Letters

I'm biting from Anne Nahm, who inspired me to craft some letters of my own, because it's just that kind of day. And like Anne, I'm going to kick it off with a letter to the Universe.

Dear Universe,

Look. I know my complaints are small and generally first-world. Like, geez, it's freezing in this house I'm really lucky to be living in here or god, this pasta is filling and nutritious and at least you're eating tonight, twit bland. So I only ask one favor. Could you please do something about the whole waking at 4:30am thing? Because it has fashioned itself into the perfect time to roll around and wallow in self-doubt and self-loathing, beating myself up for God knows what, although I will give you this: when the alarm goes off a mere 30 minutes later (yes, that's right!) and my gorgeous husband presses his early morning wood into my backside spoons me, things tend to right themselves, somehow.

That's all for now.

Kel

*********

Dear Guy Who Keeps Tossing His Tobacco Juice Bottles In Front of Our House,

Um...could you stop it? I pick trash up all the time, because a lot of people tend to walk around being all lazy and they can't just hang on to the trash item until they get home. They must dispose of it at that moment because that Twix bar wrapper is simply too much for their fingers to handle. It's awful, the burden of actually throwing garbage in the...garbage. And as much as I fantasize about going all Carl Hiassen-hero on litterers and hijacking a dump truck filled with refuse to dump on the spot where YOU live, I cannot do that, so I pick up the Wawa hoagie wrappers and candy wrappers and empty iced tea bottles and McDonalds bags and I throw them out...in the garbage. Other people's garbage in my garbage. Weird. But whatever. Still, I draw the line at bottles filled with brown spit. So I don't know whatever it is about our curb that inspires you to leave it with us, but I'm praying that somehow you wake up and realize what a giant turd move that is, and maybe you should take your spit with you and throw it out...in the garbage.

Sincerely,

I Refuse To Pick Up Spit



*********

Dear Girls in My Chemistry Class,

So we were all discussing what courses we were signing up for during the upcoming summer session, and I cop to feeling extremely jealous when you starting talking about taking A&P in the morning and then being able to study on the beach in the afternoon. And I was like, that's totally not right. You should be forced to spend summer evenings in the lab until 11:30pm like me and then have to try to study during the day while children climb all over you asking for a popsicle because it's just so hot. You should have to hang with those children (who really are adorable, by the way, but also supremely...ahem...needy) from 6:45am to 4:30pm, and do the homework and studying for a condensed course, and probably do all the other things you do like meal-planning and laundry and gathering the giant dust balls that congregate in the corners. But then you asked me when I was taking Chem II, and I told you that I had to take evening classes because the kids are home with me, and you were like, "You have kids? How old are you?" And I was like, "I'm 34," and you were like, "Wahhhh?" And your friend was like, "Wahhhh? I swear, I totally thought you were like 23 or something." And then you were like, "You look sooooooo young," at which point I climbed across the lab table, knocking over my titration set up and spewing the HCl everywhere, and kissed you both on the mouth, because that's how giddy you made this tired, stressed mama. And so now I say, go study on the beach young ones. Tan those tiny bodies unsullied by pregnancy. Enjoy the feel of class in the morning, and the sun and sand in the afternoon. Because you deserve it.

Love forever and ever,

Kelly

*********

Dear Dave,

Last night I walked in from class, feeling less than stellar. Sure, I'd gotten a 93 on the previous week's lab, and sure, those girls were blown away by some weird trickery of light my youthful appearance. But, man, the existential crises! Always with the existential crises! They come and they go, mercifully, but they tend to knock my socks off a bit, and can shrink me into this tiny ball of bitterness, which I hate, because I have nothing to be bitter about. But anyway, there you were on the couch, with the children snug in bed and the kitchen cleaned (cleaned!), and you were happy to see me. I love it when you wrap me all up and tell me that I'm your friend, because you make me feel special and like I'm good and I'm doing things alright. And even though we ram heads sometimes and get all uppity with one another, I like to think how wrong that guy was who told me "Good luck with that" after asking what your sign was and what my sign was. Because your Capricorn and my Sagittarius make a pretty good team. And I love you.

Love,

Kel

Books That Gutted Me

When I finished reading Cormac McCarthy's The Road, I wasn't quite certain how it was that my heart was still beating.

Because I was convinced that someone had entered my house and beaten me to death with a baseball bat. I seriously closed the book, put it next to me on the couch, and then proceeded to feel my skull, because it had to be concave somewhere, so sound was the beating I took. I kept feeling around. Where is the valley where my head was bashed in? Where is it?

