The Ghost of What Remains

Persuasion

Alone for a few hours on the job today, I pulled up some Richard Thompson on YouTube and listened to him at full volume. (This ability we have, with current technology, to listen to nearly anything we desire at any given time, astonishes me daily.)

This song, especially, makes me swoon. This guitar —

Moon, and Jupiter

Yesterday on Facebook, my friend Jamey posted a 25 second video of the moon and Jupiter; the only movement was from his hands, steadying his iPhone.

I watched all 25 seconds of it. There was something marvelous and amazingly sweet about this, and I can't quite put my finger on what it is that I find so enchanting, but the fact of posting on a social networking site a 25 second video of the moon and Jupiter makes me smile, and smile again. And again.

Maybe it's about the constancy of the moon and planets, and the relative-recentness of social networking — liable to shift to the next and newest incarnation of itself or something else entirely— that makes this so remarkable. I mean, there's not much new about the moon and Jupiter, while
Facebook (as a metaphor for modern technology), in comparison, is as new as spring's first blade of grass.

And then there's my friend, who is the epitome of understatement and nuance. No shouting out the news from Jamey. The news will arrive in its own good time, no rushing-it, please.

And there is the right-now aspect of Facebook, the read-it-now component of whatever it is you want to say and have known. Tomorrow it will not only be old news, but disappeared news, all things considered.

But the moon? And Jupiter? On any clear night, from whatever orientation you  claim as your own, chances are you'll find at least one of them, or Venus, or Mars, old reliable friends shining their old reliable lights minus fanfare, minus the Big Parade that Facebook marches out every day for our viewing pleasure, or, er, displeasure, whatever the case may be.

So I say thank-you to my friend Jamey, for reminding me that friends like him — the tried and true — are as constant as the moon, and Jupiter, holding reliably steady in a universe of infinite changeability.

Abandoned

"I am in love with the world." --Maurice Sendak

I've listened to this (the link below) about ten times today already, and every time brings tears.
This shall become an annual post, along with Brendan Gill's Rules One and Two.
Enjoy.
And live your life.

http://niemann.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/14/the-lives-they-lived-maurice-sendak/?smid=pl-share

The Pack-Up

We packed everything up yesterday afternoon in a record 3 1/2 hours, just about lost it while shrink-wrapping the three pallets, but instead descended into post-show giddiness. If you've ever shrink-wrapped anything, you'll know that it's the same as Saran-wrapping food in your kitchen — the roll gets tangled, sticks to anything and everything — except that in shrink-wrapping the roll is 2+ feet long and misbehaves often. There's an art to shrink-wrapping a pallet, and it seems that we have to reinvent it every time we do it.

It's intense work, and all around us is a general frenzy as every vendor is hot to get packed and outa there. At one point, to give my complaining back a momentary rest, I laid myself down on the rubber flooring and closed my eyes. I could have easily fallen asleep.

When we left, what was, just hours prior, a beautifully-lit and carpeted marketplace, what now an upheaval of empty boxes,  disassembled display units, dollies, rolling carts, packing peanuts, tossed water bottles, newspapers, show maps, and the general detritus of after-market.

Rather incredible to think that in a few days our pallets will travel by truck to a Philadelphia warehouse, where they'll sit for a few weeks before being delivered to the Buyer's Market of American Craft.

And then back to Seattle.

As wholesale shows go, Atlanta was considerably less than fantastic, but we garnered some new accounts and made some great connections which have lots of potential. To be honest, the buyers were generally of a less-sophisticated sensibility than those in the Northeast. We won't be going back.

But....we will have a collection for sale at the gift shop of the Renwick Gallery, a branch of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Frenzy

AmericasMart in Atlanta covers 7,000,000 square feet over three city blocks. It is completely overwhelming. Over the past few days, I've wandered across many of those square feet, and viewed immeasurable numbers of every possible type of product, walking, I'd guess, many miles.

The exhibit hall housing gourmet foods was a manic miasma of over-zealous vendors hawking chocolate, pickles, hot sauce, popcorn, waffles, relishes, cookies, cornbread mixes, marshmallows, tea, coffee, spices, etc., each scent conflicting with the next, buyers reaching over each other for samples, food spilled on the carpet.

