark and troubled beauty, a splendor, an art.

I have loved them and been awed by them and taken solace from them, but what can I learn from them that might sustain me when an emptiness looms in me where it never loomed before? What have I ever had in common with any of the great writers that I could get through such emptinesses with any grace or goodness? And what do I learn by placing myself before the literary ancestors and their works when my own writing doesn't seem to go along so well, or when it grinds to a halt?

Nothing.

For all the good lessons those great works of literature have to offer a writer, that particular lesson isn't in them. My life is as far-removed from their greatnesses, and their troubles, as the far stars are from the morning glories withering on my front trellises.

So what then, in my ordinary life, has opened itself long enough to let me "see" something profound enough to get me through, to decipher its meaning and merit on my own, to see a gesture, an act of faith strong enough to get me through the rough spots of the writing life. There are a few, I think. But none more immediate lately than my little cat, that amber-eyed, 6-pound sack of fur and birdlike bones, that eating and sleeping and pooping fiend. He manages everything he does with a curious feline finesse and I have never seen him depressed or filled with melancholy. When he's not eating or sleeping or hunched in the litter box with that far-off, how-did-I-come-down-to-this "look" on his face, he's curling up on the chair-back for a nap or devising new ways by which to instigate the daily bug-tussles with the big, blue-eyed cat who, by now, is frankly annoyed with his chronic merriment and curiosity.

That dumb little cat knows nothing of discipline, artistic or otherwise. He knows even less of poetry, classical or contemporary, and memoir and fiction are wholly beyond him. My cookbooks are about as intriguing to him as my textbooks are: something to distract me so he can go about his daily mischief. Awards and honorariums and professorships do not impress him. He could care less about publications and tenure. What impresses him is his daily tuna - and catnip toys. He will chase, with gusto, the red light on the laser-pointer across the floor and up a wall. He will do this for hours. He will sit alertly and watch a toy bird with as much attention as he watches an actual bird. And he relishes my time at the desk each morning because it means he can sit on my desk and mess with the paper clips and stapler, so he can amuse himself by swatting at my fingers or the pencil as I write. Sometimes, he gets bored and places his soft-furred head alongside the warm keyboard and dozes off. It's of no consequence to him if I agonize half the morning over the structure of a sentence, if I'm pleased with the task of it all or stuck in a subjunctive rut.

But just let me run out for a half hour to do the morning's errands or head upstairs to put away clean laundry, and he'll diligently post himself at the living room stairwell, looking up, waiting for me to return. He'll sit like that, looking up an empty stairwell, for however long it takes for me to come down again, or to return with groceries or mail. He doesn't just sit and wait; he anticipates. He sits in a chronic state of belief: something will come.

After all, he's never been disappointed. I go away; I return. And with my return comes the return of the food and play and more time at the desk and catnip toys.

It's a grand time for him, that sitting, and he does it with all his catlike little heart and body and those three little synapses that my husband believes are the only standard operating equipment for thinking that cats bring to the game. Like Romeo at the balcony, he waits with great fervor.

The odd thing though, is that crazy little cat is never neurotic or unhappy when I go away. He takes up his position at the foot of the stairs and lifts his eyes. He can stare into the emptiness like nobody else I know. He never flinches, never gives up. He is – as my people are wont to say – in a state of blissful ignorance, believing he will sit and I will return. Not exactly cause-and-effect; more like waiting for the payoff after he's put in the time. Cat logic. Or a human imagining cat logic.

Call it what you will, but I am learning a kind of grace from that cat's gesture of waiting that is making me less crazy, less anxiety-riddled, less paranoid when I sit down at my desk in the pre-dawn hours of the mornings and nothing comes to me. And by "nothing," I mean nothing. In the deeply-troubling moments of no-words-coming, the moments of I-have-nothing-left-to-say-of-any-importance, moments when I would formerly have fled the emptiness for the productive distractions of gathering laundry or unloading the dishwasher, when those moments come to me now, I am learning to sit back in my chair, to wrap my hands around the coffee mug and stare out into the dark wintry morning beyond the windows and to wait. Something will come. After all, something has always come. Not because I have demanded it. Not because I have bargained with the gods for it. Not because I am strong-willed and dedicated. Not because anyone else in the world cares if I am writing or not. And certainly not because I arrived on the planet infused with greatness. It has arrived for as many years as it has because I have been open to it, because I wanted it badly enough to wait until it arrived: hours, days, years. Maybe it arrives some mornings because I wouldn't know who I was without it, because it's my oldest habit, my most faithful vice or virtue. And now I am learning, thanks to a cat, the joy of sitting in the largesse of emptiness, in anticipation of an arrival.

photo by Anne Caston

IN MY DREAM OF THE END-OF-DAYS

 

I am alone in a deep ravine, standing before a towering wall of layered stone. Before me is recorded Time – Rock-Time. Geologic time.  At my back, the End-of-Time:  an ink-black sky where far-off stars flare, then fall through deep space, leaving behind a comet’s-tail of debris – a smear of light.

Like a blind man reading his world, I put out my hands to the great wall, fingering what lies before me, trying to discern what each remnant, each layer, signifies.

 Here, I say, is where dinosaurs walked;  mammoth and mastodon, here.

I move my fingers farther up the ledge: here was fire, and here was water, a great flood; here, a tectonic shift. 

But where, in geologic time, did we exist?

I search, higher and higher.  Midway up the wall: a chalky smudge – all that remains of the great cities of men, of kings and kingdoms, of symphonies and books, museums, and monuments to the greatness and the evil of which we were capable.

Like some last Kilroy, I dip a fingertip into the thin rim of chalk; I scrawl on the stony face of that wall, We were here.

I turn, ready to step from my place in it all, ready to enter at last the End-of-Time.  God-time.  Not-time.  And all its stars.

 

I HAVE A DARKNESS IN ME. ALSO A DEATH. ALSO A PIN-PRICK OF LIGHT.

 

           

Fall, 1980:

I am called to the docks when my shift is done at 7:00 a.m.  The fisherman of Glory have netted a seabird and there it lies, wings spread, on its back - a great white cross - the Royal Southern Albatross, dumped on the deck among the morning's first catch, the only unmoving thing among the lesser finny creatures still gill-gasping and thrashing in the wretched blue air of the morning.  For forty minutes it has lain thus, dead-center of the catch, circled by the crew who, in fear, refuse to touch it or anything else that's come up in the net.

Roberto, who sent for me, is furiously crossing himself - Father, Son, and Holy Ghost -  as he crossed himself at his mother's bedside when she lay dying in the hospital where I was her night-nurse. Roberto tells me he wants me to "take care of it" - and, by this, he means dispose of it - so they do not touch it and curse themselves, or their boat, or the sea-sturdy net by which it came to them.

But what do I know of the sea and its birds, or the superstitions of men, or why the tragic dead appear to us, as they do, under the bluest sky, on the most ordinary day of our lives?

Maybe it is the way of a net that it does not discriminate between the good and the wronged, that when we cast it into the sea in hopes of a good catch, it brings us both the day's food and the fallen, places it all at our feet like this, leaves the gore - and the glory of it - to men. Maybe this bird is a test or a sign of some kind, far north of its home waters in South America. Maybe the dead bird just is, no reason for it at all, no sense or nonsense in it.  Maybe nothing more than hunger drove him here.

Some petty thing in me wants to snap at Roberto this morning. Maybe because I am just weary after working all night among the sick and infirm and dying.  Maybe because he summoned me with an urgency that I believed meant life-or-death. I want to tell him to "take care of it" himself, to lift it, to hold it against his heart, to accept it for what it is, then to surrender it again to the sea.  But what are the odds he could manage this after he could not lift his dying mother, not once, refusing even to take her hand in his or to kiss her brow, preferring instead to send her - body and soul - unblemished to God after the priest had administered Last Rites?

But this would be cruel of me, and the men are clearly troubled.  So I squint up at the sun and the unyielding blue of the sky overhead.  I hear the sea slapping against the hull of Glory and I hear the cries of gulls, searching for food.  I hear the early-morning business talk of fishermen on the docks.  I feel a shiver rising in me in the morning chill and the damp briny air.