-Spoiler alert-

I also cried, but this might be because I knew Viggo Mortensen would be playing the father in the movie, and Viggo = hot. Even dirty and stanky and half-mad with starvation, Viggo = hot. And, if you read the book, you know how Father/Viggo ends up.

Which, sad!

All my cheeky talk is taking away from the fact that I found the book to be quite powerful, and I'm very serious when I say I did have to sit there and digest it all after I finished it. That story had to make its way around the bowels of my brain, and then I cried, and I don't meant to suggest that my tears were brain poop.

Gah! This isn't working!

It's difficult trying to say you enjoyed a work of fiction about post-apocalyptic America. Because enjoy isn't the correct word. I can't say I enjoyed reading a book about a father and son trying to make their way someplace, any place, through the barren, burned-out environment, and along the way, trying heartily to avoid the numerous bands of cannibals that perhaps set up shop where the old Wal-Mart used to be. It was hard to read, and I did feel a bit like some post-novel therapy was in order. But I was still glad I got through it.

I felt very similarly after reading John Hersey's Hiroshima, because reading about the level of death and destruction brought about by the dropping of the atomic bomb will do that.

Ditto for Lauren Slater's Welcome to My Country, and Susana Kaysen's Girl Interrupted, because if you've spent any amount of time here, you'd know that I'm all over that depression lit, with good reason! Both were crucial reads at a time when I needed smart people to validate what I'd been enduring, and I was grateful for having encountered both stories.

Junot Diaz's book The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao was also a killer. A good killer, a sexy killer, where all your encouraging energy goes to a morbidly obese, fantasy-obsessed teen. Moving back and forth in time, you get a horrifyingly clear picture of how far the death and destruction of a brutal dictatorship (Trujillo in the Dominican Republic) spreads, and how many people are affected.

What I want to know is what books really got to you? Which did you put down but not forget about?

Depression in Winter

There comes a little space between the south
side of a boulder
and the snow that fills the woods around it.
Sun heats the stone, reveals
a crescent of bare ground: brown ferns,
and tufts of needles like red hair,
acorns, a patch of moss, bright green...

I sank with every step up to my knees,
throwing myself forward with a violence
of effort, greedy for unhappiness --
until by accident I found the stone,
with its secret porch of heat and light,
where something small could luxuriate, then
turned back down my path, chastened and calm.

Jane Kenyon, Depression in Winter, from Otherwise: New & Selected Poems

********

Last Thursday, two local teenagers walked down to some high-speed tracks near their houses and wrapped their arms around one another as the Acela barreled into them. It is a story that is still unfolding, and it's something I am thinking about, in all its excruciating detail: the recent death of a classmate, mourning, signs of depression and perhaps plans made somewhat public amongst friends and online.

I think about it now in a dual role: as a parent and as a patient: as someone who has birthed two children that I'd do anything to keep safe and well and whole, and as someone who has seen the inside of a locked unit, been on perhaps a dozen different medications, and who once filled a tub with warm water and got inside with a single blade thinner than a piece of paper.

I've been in a hole, multiple times now, that was so fucking foul, with walls so slippery and unforgiving, that I could swear the very ability to feel something so powerfully bad should have been a killer in and of itself.

But no, you remain alive there, in something you cannot get out of, and depending on your situation, it is usually the mercy of others that takes you to a place that might not be pleasant, but is survivable.

So I don't know about those girls: how long they'd been in that hole or what exactly it was they couldn't extricate themselves from, or why they thought obliterating themselves in front of a train was the only option left. They must have had people who loved them, who could have helped. And it hurts just pondering it, because no matter how removed I am from them and the people that survive them, I remember that sensation. I loved the people I'd be leaving, but holy god in heaven above, I was hurting like a motherfucker.

And it was the mercy of others -- my mother, who took me to the ER, the social workers, the psychiatrists with their magical pills, and those angels of nurses, who sat on my bedside night after night and talked to me -- that got me to some other plane.

What is better? Well, I could wake up and be okay with it. That small thing was huge.

And I wish I could tell those girls that. That shit hurts and it's brutal and sometimes it's so overpowering you do feel like death is preferable. You pine for it like an elusive suitor. It's your boyfriend, death, all dressed up for you and beckoning.