One day I wandered into the "Cash'n'Carry Jewelry" wing, (past "Seasonal" where it was Halloween and Christmas all at once) and entered another dimension. Vendors stood hawkish at the rear of each booth, behind the heaps of bracelets, necklaces, rings, hair ornaments, scarves, beads, most of it the cheapest of the cheap, all mass-produced on the other side of the globe. You didn't have to be a wholesale dealer to purchase, and there was no minimum requirement. Women were diving into the entanglement of bling, piling their trays with their must-haves. My jaw hung open in astonishment. I've never wanted jewelry less than I did then. My god. Is this really the world we inhabit?

So the next day (we haven't been busy, alas), I thought I'd go back down to Crazy Jewelry Land to see if it really was all as insane as I thought it was the day before, and it was, in fact, even more insane. I felt like I was taking notes for a master's thesis in social behavior.

I never want to buy anything again.

At 6pm, at the closing bell (as it were), thousands of exhibitors and buyers were dumped out into the streets, and I was in the middle of them all.

It felt like this:

Say What?

This Associated Press story had me screaming with incredulity —

WASHINGTON (AP) — A "Death Star" won't be a part of the U.S. military's arsenal any time soon.

More than 34,000 people have signed an online petition calling on the Obama administration to build the "Star Wars" inspired super-weapon to spur job growth and bolster national defense.

But in a posting Friday on the White House website, Paul Shawcross, an administration adviser on science and space, says a Death Star would cost too much to build — an estimated $850 quadrillion — at a time the White House is working to reduce the federal budget.

Besides, Shawcross says, the Obama administration "does not support blowing up planets."

The U.S., Shawcross points out, is already involved in several out-of-this-world projects, including the International Space Station, which is currently orbiting Earth with a half-dozen astronauts.

---

$850 quadrillion???
I don't even know how many zeros that is.
And what a relief — we're not going to blow up planets!!

Have you ever notice that sometimes you can look in someone's face and see the child that they once were? And then there are those people in whose faces there is no remnant of child?

I looked at so many faces these past few days, and saw so few of the children these strangers once were. There was one couple — husband and wife — fifty-ish — and I could see with unquestionable clarity the little boy of five or six, in that man. His wife's face held nothing of her past, stripped clean, as it were. It was extraordinary, really, that each so clearly stated one or the other, and that each was so clearly opposite the other.

And I don't mean "baby-faced", as the saying goes. I mean that in certain people, there is the possibility of a glimpse of something from decades back, something still evident, a playfulness or an openness that so many of us lose, or, as a practice, send on its lonesome way.

Lovely, really.
The older the person, the more lovely.

I recall seeing it in my mother, in her gleeful moments, which were numerous.

And lucky I am, to remember it.

Formicidae, at Lanta

I've been blogging from my phone — a real pain on such a doll-house-sized keyboard, but internet service has been spotty. At an exhibitor's party tonight at the Capitol City Club, there was no service, zilch. I suppose rich southern gentlemen have more important things to do than check their email.

Currently this building is dwarfed by high-rises, and exists amidst the exhaust fumes of downtown traffic. We did, however, enjoy a few moments on the veranda in the 66-degree January evening. (Cough, cough.)

I sat on a red velvet couch beneath a massive oil portrait of this man —

— a Mr. Livingston Mims, who was elected mayor of Atlanta in October of 1900. (And another great name for a character in my not-gonna-happen great southern novel.)

America's Mart — the massive, multi-block many-leveled facility where this gift show is happening, feels like a massive ant pile. We connect from wing to wing in narrow tubular walkways, and our 150 square-feet booth seems like an ideal place to stash ant eggs.

Since our arrival on Tuesday, we have passed through the larval stage to the pupal stage, and will emerge as fully-fledged adults at 9am tomorrow morning when the show opens. We are of the caste of artists.

In this massive colony, there are literally millions of categories of "stuff" to be had. As we pass through the narrow corridors (with low ceilings), goods to be had to the left and to the right and seemingly-never-ending with every step, I get a little dizzy. Lose my true north.

Though there's no question which way is down —

Hold tight.
Here we go....

Sitting at the bar last night, chatting with the great-grandson of Emma May, he said:

"Atlanta is 50% white and 50% black. Of those blacks, they are 50% good and 50% bad."