When there is no longer a way to avoid it, I kneel to the deck among the fallen scales and the fins and gills and the other still-troubled things of the sea.  I try not to think of their struggles, these fish, of how to be in air when what they know is the sea.  I lift the great creature of the air as I sometimes lift my sleeping son: staggering under the sudden weight of him, murmuring to the head slumped against my collar bone, Shhh.  It's all right now.  Back to sleep. . . . 

I bless the bird for the long sea-journey he is about to take, the slow sinking, the sea-change by which he will be utterly undone, and I tip him backwards into the sea. And while he drifts away, his great wings sinking last, I bless the waves that carry the broken cross of his body away, bless too all the creatures of the sea and the day's dying catch on the deck.  I bless the blank blue face of the sky and the knotted net that brought the bird up again from the deep.  And for good measure, before I go, I bless this boat and the men who stand here, heads down, grateful and ashamed, unable to look up at me, though my white dress glitters and sparkles from the bright cast-off scales as I stand here before them, spangled with sun, on the splintered deck of Glory.

 

photo courtesy of Judy Ledbetter 

 

 

WHAT I WANT TO HEAR, JUST ONCE. . . .

 

Thanks for bringing me into the world, Mom: you are the night-light in a dark and scary world. 

Mom, you made mine the happiest childhood ever.

Why, I think freckles and a pale complexion are beautiful. 

Oh, here, let me get that for you. 

You have changed my life for the better. 

You rescued me from bachelorhood. 

I will be there for you.

You were my first.  Really.  You were. 

No way do you have eleven grandchildren!

No, I'll scoop the cat-box.

Merry Christmas, darling, and doesn't Aruba look tiny from way up here?

Let's stay an extra week if you like.

Beach hut or condo? Diamonds or pearls?

Want to have some torrid make-up sex now?

I think you look hot in flannel.

You haven't aged a day.

You're married to THAT man? For sixteen years? Really?

No, this year I'll do all the Christmas shopping.

I'll wrap the gifts and mail them out.

Put your feet up and let me get you a glass of something bubbly.

Shall I make dinner for you tonight?

What movie do you want to see?

I scooped the cat-box.

I picked up the dry-cleaning on my way home.

I'll run you a bath and turn down the sheets.

Truffles and a chick-flick tonight, just for you, babe. 

Let's go to IKEA and buy you some new bookcases today; I will assemble them, and I'll follow the directions.

Then, let's have some friends over for a cookout.

Wow. That light WAS red.

You're right again.

I mean always.

I'm a better person for having married you.

No, really; I want to hear what you think.

That book you wrote changed my life.

For your birthday this year, a Mercedes Benz AND roadside assistance.  I meant roadside assistants:  meet Ramon and his cousin, Julio.

Why yes, they were Chippendales.

I'll take the middle seat on the plane this time.

I left the Blackberry at home tonight; let's sit close and hold hands.

Why don't we eat by candlelight?

Your students all speak so highly of you. Your colleagues think you're wonderful.

This is your lucky day.

No, your butt doesn't look big in that dress.

I'm the luckiest man in the room.

Red roses.  Just because.

This year, I'm throwing a birthday bash for you.

I'm inviting your friends and hiring a band.

I'd love to dance with you.

 

AN EVENING WITH THE MOUSE

 

    Not the Mickey.  The Chuck.  As in Chuck E. Cheese, the big gray mouse who sports a bright purple tee-shirt and a baseball cap.  Mouse with a game arcade, lots of really bad pizza, and hundreds of running, screaming, tantrum-throwing children – mostly under the age of six.

            The decibel level in here rivals a heavy-metal concert.  And speaking of heavy-metal and industrial drums, I happen to be guarding the winning cups for my granddaughters at a table across the aisle from Guitar Hero, an arcade game which features a large, animated screen where an industrial band is performing for virtual convicts in white- and gray-striped prison pajamas. At the moment, two sweet-faced sisters are manning the two interactive guitars while their younger brother looks on in wonder from the sidelines and their young mother gives them instructions.  The only on-screen instructions to the wanna-be rockers are found in a smallish box near the top of the screen:  Don't fret; strum.  Beginner's mode.  And the song  they are rocking-out to just now?  "Hit Me With Your Best Shot."  Lots of that - hitting - going on in here too.  The little boys only know that they're friends, apparently, if they can slug each other with all their might.

            Next to them, my two-year-old granddaughter, Whitney, is feeding a gold coin to the Big Bass Wheel Pro arcade game which, all evening, has returned – to even the most skilled players – only 2 to 3 tickets.  The good thing about a two-year-old though is how she is equally happy with one ticket as she is with ten or twenty.  That is how young she still is.  How wonder-filled.  Not far away, her big sister, Haley, is torpedoing ships with great gusto from the submarine Sea Wolf.  She brings back to the table an impressive string of tickets for her "winning cup" and then runs right back off to her Papaw to ride the big white horse in the Derby game over in the Toddlers' section.  In front of her: the track and the heads and rumps of other virtual horses against whom her horse competes.

            In the far back of the General Admission tables, where we sit, is the section of specially-reserved tables for the birthday party children.  They have a stage and a larger-than-life stuffed version of The Mouse.  They have a video booth where they can watch themselves dance and make faces at themselves.  They have a big cake and get a visit, every hour, from The Mouse himself: someone dressed in a big gray mouse costume who waves and moves among the birthday party children, giving them high-fives and hugs and posing with the children for their parents' cameras.  Big smiles and excitement all around.

            The children in our section want to hug The Mouse too, but they are not "allowed."  One mop-headed toddler has to be carried away by his mother who seems weary and distracted, uninterested in the moppet's sadness.  She plops the boy on his father's lap and goes for a refill of her diet soda; the boy's father continues texting someone and tells the boy to "shut up."  The boy does, but his eyes are still following the big mouse around the back of the room.  Even in a children's paradise such as this, there is privilege and hierarchy, permission and denial.  Haves and have-nots.  Not that the boy yet understands this.  But he will, in time; he will.

            Outside, the sky has gone stormy and, across the parking lot, both flags atop the Texas Roadhouse are flying perpendicular to their flagpoles.  Hurricane Irene is moving up the coast.  Not that we have much to fear, inland, except maybe the amping-up of the usual high winds, hard rain, and flooding that we are growing accustomed to here in Central Pennsylvania.  But we have become a sort of "tornado alley" in the last two years – 3 of them so far this year – so we are learning to keep a watchful eye on the wind, even as the winning cups fill with tickets, then overrun their plastic rims in that "my-cup-runneth-over" way that they do.

            When all the gold tokens have been spent in the arcade, when all the games have been played and replayed, when the tickets are gathered up and cashed in, there will be prizes to select and carry home.  Small treasures for the children.  Keepsakes.  Departing gifts from The Mouse and all his weary, faithful minions.

 

photo courtesy of photos.com

 

THE HART

        Early October and the leaves were already long-gone to orange and gold, already falling from the old oaks and maples, the air chilly, mornings damp with low-lying fog and mist.  I'd soon be needing more than a wool sweater for morning walks.  The long field I had to cross to enter the woods was nothing by then but rough stubble and thorns, brown, a no-man's land, and I'd taken to wearing boots in the last few weeks so my walk to the woods and back would be less miserable, so I wouldn't have to spend half an hour after I got home again picking prickly stubble from my socks.

A thick mist lingered wetly at the wood's edge that October morning when I'd headed for the solitude of the woods, my heavy wool sweater growing heavier, and clammy from the damp air.  Once I'd entered the trees though, the discomfort of the crossing lifted.  The deep woods always smelled faintly sweet, like bark and dirt and rot.  Like things falling back to their most basic elements.

Without thinking, I'd entered the tree-line that morning by the old post that marked where the property ended, and had turned immediately to the left, picking my way through thick underbrush and fallen limbs to a clearing where I knew a wide  stump squatted beside a creek-bed. Cold water trickled in it and made its crooked way around large rocks and fallen tree limbs.  It didn't matter to me where it had come from, that icy water, or where it was heading.  I wanted to sit a while at its muddy edge and watch, mindlessly, as it made its way from here to there.  

In those first long months after my husband had packed his things and moved out – moved on – it had seemed easier to be alone deep in the woods than to be among others; easier to be solitary and silent than to be among sympathetic friends who didn't know how to help me or what to say to pull me past the ache of failure and sorrow that seemed never to lift.  In that wood, I could be out of sight of curious neighbors.  Away from well-meaning friends who were trying to set me up on blind dates with their bachelor cousins or uncles or brothers or widowed fathers.  Away from my stunned, confused children for whom I had no way of explaining where their father had gone or the terrible turn our lives had taken.  