But just like in that poem that Jane Kenyon wrote, deep within the recesses of the bleakest winter, there are places the sun gets, where there is warmth and growth and another chance. And that pain, like the burying cold and biting wind, isn't forever. It may take an army to conquer it, and you may be in the back of the line, letting others wear armor for you and wield their swords, but you'll be there, fighting along in whatever way is possible at the time.

I wish I could tell them that. I wish I could tell them to hold the fuck on.

lucille clifton

photograph

my grandsons
spinning in their joy

universe
keep them turning turning
blacks blurs against the window
of the world
for they are beautiful
and there is trouble coming
round and round and round

**************************


I just read of Lucille Clifton's death, and had to put up a post that was quick (and most likely crappy, because I am so not a literary critic!) though necessary, because her poetry was among the first I was introduced to as an undergraduate a decade and a half ago.

I barely remember the poetry from high school, lines and stanzas from AP English that stuck nowhere, obsessed as I was with fiction -- Salinger and Faulkner and Cather -- because it was the stuff that seemed to sustain me.

What we did read (Eliot, perhaps) struck me as inaccessible, and in that impatient phase of adolescence, I didn't have time for translation.

As a college student, though, things were somewhat different. A new environment, new classmates, professors who were thoroughly eccentric and excited about the things they taught -- all of it combined to make me see things anew. In the first poetry class I took, we had a visitor from a very small Rochester, NY publisher called BOA. The guy was nice enough to bring a boxful of give aways to the class, a sampling of some of their most famous poets. In a move that was uncharacteristically bold of me, as soon as he gave the word, I scrambled to the front and grabbed some.

Dorianne Laux, Li-Young Lee, Lucille Clifton...all poets we had learned about in class, read aloud, and started to appreciate. Laux and Lee tended towards the erotic, or, at least their most popular poems did, so their books were swallowed up first. But the handful of Clifton's poems we had worked on struck me as important, and went beyond issues addressing the surge of hormones we were all mired in, so I picked up her book quilting: poems 1987-1990.

The poem about her grandsons at the top of this post captured perfectly both the beauty of childhood and the inability that adults have in always keeping them safe.

In a poem about the Walnut Grove Plantation, she addresses the men and women buried in the cemetery:

among the rocks
at walnut grove
your silence drumming
in my bones,
tell me your names.

nobody mentioned slaves
and yet the curious tools
shine with your fingerprints.
nobody mentioned slaves
but somebody did this work
who had no guide, no stone,
who moulders under rock.

tell me your names,
tell me your bashful names
and i will testify

************************

And when writing about a possible hysterectomy, Clifton laments losing her uterus:

no
they want to cut you out
stocking i will not need
where i am going
where am i going
old girl
without you
uterus
my bloody print
my estrogen kitchen
my black bag of desire

************************
I remember being struck by how she turned conventional thought on the menstrual cycle (painful, tiresome, burdensome mess) on its head, and celebrated it instead. (Okay, it wasn't a complete celebration, but she still provided a slightly different way of viewing one's period.) It felt fairly radical, at 18, to read this:

to my last period

well girl, goodbye,
after thirty-eight years.
thirty-eight years and you
never arrived
splendid in your red dress
without trouble for me
somewhere, somehow.

now it is done,
and i feel just like
the grandmothers who,
after the hussy has gone,
sit holding her photograph
and sighing, wasn't she
beautiful? wasn't she beautiful?

********************************

It is such a pleasure to read her. Because I can think back and know that she is one of the reasons I like what I like, and why I continued to take poetry classes and read poetry. Her words are one of the reasons I didn't turn away from poetry or continue to label it as lofty and unnecessarily vague. I hope she's at peace.

A Letter

Dear Sarah Palin,




Sincerely,

Kelly

Truckin'

In the midst of last night's darkness, somehow my brain concocted quite a story that played out, bizarrely, while I slumbered.

Dave had ditched historic preservation as a career and had taken up driving a big rig. My heart was broken as I said goodbye to him, running next to the truck as it took off, bringing who knows what kind of haul where. Wherever deliveries are made in the dream world, I guess. Or maybe the lure of cash was taking him to the Ice Road, ready to brave Alaska's weather systems and a highway system set up on a frozen lake, all for a big payout. Wherever he was going, I wasn't very happy.

We were also living in an enormous house. The foyer and living room were positively cavernous. The ceilings must have been 30 feet high, and at the top I could see the popcorn-like bubbles of stucco. How are we ever going to paint this, I was thinking And how does one decorate walls in a room like this? Really lengthy tapestries is the thought that ran through my head before the another thought struck me: I was alone with the kids for some length of time that I wasn't aware of.