Hmmm. I took out a photo of  two young men, who are black, and said,

"These are my nephews."

I must say that it was with pleasure that I saw him squirm.

I guess, if my nephews lived here, they'd be among the 50% of blacks who are good.

The South is still The South, and racism is still racism.

Sure glad I can call Seattle my home.

At Lanta

Ah.

Atlanta.

Stuck out here seven miles north of downtown in Hotel Land.

Up today at 3:19am waaaaaay tooooo early to catch a 6am plane.

Here's a name for you:

Emma Mae Suggs Calhoun

Gleaned from a bar conversation with a man (progenitor of Miss Georgia 2006) who claimed to have sold more hotels than anyone on the planet. Emma Mae was his great-grandmother, and if I ever become a Southern Novelist she will be my main character:

Emma Mae Suggs Calhoun.
Damn.
Fantastic.

But from the looks of it, I might as well just work her into a poem
because me + southern fiction ≠ anything.

The bellboy (or bellman, as it happened), wanted to know
if we were pleased with the results of our Washington state election.
Tee hee! He giggled as he left.

The hotel salesman told us that he came from generations of southern farmers
who always had a side crop of cannabis, for "spending money".

The farther away from home one goes, the smaller the world becomes.

Meh*

Winter doldrums are in full roar.

*Meh

interjection

1.

(an expression of boredom or apathy): We thought it would sell, but customers are saying “Meh!”

adjective

2.

unimpressive; boring: The first few songs were meh.

3.

bored or apathetic: I'm feeling a little meh.

Origin:
1990-95;  popularized on the TV show The Simpsons

Ah....

My friend, the poet Paul Hunter (who can be found here) posted this on facebook today, :

“I sense the world might be more dreamlike, metaphorical, and poetic than we currently believe--but just as irrational as sympathetic magic when looked at in a typically scientific way. I wouldn't be surprised if poetry--poetry in the broadest sense, in the sense of a world filled with metaphor, rhyme, and recurring patterns, shapes, and designs--is how the world works. The world isn't logical, it's a song.” ― David Byrne, Bicycle Diaries

I like to think that this is the world I inhabit.
You?

New!

Work

Less than a week until Melinda and I fly to Atlanta, and we're intensely occupied with painting a new design. It had me cursing repeatedly today — it takes some time to get to know the landscape of a new design, and I entered into Black Paint Hell.

I should mention, though, that it is always exciting to develop new work. M. is faltering with a completely new line. Stop. And go. Invention was never simple.

And on another bright note, our 2013 reserve orders are piling up. One gallery said they wanted exactly what we sent them last year — but doubled. No complaints!

Inside The Box

Glass Box Update

My son figured it out!

Hints

Re: Glass Box

1. Think outside the box.

2. This hint was in the prior post:
  
      "I told him to give it a few weeks; he may just figure it out."

To Break or Not To Break....

Nine years ago, when my sons and I were faced with celebrating Christmas minus their father, we decided to begin new (and wacky) traditions, in part to honor him (he was wildly creative) and also to acknowledge and accept our revised family. No wallowing in the past!

The tradition that has lasted is our annual gift-wrapping contest, where each of us wraps at least one gift in the oddest way possible.

In these intervening years, each of us has developed our own particular wrapping style: Reilly mines the kitchen for discarded cereal boxes, lengths of foil, duct tape. Nelson goes the route of glueing-things-to-other-things. My style has not evolved so much as been a last-minute grabbing of whatever I can find that is odd. (One year my entry was wrapped in pages from an old dictionary.)

Reilly's sculptural assemblages (shredded wheat boxes, plastic yogurt tubs, string) have won nearly every year. The vote must be unanimous! (Alas, I've never won.) 

So, last Sunday I got an email from my friend J., who wrote that he had an idea that would pretty much guarantee my win: he'd help me construct a glass box in which I could entomb a small gift.

 Christmas Eve we met at his house, and using plate glass and a scoring tool, he snapped out six rectangles —

which we glued together with UV glue and an ultra-violet light —

Before gluing the last pieces, I slipped the present within –

Voilà!

Back home, I wrapped the glass box — openable only by breaking! — into several other boxes-within-boxes to ensure surprise.