One morning, a dog – a hay-colored retriever – had come to drink from the slow-running creek while I sat on the old stump thinking – or trying not to think. He'd dropped his yellow head and had lapped loudly, greedily, with his long pink tongue.  Though I sat still, though I hadn't moved or shifted or even exhaled, he suddenly raised his head, ears lifted, and looked at me.  Maybe that was how long it had taken for my scent to reach him – that fragrance of damp wool and shampoo.  Or maybe he'd been startled by the sharp tang of late apples and cinnamon that still lingered on my hands and fingers from the morning's apple-peeling and canning.

Whatever had alerted him, I'd had enough time in those few seconds to see clearly  the drops of water that hung, suspended, in the fine hairs of his muzzle.  I was stunned, as if it were the first time I'd seen such a small detail so clearly.  And then he turned and trotted off again in the direction from which he'd come.

There had been rumors in town of a feral dog pack roaming the fields and woods, but the animal I saw that morning hadn't been thin or ragged and he'd been alone, not in a pack. He had been one of only three animals I'd ever encountered in those morning woods.  Once, there'd been a raccoon who'd stood up on hind legs and chittered madly at me and swayed menacingly then, seeing I wasn't to be frightened away by his fussing, he had dropped to all fours and waddled off again.  Another morning, a small white opossum ambled into the clearing; it so much resembled a large rat I'd gasped and stood up, stumbling backwards in fright.  The opossum hadn't seemed to give me much thought as it nosed around in the leaves and twigs.  Backing up and moving forward. Backwards and forwards, over and over, his pink snout to the ground. He looked comical, like a wind-up toy, not a real animal.  Then he, too had snuffled his way into the underbrush again and was gone.  He'd seemed impossibly white and out of place in that dark, mossy, lichen-riddled place: a little pink-eyed ghost, popping in to root among the fallen leaves for grubs and bugs.

I knew there were also deer nearby but I'd never seen them.  A tree grew crookedly at the edge of the property – a gnarled tree, split and charry still from an old lightning-strike – and sometimes, after strong winds or a thunderstorm storm had shaken the tree, small hard apples would lie in heaps beneath those twisted boughs.  I always left apples from that tree to rot because they'd have made a poor applesauce or cobbler, hard and sour as they were.  Not a one would have been sweet enough to eat.  The deer though, in their hunger, had arrived soundlessly in the twilight – one, two, sometimes many at a time – to gorge themselves on the windfall apples.  I knew because I'd seen the tamped-down grasses where they'd stood eating and the white fleshy apple cores they'd dropped.  I'd seen the hoof-prints they'd left behind when they walked again across the clearing and vanished.

But the animal that followed me as I made my way homeward, out of the woods that October morning, was noisy and crashing, staggering forward like a wild, drunken thing, out of the tree-line and into the open field behind me.  I heard it, then turned and saw it for what it was: a gray-brown deer, swaying, looking back at me.  I don't know how long it took before it registered on me that the deer was a doe, or that she stood there with an arrow through her throat, pink foam frothing around the bright silver shaft.  By the time I saw her clear, she charged away again along the tree-line, leaping with a speed that belied a wound so devastating. I stood there, unmoving, blinking hard, not quite believing I'd seen what I had seen.

She must have been moving, by then, out of adrenalin and sheer terror.

                            * * * * *

A hart, my grandmother had called that large-antlered stag we'd come upon suddenly in a narrow clearing in the forest where we'd taken a shortcut on our walk to the store.  When the stag had turned solemnly and walked back into the trees, she'd told me the story of Cernunnos, an Irish legend, a tale in which a lone stag would appear and disappear again at the edge of a haunted wood.  A mythic creature, a being "outside of time."  A hart who shifted its shape from an antlered man to a stag.  An ageless creature who moved with ease between the Land of the Dead and the Land of the Living. When he appeared, it was a message.  A sign.

Of what, I'd asked her excitably then, a sign of what?  

But she had grown quiet and strange by then, saying only that the one for whom the sign was intended would know what it meant.  She had always been given to odd beliefs, my grandmother, a woman with a penchant for seeing signs and portents in every simple thing:  tangled twine on a pathway meant a traveler would become lost; two sticks laid across each other at a crossroads meant that there would be quarrels among friends and an unmendable rift; birds flying, break-neck, into windows were a sign that some devastation was coming.  I'd learned to take most of what my grandmother told me as a kind of pleasant fiction, a story-teller's way of explaining the inexplicable.  Of giving small things significance.  Something by which to amuse an easily-amused granddaughter.

                            * * * * *

And yet, years later, that October morning, a deer had appeared out of nowhere, had stepped out of the mist, and had stood in front of me. She'd seemed, in that moment, a doppelganger, a mirror-image.  For long seconds we stood like that, a plain little doe with a steely arrow lodged in her throat facing a woman gone almost mute.

No one had seemed able tell me why my voice was failing, not the white-coated doctors in the halls of medicine, not the specialists they'd sent me to, not the old women  among whom I lived who'd offered me their best broths, brought me herbs and homemade poultices to soothe the raw, wrecked throat and the ruined vocal cords. 

Back then, I wouldn't have been able to tell anyone of that morning in the field, much less say what I'd felt when the doe passed into view, halted before me, the arrow protruding from her throat, then leapt furiously away again.  I remember putting my hand to my throat.  I remember the thunder of her arrival and the thunder of her departure.  I remember seeing her gray flanks disappear as she reentered heavy mists far down the field in which I stood.  I remember also the rise of hot anger in me when the huntsman with his heavy bow had stepped from the woods, following her trail: a man hunting out of season, a man who'd shot a doe – a female – which was forbidden around those parts, even during hunting season.  

Only a coward would shoot a doe; a doe might well have had a young fawn or two tucked into a bed of leaves somewhere in the forest.

He looked up and, seeing me there, briefly lowered his bow. But when I said not a word, when I stood there, flushing bright with anger, one hand at my throat, he looked again at the ground and found something that seemed more interesting than the silent woman who stood in a cleared field before him – perhaps crushed stubble where the doe had thrashed her way into the field, or a blood trail, or the distinctive curve of hooves' in the soft ground – and he set out again, in the direction where she had bounded away.  

How far could a thing, thus stricken, run?

                            * * * * *

In my dreams of the hart, she turns back into the forest and makes her way, staggering, to some safe place, to the mud bank of that stream where, finally, her forelegs give way and she kneels on the leafy ground, a supplicant, a penitent at the water's edge.  The hind legs tremble and give way too until the soft white underbelly lies full-length along the muddy, leaf-strewn ground.  The silky head sinks to the marsh, the wild light of terror or of pain flickering and going out, the jaw going slack, the soft ears no longer flicking.

In the dream, no other animals, large or small, devour her; neither does she fall to rot and stench, the soft hide stiffening.  In the dream, the huntsman does not find her or take her body.  As I drift some nights now toward sleep, she also sleeps and, in time, the arrow snaps and falls through and the wound in her throat closes and she quickens and wrenches herself upright and stumbles on unsteady legs, regaining her footing. She lifts her head and steps silently back through the dense forest and vanishes.

In the dream, I am standing again in that stubbled field when she steps forward, out of a wet morning fog, when she approaches me again, so close this time that I can see the white throat and the tender place where the arrow pierced her, the slight scar of it that remains, so close I can put out my hand and almost touch her.  In the dream, I always understand, I always know what she means; the sign of her comes clear.  When I wake again, I don't remember what it is that I knew in the dream.  When I waken, she is always vanishing again, moving back through the mists, back through the field of time, a phantom, a lost sign, a deep and unfathomable silence.

photo courtesy of photos.com

 

THE PROPER TERMINOLOGY MUST, AT ALL TIMES BE EMPLOYED

 

            My husband does not "fart."  He out-gases. That is his word, as in, "I left the plane quickly because I feared what might be happening to that cat stowed underneath my seat after five hours of my out-gassing."

            Out-gassing may very well be a polite euphemism, as I believed in the early years of our marriage, but I have come to see the particular accuracy of his term.  There is a seismic quality to his flatulence, a loud dark force pushed up from a stewy place, carrying with it the pruney sulfurs of the lower intestine, a foul attar which emanates, then slowly seeps outward  into the far four corners of whatever room he's in: an ill wind traveling north/south/east/west.