I've gone great gaps of time without remembering dreams. I don't know if this is good or bad. I don't know what this means about my sleep patterns either. But whenever I start to have strange dreams that I remember vividly, I always think that I'm knocked up.

The night that I discovered I was pregnant with Hannah, I dreamed I was in the woods at my in-laws house, alone. It was snowy and dark and I was in short sleeves, but I wasn't scared at all. I wasn't even cold. I was just moving. And all I could hear were the sounds I made, the swishing through the snow and whatever was buried under foot. Something was happening. It was weird and uncharted and I didn't know quite what to make of it.

When I was pregnant with Lillian, I had home invasion dreams. Gone were the vague adventure dreams of something new, replaced by the need to protect and the fear of being unable to. And so once, during the night, two men and a woman pushed their way into our house and I felt one's hand wrap around my arm. It was the opposite of promise, with my brain intent on feeding my nightmares. One 20-month old in a crib next door, and something tiny growing within, and I was ready to do battle. But what if the fight wasn't fair?

I don't hear much from the girls about their dreams. When Lillian reports something, it's always the same. I went swimming with Ariel, she says. And I had lunch with all the princesses.

But that's what you dreamed last night, I tell her.

Yes, she says. I'm a very lucky dreamer.

Sometimes she talks in her sleep. Once, not too long ago, I heard her yell out, I don't love you anymore! You're not my friend! When I tried to tell her this the next morning, she would hear nothing of it. The concept of being asleep and talking was too much for her.

This morning I shared my dreams with Dave and Hannah as we sat on the couch. Both seemed entirely disinterested by the tractor trailer driving and the enormous new house filled with the former owner's furniture. I think there's a lot there to be mined. Maybe, though, not quite as much as could fit in the back of one of those Kane is Able semis.

A Hermitage of One's Own

I'm slogging through the life of Thomas Merton right now.

I say 'slogging' because he writes incredibly dense sentences like "Nevertheless, after a couple of months of it, I got to a state where phrases like 'the Good, the True, and the Beautiful' filled me with a kind of suppressed indignation, because they stood for the big sin of Platonism: the reduction of all reality to the level of pure abstraction, as if concrete, individual substances had no essential reality of their own, but were only shadows of some remote, universal, ideal essence filed away in a big-card index somewhere in heaven, while the demi-urges milled around the Logos piping their excitement in high, fluted, English intellectual tones."

I mean, Merton say what?

And I probably should be posting this on the religion thing I got going on elsewhere, but listen, I'm gonna channel my high school biology teacher and yell out in a voice clearly on the verge of a nervous breakdown: If you don't like it you can leave!

(To which I promptly laughed and almost got kicked out of class. Seriously, I had a laughing problem. Always laughed at the WORST TIMES EVER.)

If you don't know, Thomas Merton was raised with no particular religious background, but found Catholicism in college and converted. He later joined the Trappists in Gethsemani and promptly became one of the most famous monks evah. (I just skipped a whole hell of a lot of background there.) This because he had quite the literary proclivity and at the encouragement of his superior, wrote his memoir The Seven Storey Mountain, from which the lengthy sentence I quoted above was taken.

At a later point, Merton had a hermitage built on the grounds of the monastery, providing him with a means for greater solitude. (This part isn't within the book I'm reading. But whatevs.)

And this is actually the reason why I'm writing here. Because I'd kind of like to have a hermitage.

I was actually thinking that it should go in the place where Dave is planning on building the girls a playhouse this summer. While co-opting that space for myself will not win me mother of the year, it might win me a few moments of Merton-like solitude.

I'm not sure how I would outfit it, though. Spare and bare, a la a monk's abode? Basic but with a few luxuries, like a pillow or two? And what, exactly, would I do in there? Simply hide? Read? Sit with eyes focused on a woody knot in one of the planks, and stare until my eyes water and burn?

One of the things about parenthood is that when you do get a moment for yourself, you tend to not know how to spend it. How many times have you heard a parent say that they had a block of time to do something, alone, and then they ended up spending a decent portion of that time actually deciding what to do?

So who knows? Maybe I would just sit there, but I imagine just sitting there might feel pretty good anyway.

Also, I would love the chance to say, "Pardon me children, but mommy is going out to the hermitage."

If you could go all Thomas Merton on the world, and create your own getaway on your own property, what would you outfit it with? And what would you do there?