Nelson began to laugh —


and couldn't stop for a mighty long while —

The caveat: I wouldn't be a truly tortuous mother without messing with his head just a bit more. I told him that if he breaks the glass, he'll discover what is inside. But if he doesn't break the glass, the gift will be re-upped next year, as long as the glass remains unbroken. If he guesses what's inside, he still qualifies for re-upping. And either way, he gets the gift.

breakage = only this year
no breakage = a continuing gift

He asked if it was a check for $10,000.

No, it isn't.

(But I won! I won!!)

And I told him to give it a few weeks; he may just figure it out.

Any guesses from blogland?

Funk, Bach, Cookies and Gospel

Seems like every December I re-invent Christmas, trimming and honing traditions to suit whatever hectic schedule I'm involved in. Just this morning I wrapped the clunky tree stand in an old scarf (I can't even bring myself to say the words "Christmas tree skirt"). The 5-6' tree ( there were no 3-4' trees at Lowes) has only a handful of ornaments on it. No time to drag out more! I did manage to find a book of Christmas piano music in the basement, but this week I've been stuck on Bach preludes, for their precision and simplicity: psyche-soothing little bits of fingerwork.

A tableful of cookies —






















— a pile of gifts yet unwrapped, a list for today that includes PT at 1pm. Last night I wrote on the top of the list: get up at 7:30!! Begin day @9am.

Well. Suffice to say I've already ignored everything on the list.

Ho.

The highlight of the holiday, though, was this party last night, hosted by my sister-in-law's family: gospel choir, funk band, ribs, fried chicken, cornbread, and people I see only once a year. After dinner, while the band was kicking it — and good gawd they are great! —Nelson leaned over and whispered in my ear, "Mom, of all the things we do at Christmas, I think this is my favorite."

Ho ho.

Damn, it's good to be alive.

Waiting for Baby Cheesus

Oh so sweet.....

Well I'll be damned if this just isn't the sweetest thing I've seen in ages —

Packed and Outa Here, Baby

The rare smile on J.!

I'm cold.

And wet.

We packed it all up for the Atlanta gift show today — display materials, glass shelves, black springy floor, desk, chair, lights, coiled cords, step-ladder, hand-cart — on two pallets and a third pallet with boxes of one of everything we make, all shrink-wrapped, all in the rain. Finished just as it began to get dark, toes wet, black beret dripping rain down my nose. Good gawd I was ready to be done.

The joy of an afternoon off — even with this early darkness and the rain unrelenting and the temps just hovering above snow temps. I drove to the fruit stand and pondered apples and oranges (apples and oranges!) in the cold, one glove off to wrestle with plastic bags. (Black beret pulled snug, scarf wound and knotted.)

Pomegranates in a red heap.
Lemons, limes, some $$$ strawberries.
The root crops — the beets, the parsnips and yams — looking curled into themselves, hardened against what will come.

Jars of honey: blackberry and clover.
Bagged stacks of corn tortillas.
Baguettes from the Vietnamese bakery.

Nothing fancy, no pretensions.
Honest-to-goodness food, on a cold and rainy Sunday.

The second (and last!) day of the holiday studio sale is tomorrow, and we swept and tidied today before I went home. The shippers arrive sometime Wednesday to pick up our three pallets for the Atlanta Gift Show; pallets, that is, of prototypes we are still in the process of making. I am so ready for some time off.

Melinda got a call today from a gallery in Berkeley to whom we mailed a shipment of 18 pieces just this past Monday, and they'd already sold out and did we have anything — anything to send her ASAP?!!

No, actually. We don't.

There's a rumor that Christmas is afoot, but I don't seem to be able to confirm it.

And I can't post today without mentioning the horror I feel at the current news. It is incomprehensible. I've written and deleted sentence after sentence here, so I'll just say that there are no words powerful enough to contain what must be endured by so many families.

Blessings.
Blessings.
Blessings.

Some Details

I saw a row of raindrops on the red twig of a dogwood today, absolute perfection in the seven drops—

I saw the neighbor's calico cat go scuttling from the yard when I was bringing my borrowed dog out back on a leash after her dinner, and as she lunged forward after the cat I had less than a second to center myself so as not to slip headlong down the steps, slippery with mossy scum. And all so quickly over, there was no time for my heart to skip to that point of panic when the dark December night suddenly seemed lurching into crashing and broken bones —

I heard this fragment on the evening news: "The campaign against Easy Bake Ovens —"

I spoke on the phone today with a friend in Hawaii and I could actually feel the sun in his voice —

(So many details of the past twelve hours of being awake on this 12/12/12)

Homemade pizza for dinner (albeit from the freezer) and I could taste the pinch of cinnamon I put in the red sauce —

Good news, although not entirely official, concerning my book-length manuscript. Not quite ready to pop the cork on the Champagne, but it's a'chillin'.