            Sometimes shopping in the grocery store, making our slow way through the bright-lit aisles of pickled asparagus and garlic-stuffed olives, past the sanitary napkins and adult diapers, or in the crowded corridors where last winter's coats sag, half- priced, clearanced, on their cheerless plastic hangers, he'll lean in to me and mutter with an embarrassed urgency, "You should move.  Right away."  I give him my most stern look of disgust and roll my eyes, and then I quickly push the carriage on its stubborn rubber casters into another aisle where he will join me in a few minutes, looking sheepish and relieved.  Relieved, that is, until we hear, one aisle over, a woman's anguished voice,

            "Ack!  God in heaven!  What IS that smell?" and after the briefest pause, her snarl of  "Henry, did you fart?"  The way she says that word, in a voice half-hiss and half revulsion, makes my husband suddenly pink up, like an embarrassed schoolboy.  It makes me laugh.  I have to cover my mouth with both hands, sputtering and choking back laughter, trying to shove it down until we are least out of hearing-range of that highly-offended woman and poor falsely-accused Henry. 

            There is no way to say that word, to inflect it or solemnize it, so it isn't funny.

                                        * * * * *

            It takes certain fortitude for a woman to live with a man.  A gassy man.  A man with neither a sensitive nose nor a sense of timing.  Southern women, out of a great and deep, long-suffering love, learn to endure, to persevere.  We have been trained for this by brothers and fathers who seem also to have been born with these devastating defects of the digestive system.  As we grow into young womanhood, we discover to our horror that the polite, comely young men whom we dated, were engaged to, and married, are suddenly little more than fierce bags of gas, men who spend many daylight hours burping into their fists or inventing contests among themselves where they suck in great gulps of air or take in tankards of yeasty beer and then compete to see who can burp out the alphabet. The man who gets farther down the alphabet wins and the victor then thrusts his arms up and runs in tight circles in the yard and is proclaimed, by his fellow apes,  Champion of the Universe or The King of Swill. 

            They'll do this, evening after evening, holiday after holiday, until finally someone unseats the reigning champion.  This is what evolution has led us to.

            By night, these charmers snore and wheeze and grind their teeth.  They snort and mumble in their sleep and their stomachs grumble like great bears at the end of a long hibernation. All these, however, are merely practice, a warm-up for the real show:  the night farts.  These can be loud or silent.  They can lurk a long time under your 600-count Egyptian cotton sheets or the quilt passed down to you by your grandmother. But no matter the quality of the covering, sooner or later the odor seeps outwards from some exit hump and takes over the territory you believed, naively, was yours.  By sunup, a wise woman will have learned to make her escape from the bedroom before his faithful, early-morning's long, low rumble of intestinal thunder banishes the scent of last evening's vanilla-scented candles into some outer early morning darkness elsewhere in the house.  The husband, however, will go on, snoozing right on through it, this foul alarm, oblivious to the toxic fog that hangs now, like a pall, over the marriage bed.

                                         * * * * *

            I cannot attest to the training of girls who have been reared in the North, but Southern girls are taught, in early childhood, that they must master all body noises.  Burps and farts are top of the list.  There are strategies for this, from what NOT to include in your diet to how to not allow any passage from the body into the outer world.  Stomach cramps are a minor by-product of such training.  Strategies.  Accommodations.  This is a girl's training.  This is her life, this mindfulness, this self-control.

            Sneezes are a close third, especially the explosive ones, and a girl will practice many years to master the fine art of the delicate, high-pitched a-chew and its purposeful placement into a tissue or handkerchief.   Snot, at all costs, must be kept inside the nostrils.  Daubing at the nose after sneezing is an effective strategy which will prevent great wads of snot from fouling Grandmother's lace-edged linen handkerchiefs, those practical fabric inheritances which can be laundered and handed down for many generations yet to come in a family for which silver service is not an option.

             Waste not; want not.

            The sinus-demolishing silent sneeze is altogether another art and few of us ever master it, despite our best attempts.  The sheer force of it almost pushes the eyeballs from their orbital sockets.  Even more difficult to carry off with a full bladder.  Something somewhere has to give, after all.

                                           * * * * *

            Somewhere along the way, in the socialization instruction, ten-year-old girls are taught to use the proper terminology for seismic body events instead of the "boy-words" commonly used by our brothers and close male cousins.  Burping and farting give way, respectively, to belching and flatulence.  In an odd turn of manners, sneezing remains the same, but one learns rather quickly to never, ever use the word snot.  The proper term is mucus or sinus drainage.  And boogers are what your grandfather extracts from his great hairy nostrils and not to be mentioned at all.

            I do not believe belching sounds any more respectable than burping, and flatulence sounds absurd.  It is impossible to say, over tea with friends at the Garden Club, "I am a bit flatulent today," and be taken for anything but a yokel or imbecile.

            Among the proper terms for body parts themselves are bosoms not titties or tatas, and penis instead of wiener or wee-wee.  Likewise, vagina is the anatomical term, not hoo-hoo, though I cannot, to this day, imagine any circumstance under which the word vagina should be used publicly.  Imagine a woman's horror – her feet mid-air, heels propped awkwardly in the cold steel stirrups, toes-up, her body barely covered by a scant paper sheet – should her gynecologist suddenly up and announce as he squeezes the cold, gooey lubricant onto two gloved forefingers, "I am now going to examine your vagina."  

            And never should there be an occasion in which the word, vagina, would come up in the confessional between you and your priest, as in "Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned with my vagina."  It is even less likely that your husband will find an occasion in which it will be necessary to mention the word by name when he is in the throes of passion or in any way otherwise engaged in the vicinity.

                                         * * * * *

            In 1963, as most of my friends and I were entering fifth grade and some of us were deemed to be already approaching the years of menstruation and fertility, the Jacksonville Board of Education mandated that "Sex Education" would now be a formal part of our schooling.  Fifth-grade boys were whisked off to the gym to receive instruction from their coaches – in retrospect, not a wise choice for those boys – as we girls were lined up and marched off, single-file, to the cafeteria where we came under the fierce instruction of the school nurse, Miss Bettina Murske, a robust woman with fine dark hair on her upper lip and a deep, man-like voice, a spinster who had dedicated her life to elementary school nursing and who, now, reluctantly would assume the task of properly educating the 11-year-old girls at Hyde Park Elementary in regards to puberty and menstruation and copulation and gestation and child birth.

            We watched the filmstrip on the school's only working projector which was narrated by someone who sounded suspiciously like Walter Cronkite who, in a happy, isn't-this-great kind of voice claimed that we were about to embark upon the most exciting adventure of our lives:  puberty.   The filmstrip itself consisted only of pen-and-ink outline drawings of the female body from the neck to the knees.  The illustrator had given her well-developed, symmetrical breasts, including larger-than-life nipples, and a tiny pear-shaped womb with each fallopian tube – one on the right and one on the left side – curling under into a lazy "C" and culminating in ovaries which were filled with little black dots.  The womb trickled off, at the base, into a thin tunnel-like opening whose terminus was obscured by what appeared to be a mass of tiny curly hairs penned in: pubic hair, the narrator instructed in his cheery voice.  Likewise, a curly mass of hair seemed to be growing in both her underarms.  He never really addressed the underarm hair so we all assumed, which seemed logical, that pubic hair also would grow under our arms.  Once we learned what the pubis was, it seemed rather horrifying.

            We looked dumbly from the screen to each other. This was the equipment we would need for this "great adventure" we were embarking upon?  Maybe we could just stay home with our smooth, hairless bodies and continue on with our unadventurous lives. . . .

            The film cut away to a close-up of the womb and the little dots in the ovaries suddenly became small round circles:  "…ovum, from the Latin, for eggs."  That part I got right away because I had gathered eggs before at my grandfather's place in Arkansas and understood that we were like hens in that way: we would produce eggs from that opening, eggs slick with blood and mucus.   We would put them into a bucket once a month, take them to the hose outside to rinse the crud from them, and then carry them indoors to the refrigerator. But then what would become of them? Surely we would not scramble them up for breakfast or make a soufflé of them. 

            I had stopped paying close attention to the film by then, trying to visualize the experience so I missed whatever instruction was given between when the ovum was defined and how the baby starts forming inside the woman's body.  That, apparently, was the critical information.