Dit, dot, et al.

I'm a punctuation geek.


I'm carrying on a decades-old tryst with the semi-colon; the em dash — yes, the em dash — is my constant companion. I'm particularly fond of using bracketed phrases (or single words [although often multiple words]) inside of parenthetical asides. An ellipsis has the power to excite feelings of joy and well-being....

On the other hand, the this modern-day practice of punctuation butchery in the form of emoticons rankles the punctuated spirit of my deepest soul. My question: who gave permission for this?!

Okay, okay. I'll settle down.

And then I discovered these Japanese emoticons, in last Sunday's NYTimes Magazine, and I must admit a certain enchantment with them:

(=_=)
bored

m(__)m
bowing down in apology

(>_<)
ouch!

(9_9)
tired

d(-_-)b
wearing headphones

(^_-)
winking

(;_;)
crying

And here's my contribution to the emoticabulary:

(-_+)
punched in the eye

Work Faster, Faster

It's clear-out time at work, and this week I dragged out all the boxes of pieces from this past year that aren't quite perfect. (Boxes and boxes, pulled from a shed.) 300+ pieces this year, about an average number, I'd venture to say.

Each piece has to be checked over to see if it can be "fixed" enough to sell at a reduced price. Today I lined them all up on the long table, and took out my box of tricks: razor knife, various files, clean soft rags, paper towels, paint brushes, bristly brushes, rubbing alcohol,  tubs of paint, linseed oil, UV glue.

I felt like an accidental alchemist, holding each piece to the light for intense scrutiny. I glued and rubbed and polished and painted and scraped and filed and dotted and tossed in the garbage. The skills I've acquired over the past six years are so obscurely esoteric, all born out of necessity, of making something work when it doesn't want to. The success rate actually is fairly high when it comes to these cast-offs.

The next two Sundays will bring a caravan of customers from our 800+ mailing list, and every last one expects to leave feeling unbelievably lucky.

Whatever is left over from the first day of the sale will get reduced for the second day, and with any luck, our 300 pieces of not-quites will be whittled down to a big zero.

But before any of that happens, in a [yikes] mere five days, there are orders still to fill, first quality merchandise to make for the sale, plus we must convert our cozy factory into a cozy boutique. My head is more than a little a'spin.

As soon as we're done with the studio sale and gallery orders, we must pull together our line to exhibit in January at the Atlanta wholesale gift show. Last day we can ship in order to arrive in time for the show is December 19th.

I looked at my two workmates this afternoon, and said, "you know, this is pretty much all of my life right now."

They both concurred.

Gutter Cleaning & Victor Hugo

My ex-bro-in-law posted this on facebook today:

 

Random find while cleaning leaves out of the gutter: Page 39-40 of Victor Hugo's "Les Miserables". The last line sentence is "I will weep for the children of kings with you, if you will weep with me for the children of the people."

 

I love this — the manual labor part of it (and apparently the leaves were blowing back as fast as he could sweep them out) and the social commentary on VH's part. AND that the x-bro posted it on facebook. 

 

But even better: I have his permission to use it in a poem.

Night Rain

Dramatic rain with gusty winds last night, drumming on the slanted attic roof directly above my head for hours, lashing the southern-inclined front of my house. I fell to sleep reading Life of Pi, and throughout the night, waking to the storm, felt as if a tiger were just inches away, felt as if an ocean of misfortune was swelling just outside the windows. Then I'd drift from that half-dream state into full realization that all was well, tucked-in and pounded-down, knowing I was high above the rivering streets and sturdily sheltered from fir branches cast aloft.

I thought a lot about my roof, glad for its steady repel of the elements. I thought about the few pieces of cedar siding which came loose last year some time and still need hammering back in. I thought about stains, and sealants. I thought about paint. I thought about the man I hired to paint the high-up trim, that he dug some irises corms from his garden for me, and how some wretched critter chews away most of the plant each spring.