            I vaguely recall words like penis, which I already knew, and ejaculation and fetus,  which I did not know before the instruction, but I had nothing to attach to the words' significance in regards to the female body and could not, on my own, imagine what role a penis or its ejaculation - whatever that was - had to do with the creation of a fetus inside the body. And when the narrator said this was the "miracle of procreation," I told myself it was irrelevant at the moment and I would figure it all out when the time came, meaning when I decided one day far, far off, that I wanted to have my own children.  What I did register, at that moment, was the look of horror and disgust that had settled on my classmates' faces. 

            The illustrations were bad enough, particularly the one that showed the baby, head-down inside the area where the pubic hair used to be, "being pushed into the world."  Pushed?  Since I knew a doctor had to be present at the birth, I assumed he would be pushing on me to get the baby out, but the illustration didn't show this.  Nevertheless, in that moment, I decided I would push him right back if he put his pushy mitts on me.  Adoption was looking like a viable option.

            At last, the filmstrip ran down to its conclusion and the happy, annoying music and exuberant voice of the narrator trickled off again to the sound of the end of the filmstrip thwapping against the full spool.  Miss Murske had stepped out shortly after the film had begun, so we sat there in the still-darkened cafeteria, smelling the cafeteria odors of cleaning solvent and hot lunches, while the film slapped the spool over and over.  Not a one of us could move.  Not a one of us could speak. 

            Finally, she returned, flipping on the too-bright lights, and she wound the film backwards again onto the empty spool.  When it finished, all ready to go again for all the fifth grade girls who would follow us in years to come, we lined up and walked back to our classrooms, to sit again among the boys who were looking very satisfied, who eyed us suddenly as if we were a prank they wanted to play.  We went in with our heads down, flushed and confused, back to our assigned seats and we did not look again at the boys that day or for many days to come.  Nor did we speak to them of what had happened in the dark cafeteria among girls nor ask them, ever, what had transpired in the gymnasium.  But it was clear to me that they were going to get the better deal of whatever happened in puberty and in life and that sex had something to do with it, and childbirth.  All that afternoon, with the slapping sound of the filmstrip still ghosting in my head, I resolved  never to have anything to do with boys or sex or childbirth.  And I believe, looking back now, that was the actual lesson we were being taught.

 

 

 

 photo courtesy of photos.com

The Book of Splendor

 

    On notebooks – my friend Derick always carries one: a hefty black sketchbook full of well-bound blank pages of substantial weight.  And another friend, when traveling, likes this kind of notebook too – one, which he says, ". . .will not come apart when sand gets into it."  A durable notebook for durable words. Words that will last.  Words to be read.  Important words.  Words that can make things happen.

            And then there is my kind of notebook: flimsy, thin, with maybe a month's worth of blue-lined pages in it, bound together by wires or staples.  Sometimes by glue, because I have a deep affection for glue, for how it works so hard to hold other things together.

            I prefer a notebook that comes apart at the seams, something that can be wrecked utterly by sand and dew, by rainwater and ferny matter, by the weeds I so often sit among to write in it.  I like opening a little book of pages and getting a fragrance of wood-smoke and rich loam, that up-rush of where I have been before. 

            What I understand about my words, even the moments in which something profound may surface in them, is how rightfully they belong on paper that tatters and frays and wears thin at the edges.  On something that falls apart.  Something that will not be preserved; something falling, under the stern hand of time, easily back to its most basic matter.

            All things, it is said, have lives and half-lives; all things are nuclear at their center, and I believe that, don't I?  Why put all the words I cannot speak aloud into books like these, let them live out their lives and half-lives as I do, let them fall again into nothingness?

                                                            ~

            It is a noisy, noisy world.  Let my gift to it be silence.

                                                            ~

            There was a time I wanted nothing more than to finish a sentence – just one – before someone started talking over me.  It seemed, to me, so little to ask, and such a great imposition for those around me.

            After a time, I brought only my silence to the table, to the conversation, the conference, the meeting, the party.  Why wreck further a half-wrecked heart?  The sorrow would do you in.

                                                            ~

            As with any exile, I learned in time to make a country, a homeland, of silence in which I could pitch my tent in peace.  I became its sea and its vessels, the rich cargo in every dark hold.  I became its mist-shrouded mountain peak and its valley of fog.  I became its meadow of children playing and its moon's littlest white fang, the prodigal and the return, the squandered inheritance and the fatted calf, being readied for slaughter.

            I have whole mornings now sitting alone on a sunny stoop, filling with sun.  What must passersby think of that woman in her flour-dusted apron sitting there, eyes closed, taking in the sun? Assuming they even see her at all.

            I think living in a kingdom of silence, I might also have become invisible.  Most days it seems that way.  Not a great loss to the world; not a great loss to me.

            Still, is it reasonable to be so startled when some stranger says, good morning or a friend writes, "a sweet and cunning smile" as he takes down the spill of your words?

                                                            ~

           I am The Fool in a deck of cards: The Querent, The Watcher, The One-Whose-Number-Is-Naught.

            Traditionally, the Major Arcana in Tarot cards are numbered with Roman Numerals.  The Fool is numbered with a zero, one of the Arabic Numerals.  When read aloud, however, the number is not read as "zero," rather it is read as "naught," – from the Old English root nauht, nāwiht, a word that translates as "nothing, a cipher (zero)" – meaning it has no number in a set sequence of numbers, but moves around always, at will, and cannot be pinned down. Slippery, mutable, but without guile or intent.

            But when Fool shows up, it is always to be the silent provocateur, to be the question posed. And then to vanish again.

 

                                                            ~

 

            So what is Fool's question today?  And to whom?

 

                                                            ~

 

    What tongue is spoken at the river's mouth?

 

    On what muddy bank does the ferryman wait and how many coins for the passage?

 

    Where is the long-lost map to the world?

 

    Who folded time and put it in its deep closet?

 

    Whose Voice speaks from the whirlwind?

 

    Is silence a sin or a virtue? 

 

    Is God just "holding His tongue," afraid of what might come out next?

 

    When God spoke the word gazelle and the horned and hooved thing of it leapt into being on the hot savannah, when He also spoke the word lion and it arrived there, golden-eyed, how long did the two of them stand there in wonder, stunned, and how long before hunger occurred to one and terror to the other?

                                                 ~

My friend, I am writing The Book of Splendor.  You are in its pages.  The chapter and verse of you.  The body and blood.  The smallest hosannah of you.    

 

 

A Mother's Moment: Memorial Day, 2011

   

Today is parade day in our small town.  It's an unusual parade, wholly unlike the big fanfares of the more familiar parades of the country (Macy's, Mardi Gras, St. Patrick's Day) with their floats and giant balloon figures and flying dirigibles and confetti-throwing crowds.  Our parade is home-grown and no one would travel very far to see it, much less to film it.  Of this I am certain.  Still, several days before the holiday weekend, the town puts up American flags along Main Street and every front yard along the parade route sports little flags on wooden poles.  We're in a good place for flying flags, given how the wind in Central Pennsylvania seems to ceaselessly blow and bluster.  And how those little flags love the wind, snapping and fluttering like bright little red-white-and-blue beauties up and down the town's streets. 

At the town's center last week, a new flag was unfolded ceremoniously and sent up the tall metal pole in celebration of the big event while local citizens and a few white-haired veterans stood and stared skyward, starting in earnest this weekend's remembrance of those who served this country once, both its living and its dead veterans.  Though it seems strange to think of it this way, especially after so many years have passed, those "veterans" include me and two of my sons and also my daughter, all of whom served in the Armed Forces at one time.  My time came during the Viet Nam War, though I did not go to war myself.  My sons' and daughter's time was more recent, sending them to places far-off as Korea and Bosnia, to Iraq and Afghanistan. 

I couldn't bring myself to attend the town parade last Memorial Day because my middle son – an Army medic – was still in Afghanistan, and I was still deep in the throes of a mother's terror over whether or not he would make it home intact.  There are some things a mother should not be asked to do: going to a memorial celebration while a son is still on the battlefront is one of them. This year, however, my son is out of the battle zones and he did come home intact to his family.  So I believe I will bear up being roadside when the Colors march down the street today.  That is what I tell myself anyway.