And then I thought about gutters, newly swept clean by my sons.

I thought about my apple tree, badly in need of pruning. I thought that I could lop off a large section and string it from my living room ceiling, in lieu of a Christmas tree. I thought about the accumulation of ornaments packed away in the basement, and then I thought that I might just leave them and all their attendant memories (troubling memories) neatly packed away.

How the train engines of the brain can rev themselves up in the middle of the night!

Finally I let myself slip back to sleep, lulled by that incessant torrent.

Bog Tones

It's not Ireland, but the colors fly me 6,000 miles east.

Dog, Borrowed

There hasn't been a dog in my life since I was 17, and for the next two weeks I'm the Handler-In-Chief of a golden retriever (whose owner is vacationing in Hawaii [envious!]). As it's been even longer since there's been a horse in my life on a regular basis, I'm amazed at how much walking with this very spirited animal resembles riding a very spirited and easily-spooked equine.

I'm making motions with the leash much like I'd do with reins, except there's no broad back to straddle, no muscled shoulder to lean into. No sonorous nickering. Harumph. If only I had a horse to ride to work in this very urban neighborhood!

Nevertheless, this doggy business isn't too bad, all things considered. And although I'm more of a cat person, the constant companionship of this canine is rather sweet. Don't know when I've enjoyed so much devotion.

The cats at home are not pleased.

The cats at work, on the other hand, have resigned themselves to the daily presence of this large and loud creature, and today emerged from their hiding places amongst the packing materials to (tentatively!) meet Bella. No drama, just some nose-touching and guarded gazing.

I rode a full-blooded Arabian horse for two years in my early teen years, after she magically appeared one summer morning grazing on my neighbor's front lawn. Once the hullabaloo of discovering a loose horse outside my bedroom window subsided, her owner — a retired jockey — pulled up in his car. It seemed that "Happy Springtime" had a habit of letting herself out of her pasture, and she'd wander the semi-rural roads of Renton. Mr. Van Slyke, the jockey, needed someone to exercise her, and wondered if my friend and I would be interested?

Thus began my seasons of heaven.

Funny that walking home from work, in the dark, with a dog, should pull this memory to the surface, but there you have it. But memories are like that, aren't they ? One and then another ricocheting off each other, often seemingly without connection. But that faint thread that stitches them together can nearly always be found, if we take the time to notice.

And I had the time to notice, because I was walking. With a dog.

Woof.

All Hail The Holy Mother of Oz

(With apologies to L. Frank Baum.)

My Pie Family

(A cat on the lap and all is well.)

Deep mist suffused everything today, blotted out any vision farther than a few hundred yards in any direction. Everything dripped — even the gold-finches at the feeder. Even the sole hummingbird sipping nectar. This is full-on autumn, with winter beginning to show its blue light at the horizon.

Yesterday, at a Thanksgiving table with sixteen others, I listened to the waves of conversation alternately ripple up to a passionate roar, then trickle down to near silence. Someone suggested we name our favorite movies, and a title would be announced, with the ensuing discussion and good-natured arguments: again the tide of voices cresting, then easing off.  In such a crowd, it was easy to slip into silence unnoticed, easy to be the observer.

But of course, I had my dramatic moments, as when I wrestled (so to speak) the crow/cat/fir-cone story away from my son. (It was my story.) With a few emptied wine glasses trailing behind me, I performed (I think) a fairly good impression of my very large cat pressed up against the glass panel of my front door in his attempt to escape being lobbed-at by a cone-pitching crow.

When it was time for dessert, seven pies were laid out down the center of the table along with a VERY LARGE bowl of whipped cream: one cranberry-apple, two sweet potato, two pecan, one pumpkin and one pumpkin with a pecan streusel. Be still my pie heart!

I lapsed into silence again.
I slipped into my invisible dessert bubble so that I could eat pie undistracted. 

This was yet a new version of family, a rearrangement of old friends and new, of friends that I consider family, of sons, and friends of friends. It was as if someone took a good portion of the people I've known/met during the past 26 years, put them in a bag, and shook out sixteen of them to sit together for Thanksgiving dinner. I was delighted to be among the invited.