There are a lot of veterans in our little town and in the outlying townships: Main Street sports the newly-renovated house of the local Palmyra VFW and, at the other end of Campbelltown Road (the street on which we live), there is a small, squat concrete block building where the members of Campbelltown's American Legion  meets and hosts crab dinners and cookouts and, on occasion, pancake breakfasts for the community.  Out in back, there is a large, shaded covered picnic area where the barbeque pits smoke all weekend and send out all manner of delicious aromas into the streets: an invitation which begs, like the sign out front, to Come on by and join us for some good eats.  Free to all.  

Every time a local young man or woman dies in the fighting anywhere in the world, that old flag drops down to half-mast, lowered by another one who has been there – and by "there," I mean "in uniform while the country is at war."  The elderly veteran who is assigned to lower the flag, lowers it slowly, releasing that rope slowly, hand over hand.  And when he is done with his duty, when Old Glory hangs soulfully at half-mast, he lowers his head and stands in silence for a moment too.  I have seen him make this gesture of respect more times than I like to admit – for those who served, for the one who has died, one who is more to these old soldiers than just that catch-all phrase "those who serve" because these who served and died are personal to the men who gather here:  their people, their neighbors and neighbors' children, the children who waved at them each cold morning as they drove by the school bus stop on their way to jobs in town, the boys and girls who rode their bicycles recklessly against traffic, the fishing-pole-toting, mischief-making little fellows who grew up and put on uniforms and went off to fight in somebody else's war. 

Last week, I noticed a new sign in front of the old building, a sign that is making its way to the front lawns of other homes and small shops in our town:  For Sale.  Even I know you can buy and sell a building, even an ugly one like this, but what happens to the heart of it, to those who have gathered there and made something meaningful for themselves and others?  What of their rituals and those of us who have come to care for them?  

Because I am a newcomer to this area, the old Campbelltown American Legion building has become something of a landmark for me, sitting on its corner, tacky-looking even in a fresh coat of paint and aluminum siding, with its little well-tended beds of pansies and marigolds out front, like some old throwback to the 50s, sporting its portable billboard out front announcing the week's events – one of the few signs in town, I might add, on which not a single word is ever misspelled or wrongly-punctuated.  The for sale sign shocks me.  The Campbelltown American Legion is something that was, long before I arrived here and something I believed would be here long after I am gone.  It always astonishes me how many ways I can be wrong and about how much.

Our Memorial Day Parade closes down the two major thoroughfares and byways so everyone can safely line the streets with folding chairs and baby strollers, bringing along water bottles and waving small American flags on wooden sticks, bringing along their children who, by now, know to bring bags along for the candies that will be thrown from antique cars and fire engines. They bring along their dogs on leashes – and their toddlers are leashed or bungeed too when the necessity arises, and that necessity indeed does arrive: we have some wild little children here in Palmyra. By 9 a.m. this morning, in 84-degree weather and 80% humidity, the blockades are in place and the local police are out in force to make sure there will be no moving vehicles along the parade route except for the ones actually in the parade. 

Ian and I tag along with our oldest son and his wife and their two little girls, knowing that we will get to see our new hometown do what it does best:  make do with what it has.  This town manages to get by with enthusiasm, with a little elbow-grease, with very little real style, and with a whole lot of heart and grace.  And on Memorial Day, that means everyone who can make it turns out to stand, sit, or squat on concrete curbs along the tree-lined parade route as two police cars start to cruise down Maple Avenue, red and blue lights flashing like the business end of a good ticket-writing day.  The freshly-washed cars are followed by members of the local National Guard in their battle-dress fatigues and shined boots, marking time, standing tall, stern-faced, carrying the Colors.  Everybody, even the lame and halt, stands up when they march by with the flags: the American flag, the state flag of Pennsylvania, and some other flag which I think might have been the second flag that also flies at the Palmyra VFW.   I am, of course, wrong about not being "done in" by the uniformed color guard and the flags.  But since everyone is looking at the parade and no one is looking at me, my secrets are still my secrets.

Behind the color guard and flags are three middle-age vets carrying a long horizontal pole on which are fixed the red and gold Marines' flag, a hand-lettered sign that reads Semper Fi, and a sobering reminder: the black POW-MIA flag.  Missing in Action. The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.  Flanders Fields and all its poppies between the crosses, "row on row." That is what staggers me about flags: how they summon up again the ones who are no longer summonable and place them squarely at the center of memory. 

When the formalities of the flags are done, the antique automobiles and convertible cars drive through. On each of the vehicles' side doors is taped a piece of white poster-board on which is roughly hand-lettered (no one in this town probably ever got a "A" in penmanship) the identity of the local dignitary riding in the car:  the mayor, the town clerk, a few politicians, and two young people from the local high school who are its "speakers," whatever that means. They each smile at the crowd and give us all the infamous parade "wave," including one bearded, long-haired man in glasses who places his elbow in his hand and exaggerates a "beauty-pageant" wave for our amusement.  We laugh and wave wildly back at him, enjoying the little joke.  We take our laughs where we can get them in this small town.

After the antique automobiles, an open-bed truck cruises by with a karaoke machine and a man holding a microphone. He is doing his rendition of "Where Were You When The World Stopped Turning?"  He has a good voice, that man, and he sings on-key, which must be difficult to do from the back of a moving truck on a hot morning. Whitney, who is barely two years old now, hears the singing and looks up from her seat on the curb and she bestows on him her biggest, toothiest grin.  In turn, he half-bows to her, from the waist. Singers are special to her: her daddy sings her off to bed at night, his version of "One Tin Soldier" – the same song I sang to him when he was a little boy a long time ago. 

Then come the pack dogs - the beagles, and pit bulls, and furry mutts on leashes from the local Pets N Paws shop.  This is a big hit with the little kids too, as are the two brown horses with beautiful cowgirls and fancy saddles on their backs, horses whose rumps have been painted with the stars and stripes.  But, for the littlest ones, the real show-stopper – every time – is when someone throws a handful of candy at them from a parade car, or when some teenaged walker hands them small plastic footballs or fortune cookies, or when the fire engines come alongside them and blast their loud fire horns.  The little kids squeal with delight and run into the street to retrieve as many lollipops or hard candies as they can manage to carry back before the next car or engine comes along.

Children also like the marching band, especially the drum corps which is even noisier than they are.  Big noise and hard candy.  That is what toddlers and small children are all about.  That is what they celebrate today.

Finally, the big trucks of the city – dump trucks, landfill trucks, contractors' trucks, the street-sweeping trucks, all freshly washed and waxed - finish out the parade.  The children wave with their lollipops in hand and the drivers blow their big horns.  How children openly love the big trucks and their drivers.  And then, just like that, the excitement is over; the parade is done.

Everyone packs up lawn chairs and water bottles and sippy cups and candy bags and starts the long walk, or drive, back into the rather ordinary, small-town day that is promising, already, to be a real scorcher.  Some will have picnics or backyard barbeques; some will cool off in the water rides at Hershey Park.  Some will stay all day on their front porches, fanning themselves and drinking lemonade or sweet iced tea, talking about the weather and the heat and the crops and the old wars and who they knew once. 

As I help the girls gather up their discarded candy wrappers, I hear my son's voice behind me:  Thank you, sir, for your service to our country. I turn in time to see him shaking the hand of an elderly man. The man must have arrived when the parade was at its loudest.  He'd been quiet.  He'd spoken to no one and no one else stood with him.  I certainly hadn't heard him or seen him come up behind us.  But here he is, stoop-shouldered, weathered, wearing his Sunday best clothes and shoes and, on his head, a deep burgundy VFW hat on which is lettered in fine gold stitching:  World War II Veteran.

He'd come to see this parade, his parade, a parade where he'd been an onlooker, not standing at the center of the glory, such as it was, not celebrated, not marching among the big engines and the drums and marching band and singing and spangled flags waving.  Not waving and being waved at, not having the little children smile at him.  It strikes me that this is how it often is with those who serve this country: they do what they do without parades and flags; they do it sometimes without being seen or heralded or acknowledged for what they endure; they do it because they believe it is their duty to do what they do, and they do it alone and far from the parades; they do it all from the sidelines, and far from the day's headlines. 

Today, though, someone sees him.  Today someone turns from the pressure of the packing-up, turns from the after-parade frenzy to get out of the heat, and trying to beat the traffic out of there.  Today someone shakes his hand and thanks him and means it.

 

photo courtesy of Scott & Jenn Osborne 

 

 

 

PRESENCE: The 2009 BLOGVENTION

 

 I admit it: I follow blogs.  Lots of them. Hundreds maybe.  Following blogs is almost an addiction for me: that rush as I find a new artist's blog or design blog that I can get lost in for a few happy hours.  Even the fashion blogs are appealing to me lately, more and more, for their beautiful fabrics and designer gowns though I am troubled by those gaunt, waifish models on whom the elegant clothes are draped, girls who have become, essentially, coat hangers for the industry.        

I love blogs for their photographs and graphics. I love them for their stories and the distinctive voices of the writers. I can spend hours moving from artist's blog to artist's blog.  I am stunned and fascinated by what the young photographers are doing with photographs on the digital photography sites.  I even read the parts in between the photographs.  That is how absurdly addicted I am.  Give me anything: from "I Am A Mermaid," to "Modern Country Style," to wild-and-wacky "Jennsylvania," to the Australian blog "Third on the right," to "LifeAfterNormal," and beyond: I can spend happy hours in the company of perfect strangers.  Sometimes I click on embedded links in the blogs I follow and they take me out to other sites.  Then I'll sign up to follow those blogs too.  My inbox is crazy-clogged on Mondays with all the "new posting" notifications that come in now.  It's like Christmas every week.

So many of these bloggers have what is known in the blog world as a web presence.  By this, I mean they have established a long list of "followers."  (Followers are regular readers, like me.)  Some of these blogs have hundreds and thousands of followers.  Now, that is a presence, my friend; that is a presence.  The larger the number of followers you have, the larger your web presence is.  So they say.

As for me, I don't have a "web presence."  This is true.  What I have are 10 or 12 friends and family who read the blog faithfully – and another 10 or 12 who drop in whenever life isn't swamping them.  On a good day, a stranger accidentally drops in.             

Here's the really great thing about my lack of web presence:  these people are about 25 of the greatest readers ANY writer could have.  They email.  They leave comments.  They laugh and they cry – and actually admit they do.  A few write back with funny jokes or with funny stories or anecdotes of their own.

 When I was ill last December and in the hospital, they wrote to me – from wherever they were – to see how I was doing.  They sent notes and emailed get-well wishes.  They sent secret family recipes for bread pudding because it turns out I thrive on bread pudding when I'm sick.  (Okay, so it's all in my mind, that sense of well-being I get from a fine bowl of warm bread pudding.)  Another friend sent an email from Hawaii – with a photo of the ocean on it!  A few strangers sent good wishes.  And one former student sent me some very funny pneumonia haiku he'd written.

As I said before, I don't have a "web presence."  I know this because it was confirmed for me recently at the "2009 Blogvention" – an event I dropped in on when I was meandering around in a far city, a little bored, looking for a bit of adventure or mischief.  I was desperate enough, by noon, to head down Main Street wanting to linger a while in the little café in the local Barnes & Noble, to sip a frothy latte and flip through good books and magazines.  That was my PLAN FOR THE DAY (my PFTD) but on my way, I walked past the city auditorium where an enormous white plastic banner was twisting in the wind and which had purple capital letters painted on it which read:  2009 BLOGVENTION!!! 

Those three exclamation points sealed the deal for me.  I figured that had to be more exciting than taking the city bus around the town loop all day or sitting respectably in a bookstore and sipping frothed-milk coffees and getting all spooled-up on caffeine. So I climbed the wide front concrete steps and strolled into the auditorium lobby where a young woman sat alone at a long table. Her nametag said, "Darlene" and, below that, "Receptionist." 

Darlene was texting someone on her phone's tiny keyboard.  From the look on her face, it didn't seem like a pleasant conversation for the person on the other end.  Someone was catching hell; I was pretty certain of that. 

Darlene types, like so many young people today, with her thumbs, with over-sized thumbs which moved rapidly over the phone's small keyboard – thus distinguishing herself from other primates – and with each keystroke the long, sculpted false nails of her opposable thumbs clicked and clacked and sometimes snagged on the tiny keys and the ridges around them, making her even angrier than she already was. Darlene was a young woman given to anger: I could see that.  She'd frown and push out a great gasp of exasperation as she deleted the error and corrected the sentence or word. When she was done typing, she pushed the "send" button with what my grandmother would've called "a great vengeance."

I stepped toward the registration table in hopes that I would get there before the next texted response could arrive and make her even more fierce and impatient than she already seemed.  She spotted me and tucked the phone away in her lap.

 "Are you here for the Blogvention?" she asked and I could tell, from the way she asked, she wanted me to be there for anything BUT that.  Ask directions.  Ask for the time.  Anything else.

I nodded but, before I could say that I only wanted to sit in on a few events, not the whole convention, she started rifling through folders and piling paperwork on a clipboard.  She found a pen and shoved the whole mess at me.  I guess I must have looked confounded because she hesitated and pursed her red lips.  She sucked in a loud breath and asked was I planning to attend or not and had I already registered.

"No," I said, before she could thrust something other formidable pile of papers at me, "I just want to sit in on one or two events."

  She snarled and tore off all the papers she'd just put on the brown clipboard.

"You can get a day pass for the lectures in the main auditorium for $25.00 per day.  Is that what you want?"

 I nodded.  She waited.  I waited.  She held out her palm.  I blinked.  She waited.

"Twenty-five dollars," she repeated, slowly, emphasizing each syllable.

 I asked if I could write a check.

 "NO. You may NOT write a check.  Cash only for day passes."

So I fished out a crispy twenty dollar bill and a rumpled five dollar bill from the bottom of my purse and extended them to her. Carefully.

She retrieved a strange-looking pen from a cash box and rubbed it several times over the twenty-dollar bill. Then she held the twenty up in front of her and glared at it.  When it was apparent the bill wasn't counterfeit, she tucked it and the rumpled fiver into the beige lock-box and handed me two pieces of paper.  The first paper was a list with the main auditorium events and presentations highlighted in green marker.  The other was a map of the lobby with the public restrooms, the water fountains, and the words "front lobby" highlighted in the same neon-green marker.

 She told me where I was allowed to go and what I could attend and she spoke to me as if I were daft.  She emphasized the critical words, as if they were a threat: "You are ONLY allowed to be in the GREEN areas marked on this map.  NO classrooms and NO refreshment tables.  No ICE WATER or COFFEE or TEA.  The PUBLIC water fountains are MARKED."

 Darlene stopped then and squinted up at me and said, "And NO cookies when they are put out.  They are for blogventioneers who PAID for the FULL weekend." 

People emerged from the classrooms down the corridor and walked in groups to the lobby for refreshments.  They looked normal.  Sort of ordinary.  And by "ordinary," I mean they looked local, like others from that part of the country.  Almost as if they were all – how shall I say this? – related.  And had been for generations and generations.    They were dressed in nicely-pressed slacks and pantsuits and skirts.  They carried notebooks and portfolios bulging with papers. They wore tags on strings around their necks.  And they had that pale, punched-dough, middle-aged look to them that people get after living for many years in a place where strong drink is the main event at every social occasion.  They seemed at ease there in the lobby with each other. They knew each others' names.  They chatted in groups.  They put the delicious-looking cookies into their mouths.  They sipped from Styrofoam cups.  No one among them bent to drink from the water coolers in the lobby.  I was, apparently, the only one who had purchased a day pass.  An outsider.  An interloper. A cheap, out-of-towner, day-passer interloper.  A cheap, out-of-towner, day-passer interloper who was standing by herself, with no cookies in hand, in their town's auditorium lobby.

 Darlene cleared her throat and, when she was sure she had my attention again, she handed me a hangtag for my neck: a blank, bright neon-green nametag.  When I asked if I should write my name on it like the others who were milling about in the lobby, she just threw a crooked smile in my direction as if to say, Who cares who you are, you greentagged, day-passer? Then she retrieved the cell phone from her lap and starting reading something that had finally come in.  I moved out of range.

                                                        ~

 Blogventioneers.  More strange even than the word "conventioneers" – and slightly less respectable. It had the childish, cheesy ring of "Mouseketeers."

Who's the leader of the band that's made for you and me . . .

 Who makes up these awful new words?  These bad parodies of words.  These miserable, ill-fitting misnomers.  Who are those people who butcher the English language and make it over it in their own lousy image?  For a moment, I almost convinced myself I was superior to all those others around me in the lobby, those swarming "blogventioneers."  I think I was trying hard to convince myself that I had an inside edge, knowing real words as I did, not falling to made-up words like blogvention and blogventioneers.