In the middle of it all (and sitting at a middle seat at that long table), I was reminded of something that my late mother-in-law used to say:

"You reach a certain age, you get to choose your own family."

Indeed.
She was right.

But the really lucky part, for me, is that my "family" is a big one: blood, near-blood, not-blood, near, not-near, breathing, passed-on.

And then there are all of you.
You know who you are.

Shall we have pie?

“Poets are interested mostly in death and commas.” — Carolyn Kizer

Horizontal

Ocean

Driving, late yesterday afternoon and into evening, sixty miles on I-5 in stop-and-go traffic. Rain and Friday, dark by 4pm. And then a turn to the west, towards saltwater, and a darker way to go, limited visibility for the next 80 miles, off-and-on rain, off-and-on wipers, the defroster turned to high. The radio cutting out. My quiet son beside me, his dry sense of humor.

This poem by Theodore Roethke kept flaring into my consciousness, this passage particularly:

from The Far Field

I dream of journeys repeatedly:
Of flying like a bat deep into a narrowing tunnel
Of driving alone, without luggage, out a long peninsula,
The road lined with snow-laden second growth,
A fine dry snow ticking the windshield,
Alternate snow and sleet, no on-coming traffic,
And no lights behind, in the blurred side-mirror,
The road changing from glazed tarface to a rubble of stone,
Ending at last in a hopeless sand-rut,
Where the car stalls,
Churning in a snowdrift
Until the headlights darken.  

---

Four hours later, we pulled up to this odd "intentional" community, Seabrook....

I hate to use the word quaint, but nothing else fits as well. Lil' suburb'o'the'beach.

Anyway.

What matters is that I'm here with my cancer-in-remission sister, another sister, and various spouses/nephews/girlfriends.

I do not intend to go clamming tonight at low tide (8-ish) with everyone else. A chair by the fire beckons, a glass of wine.

Long days at the glass factory.

I come home feeling beat up yet happily worn out from laughing, my hands too sore to type.

Every day between now and Christmas is booked. We ship for the Atlanta wholesale gift show on December 20th, so I've rescinded the order to cancel Christmas day. Thanksgiving? I intend to show my gratitude as a guest, delighted that I'm not hosting this year.

Meanwhile, there are clams to be dug this weekend at Pacific Beach, and chowder to be simmered. Bread dough set to rising. And miles to go before I sleep.

And miles to go before I sleep.

The Post-Election Grace Period of Happiness

The past two days I've awoken not with a sense of dread and foreboding, but the sensation that something good is actually afoot. After the few moments of post-alarm head clearing, I remember that two days ago we booted the rethuglicans from their self-constructed, self-righteous pedestals. I really was preparing myself for the worst possible scenario, and trying to come to terms with what I thought was inevitable, in advance, to ease the oncoming shock.

The levels of hate and vitriol that have been spewing from the mouths of so many accomplished, in the end, not one thing. Dare I say that I'm proud to be an American? The zip code in which I reside — the most ethnically diverse in the nation — is the perfect snapshot of the "new" America that author, journalist, and writer/producer David Simon so eloquently speaks of:

  America will soon belong to the men and women — white and black and Latino and Asian, Christian and Jew and Muslim and atheist, gay and straight — who can comfortably walk into a room and accept with real comfort the sensation that they are in a world of certain difference, that there are no real majorities, only pluralities and coalitions. The America in which it was otherwise is dying, thank god, and those who relied on entitlement and division to command power will either be obliged to accept the changes, or retreat to the gated communities from which they wish to wax nostalgic and brood on political irrelevance. 

Read the full article here.


For me, and for my sons, this is the only world we know.

My sons grew up with straight/poet/agnostic/atheist parents, played with the rabbi's son, acknowledged that the autistic neighbor-child who roamed from house to house was to be watched over, played chess with a lesbian couple, were the minority children in their elementary school, celebrated holidays with their caucasian/African-American cousins, and had friends whose skin tone was never considered.

(Once, while vacationing on the Oregon coast, there were lots of comments about how strange it was that everyone was white.)

It was bad luck — an apartment fire — that plunked us down here, but that "bad luck" transformed itself into the gift of a rich childhood for my boys; rich, that is, in experience. Rich in community, rich in the greater love that comes from a community of diverse individuals who recognize that we're all in this together.