But clearly, the other attendees who were gathering in front of the cookie trays and talking amiably to each other – these blogventioneers who had paid their fees in full – were more respectable than I was with my green-highlighted maps and my blank neon-green tag.  They could have cookies and tea.  They could wander down the corridors and hallways.  They had their names on their tags, and the names of their blogs.

 I'd never felt so out-of-place in my life and, you can trust me when I say that I have felt out of place in many places, in many towns, large and small.  But never quite so acutely, so visibly, so miserably out of place as I was just then.

 So I tried to look as if I didn't care, as if I weren't out of place and a misfit among them. I hid behind my glasses and studied the list of afternoon lectures coming up.  I saw one that was to start in ten minutes.:"The Blogosphere: How to get there fast and be read widely."

            Oh dear.

 Why hadn't I thought to check the list of events before handing over the fee to Darlene the Miserable?  I realized this might have been a bad idea, a worse idea than riding the city bus loop all day or sitting in the bookstore sipping designer coffee and thumbing through magazines.  This might be a dull disaster of a day – a disaster I had paid good money to be part of.

I studied the list again.  Two more talks would follow this one:  "Blogging For Profit" and "Building a Web Presence."  Since I could give a rat's backside about making a profit on anything, much less on writing, I decided to sit in the lobby on a far bench, to slouch in the warm sunshine falling through the tall windows. I'd sit there and daydream until the "web presence" talk at 3 o'clock.  That way I would be close enough to know when the first talk was over but wouldn't be too close to Darlene who was looking a bit nuclear by then, texting and frowning and slamming the phone on the tabletop after each message she sent. 

 Darlene scared me. 

There came a point. at last, where she went off down the hall to the women's restroom.  I took the opportunity to snitch an oatmeal cookie and a cup of ice water from the table.  I guzzled down the ice water which was cool after half an hour of baking in the afternoon sunshine and I choked down the soft crumbly cookie, afraid Darlene might suddenly reappear, see what I had done, and go into a rage, flying at me with her neon-green permanent marker and her long-nailed opposable thumbs.  I have seen rabid dogs who intimidated me less than Darlene did.

She finally returned and sat down at the reception table again, her phone idle on the tabletop beside her.  She had found a People magazine to thumb through and it held her attention for the next 2 hours.  She seemed not to even notice me, which was what I wanted except that it made me feel even less visible and less important and more out of place than I already felt.

                                              ~            

 Inside the auditorium later, I settled myself in the back of the large room, back in the safe, indistinct shadowy reaches of the room that was elsewhere too-brightly-lit by buzzing overhead fluorescent bulbs.  The back of any room, large or small, is where all the ex-Southern Baptists I know, including me, seat themselves in adulthood.  We are  traumatized by the sermons of our childhoods, childhoods which were spent being made – by our God-fearing parents and the stern deacons –  to sit in the sanctuary's front two pews, in close range of Preacher's rantings and finger-pointings and Bible-shakings.  Hellfire and brimstone were hurled at us from those Sunday pulpits and tent-revival podiums, as were the seven deadly sins and the lesser sins of omission.  Sometimes I left revival like a scorched thing, having been so close to the hellfire sermon that I could almost smell the sulfur of brimstone in my hair. 

 Others entered the auditorium.  No one smiled in my direction.  No one spoke to me.  They all moved, eagerly, dutifully, to the front and middle of the room and sat down, taking out their notebooks and folios, clicking their pens, ready to capture the secrets of Those-Who-Have-Arrived in the Kingdom of Blogging.  I stayed put –  just me and my pity-party –  in the back of that auditorium where I read through the titles of talks once again and studied my highlighted lobby map and tried to hide the fact of my blank neon-green day pass from anyone who might look my way.

Soon, the house lights went down and the podium lights came up.  The guest speaker was introduced and applauded.  Then the big screen behind her lit up: a power-point presentation. 

            Oh.  Goody. 

Pie-charts and statistics.  Acronyms and quotable slogans.  Testimonials by the guest speaker followed by snappy little sound-bytes by those others who had been pioneers in blogging and its technology and by those who were devout followers of this speaker's "methodology," people who were quoted and identified only by a first name and last initial. 

I have always suspected that these are probably not written or spoken by real people, that they were "made up."  Invented.  Characters.  Conveniently-placed characters.   The syntax and diction are too similar from quote to quote.  Sometimes, the punctuation and spelling errors are also consistent from quote to quote.  I smelled a rat.  A big fat smelly rat.

But I could see, even in the dim-lit hall, others were writing them all down as fast as they appeared on the screen, as if the words were pearls of great wisdom that could sink again into the sea-water and disappear.  Lost riches.  Little gems.  Something to repeat to others when they also finally entered one day the hallowed halls of Those-Who-Have-Arrived.

Finally, the speaker took out her laser pointer and got down to the subject:  that "web presence" we were all needing so badly to establish.  How to build it.  How to nurture it.  How to capitalize on it. 

 Why? I wondered.  Why do any of us care whether five or five hundred people are reading what we write, looking at what we post from week to week. month to month?  We're not selling anything.  We're not getting rich.  We're not.  

Or are we?

 Maybe, in some deep sense of it all, we are selling something, even if it's only our own versions of what is and has been and will be.  Maybe we're all trying to capture something about the world we know – or knew once – and raise it up again before others who might not have seen it, even when it shimmered (or shimmied) right before them.  Maybe we're hoping that they'll see it finally and be astonished by it and agree with us that it's been one helluva life, this one we've shared with all those strangers and friends and followers out there.

 Maybe we're gravediggers in the old graveyard of mortals, digging our own graves and others' too. Slowly.  Beautifully. In such a way that it seems we do it like nobody else has ever done it.  That we do it in such a way that grave-digging seems the only fitting end for something as wild and noble and filled with good and evil as our lives have been. 

Or maybe we're resurrecting our dead. Bringing them back to stand, almost-whole again, before us.  Bringing them into view so clearly and so deeply and humanly-flawed that, when we lose them again – as we surely must when the writing ends – it feels like a bitter loss to anyone else who happens to be with us there in that moment.

Maybe we are selling something:  we who are writing from our most secret and vulnerable hearts and minds.  Maybe we sell it – whatever "it" is – so well we don’t quite feel alone as we once did.  Maybe we want even that brief connection to others, a tenuous connection, at best, that often seems so damned impossible to find any other way.

And maybe in the end, we are getting rich.  Richer than we'd imagined we would be.  Rich enough to fill our pockets full with the gold-dust of all those small, fleeting  details of the moments we've lived and had almost-forgotten until we wrote them down or photographed them or painted them for others.

Maybe the guest speaker is wrong, a little, about that web presence and how critical the larger numbers of readers are.  Maybe she is not seeing the forest for the proverbial trees, despite the colorful graphs and pie-charts and well-researched statistics.  Maybe the only web presence that matters, in the end, is that we each be present and genuine in every blog-piece we write, each photograph we post, each thing we hold up to those who drop in from time to time and watch us act as if it is the only thing of any worth that we have to offer.

Maybe even Darlene is entitled to a presence here today, with her wonderfully-manicured thumbs and her sorry attitude.  Maybe even that blank green nametag is just one more manifestation of all the small signs that make good people feel ruined and discarded, signs like "For Whites Only" or "No Girls Allowed" or "Immigrants Go Home."  Maybe the presence that matters isn't the woman I was that day at the Blogvention; maybe it’s the sudden presence here of the girl I was once, deeply hung in the practices and fears of a Southern Baptist childhood, her hair reeking of brimstone, her cheeks flushed from that close encounter with the hellfires.

Maybe even you, reader, are a presence, rare and wonderful, tagging along as you have, at my elbow all that miserable day though I had nothing more, ever, to offer you than this one afternoon, this little scrap from the rich bone-yard of my own life. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

An Interview with Andrew McFayden-Ketchum

 

Dear friends, family, and readers,

 

I am taking a two-month hiatus from the blog right now, but thought I would send you this link to an interview Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum did last week with me for poemoftheweek.org   

Thank you for being so loyal to the reading here and I hope to be back online with new writing in April.  

All best,

Anne

http://www.poemoftheweek.org/id408.html