For better or worse, but mostly for the better.

A few days ago I would never have predicted that I'd be writing these words. And perhaps I'm exhibiting a bit of hubris when I say that tonight I feel that everything I've taught my sons has paid off. This country, the planet — is still teetering on the deadly cliffs of self-destruction. But for these few moments, the moments that it takes to compose this blog post — I'm feeling mighty fine.

I walk by this garage every weekday on my way to work —

Happy Barack Day!

Although it was only my son and I watching the election returns at my house last night, between switching channels and the presence of facebook, we watched with a multitude of friends and all of the country.

Lots of nail-biting followed by an overwhelming relief (tears) and then joy.

The best part of the celebration came just moments after the election was called for the president, when we heard a ruckus outside, and I opened the door to a parade of adults and children marching down the sidewalk with a kitchen band: pots, pans, wooden spoons, and yelps of happiness.

Band #2, a few minutes later, was a group of seven or eight school-aged boys, one with a snare drum fastened to his waist, drumsticks rattling out their uncontainable glee.

Firecrackers, shimmers of sparks shooting high into the night sky.

Blessings to all on this sunny Wednesday.

Bring On The Cake!

I have been breathing for approximately 15,470,300,160,000 minutes,
minus the minutes held while traveling through tunnels.

(The sad news is that I am no longer 55.)

Tuesday Poem: Supplication to Our Lady of the Dumpster

           --for Rachel Maxi

O lid of clang & wheels of clatter,
O collector of rubbish & swill, O Holy Mother
of great pickings, of dreck & slop: Hear our prayer.

O saint of litter & scrap, protect us
from the banana peel, the Styrofoam chunk,
from all that defies reduce/reuse/recycle.

O divine casting off, O sacred decay!
Hallelujah to the Hefty Ultra-Flex 33 Gallon,
the drawstring, the twist-tie.

You hold dear everything
everyone never wanted or wanted once,
a sack or a heap tossed & tumbled.

Praise to those who dive into the belly
of your dump — the urban foragers, the hungry,
scraping a meal of crust & bone.

Consecrate them, O Queen of rubble
robed in graffiti. Watch over them,
that they may not themselves become waste

to be managed, a cubic yard of flesh
primed for front-loading. Now,
and at the hour of our death.

Amen.

© T. Clear 2010

Big White Rusty, Rachel Maxi

This week marks my editorship at the Tuesday Poem hub, featuring a poem by the Seattle poet Holly J. Hughes. Check it out here.

Gutters, and James Fenimore Cooper

I came home from grocery shopping today to a spirited conversation coming from my side yard where my two boys (er, men) were cleaning out the gutters: N. at the top of the ladder, R. holding it steady on the sloppy soggy earth. Amid the flinging of moss/fir-needles/leaves they were embroiled in a discussion on the history of Israel and Palestine; then suddenly Socialism was the topic, which quickly spilled into the subject of independent presidential candidates.

Thankfully, all in good nature. They do tend to get each others passions stirred up in these dialogues.

"Watch out for James Fenimore Cooper!" I said.

You might recall the antiquarian book I placed in the sun last June, whose place on the deck railing has gone undisturbed for going on six months.

"Wait!" I said. "I'm gonna take a picture!"

I will note here that not a single soul has asked me about this. My guess is that it's just too odd to appropriately mention. But still.

Anyway, I checked on it after the gutter-reaming was completed, and not a page had flapped.

R. made us dinner — Hungarian goulash, papperdelle, and carrots in brown sugar and butter.

Before N. left, he scooped up his kitty, who settled into his arms
with an ease reserved for N. only —

On the sill —

with a backdrop of steamy glass —

Here

Driving today, after work, in dimming light along Lake Washington, the blue bruised water ruckled-up in the wind, the maples and alders side of the road in every shade of red/orange/yellow.  A swathe of rainbow to the north, a concentrated lump of color sitting just at the horizon. The sky beyond: velvet charcoal.

I kept shouting:

"I live here!"

I've driven that stretch of road so many times, it's easy to take it for granted. Easy to admit to a certain ordinariness in what is never ordinary, never the same from day to day, from hour to hour.      

Easy to dismiss the forward-thinking gods who delivered me back to this city that I love, and to whom I say:

thank-you
thank-you
thank-you