750words March 14 2015 ~ Tequila and Transplanting Shock

Yesterday I wrote of whales and bricks. Today, while this two-story townhouse casts cooling shade over the backyard, I should be pruning pelagoniums, removing the once broad but now thrashed and wind-shriveled leaves on the banana tree Marcelo planted, soaking the ground to dig up dozens of cana shoots, reducing the spread of red apple—lush succulent that it is—with its fiery pink blooms so loved by the bees. Instead, I’m writing.

Thus far, with the exception of one day, I’ve maneuvered 750 words plus to the page. I blame tequila for the missed day. The thing with tequila is this: It makes a person mis-remember. Or not remember at all. The thing with the missed day is that I know I began my 750 and believed I’d completed them only to find, on the following day, I hadn’t. This lapse may have been age-related, but I choose to blame it on the tequila. Why? Because tequila intake is by choice; aging and memory loss due to aging—is not. By opting for tequila as cause, I avoid the unavoidable proof of a failing brain. Did I, in fact, have tequila on the third of March, the missing day in question? I haven’t a clue …

By May, I will be gone from here, moved to a different place. I will miss my garden: its sandy paths through the red apple groundcover; the palm trees Fernando planted when they were mere pups—barely a foot tall—not even close to the tall dogs they’re meant to become; yucca starts that took hold in this ground after Jennifer brought them to me; creamy white blooms of the calla lilies happily shaded beneath a wall of magenta bougainvillea; mounds and leafy galloping stems of white, purple and pink African daisies; vining tendrils of orange and yellow nasturtium … yes, I will miss all of this. This greening and growing. The chaos of it all. I’ll even miss the weeds.

There are things I can take, dig up and replant at the new place. The double-orange hibiscus must leave Rancho Santini with me just as it left Hacienda Villa de Floresta and the tiny casita where I lived when Jo Ann delivered it into my hands as a house-warming-bienvenidos-welcoming gift. For a time, that hibiscus and I lived at Terraznos in a big party house on the hill across from Calafia; for another spell, the hibiscus in its pot adorned the front porch of the pink house in Rosarito centro before moving with me to Plaza del Mar’s Los Arcos section into Doug and Anna’s charming cabana (which no longer exists). Another move—up the hill from the cabana—the hibiscus occupied an upstairs patio with a view of sea and dolphins at play while I occupied a studio apartment and enjoyed the comforts and friendship of my landlady, Ruth.

So many moves (five) in so few years (three) … it’s a wonder she’s survived. (I think of this particular hibiscus with its double-orange blossoms as female, representational of Judith Hollahan, a precious friend who lost a nasty battle with cancer before a sufficiency of tick-marks decorated her bucket list, a friend who loved “orange” in every possible way—from nail polish to crockery, lipstick to flowers—and is, very likely, the reason I signed the first lease on the tiny casita south of the border. Judith’s death, a few weeks before I traveled south to “visit” a friend, caused me to consider my own “bucket list.” Living in Mexico may not have been on the list when I arrived—but it was once I got here. End of story.)

For three and a half years, I’ve put down roots at Rancho Santini. The double-orange went into the ground here; she’s blossomed as never before, happy beside a deep-pink blooming sister I purchased in early 2014. I’ll take them when I go, dig a hole in new ground, nurture them with food and water, watch them grow, become lovely again after the shock of transplanting. I’ll do the same with the flax, with the blue agave (a gift from Fernando), with the calla lily and new starts of African daisies.

Hmm … all this “missing” business filling the screen … Am I suffering an early onset of the “shock of transplanting”? If so, let it be. Let it come. Bring me a shot of tequila as the sun sets. Let me grieve for what I’m leaving behind. And forget. There’s new ground waiting, a new place to settle into, take root, blossom as, perhaps, I haven’t yet done. I can become lovely again. I will. In time.

Swirling

Swirling.

via Swirling.

750words March 13, 2015 ~ Whales and Bricks

On May 1, 2015, I will live in a different house with a different view of the ocean. Olga has said the whales cruise close to the shore there as they make their way north from the lagoon at Guerrero Negro, close enough to see the babies jump and play.

Last night I fell asleep thinking of Guerrero Negro and the baby whale who rested above the water on his mother’s back, offering those of us in the panga (boat) his or her gaze from an innocent blue eye, that eye large and unwavering as it scanned us, the mother whale holding place alongside the boat and near enough for our human hands to reach out and stroke her offspring.

I thought about humans, our distrust of our own species, and tried to imagine myself with an infant or toddler or juvenile child, the child cradled or held by the hand as we approached a gathering of people never previously met. I imagined the stance we might take to observe those strangers—perhaps wearing turbans, feathered headdresses, striped muslin gowns, denim pants with the crotch bagged down to the knees, backward ball caps, pink spiked hair, safety pins laced through lips and/or eyebrows, loin cloths, less than loin cloths, etc.—and if I could or would allow them to touch and run hands over my baby/child/loved one.

I wouldn’t. This kind of behavior is not in my DNA.

Then I tried imagining introducing my offspring to a flock of geese, a family of coyotes or orangutans, a colony of ants, a hillside warren of rabbits, bears (any color or size), alligators, ostriches, elephants, yaks, racoons and any number of other terrestrial creatures.

Imagination failed. Although, I must say, not as dramatically as it failed while visualizing sharing (introducing) my young to strangers of my own species.

Eventually, I drifted into sleep. No dreams come to mind as I write this. If they came, they came quietly and left on tiptoe.

Now, I consider the days until I’ll live at the new location. Will the gray whales still be migrating north with their young—those miraculously inquisitive and trusting creatures? Will I take the time to watch for them, plant a chair of adequate height near the balustraded property edge and rest elbows on the top railing, binoculars in hand? Will I need binoculars if they migrate as near the shore as Olga has indicated? Of course, I may miss the migration north. The weather is unseasonably hot and sightings along the coast occur with frequency according to friends with such views.

Movement. Migration. Trust. How we glide through life currents. How different are lives—from whale to woman to child to Monarch butterfly? First steps. First flights. First breach by a youthful gray whale among Guerrero Negro’s calm waters or from the swells of the blue-gray-green Pacific Ocean.

Later steps and glides and slides—tempos at passages ever swifter—until days seemingly pass as if seconds, months as if days.

At 68, recent years are a tumble of formed bricks at my feet, bricks shaped by choices I’ve made and fired by blazing experiences. All recyclable. Nothing is lost. Even the dust of what was once mortar flies off to another horizon, becomes part of another landscape, or sediment, cool under its blanket of water. What does that mean? What am I trying to voice with this misshapen pile of rubble meant to be a metaphor of time (my time) and experience, what I’ve built out of life and what I’ve either (1) allowed to crumble through negligence, (2) intentionally dismantled, or (3) witnessed the forces of nature disassemble.

A line from Sense & Sensibility, a line I won’t quote properly comes to mind: Nothing is lost which cannot be again found.

I think that’s what I’m trying to voice. What is lost, what tumbles down—can be again found, rebuilt. The shape won’t be the same; textures and colors will differ … but maybe, just maybe, new configurations will wear more comfortably, stand stronger against whatever nature may throw their way. Who can say?

Finally, what does all of this have to do with the whales? Let’s say it has to do with their ability to “trust” what’s out there when they breach, break the horizon line with great exhalations, spume rising all but invisibly against a backdrop of blue; it has to do with their great gray-blue inquisitive eyes; with their migratory patterns and timing, their generational runs north and south, south and north.

I’ll be heading farther south shortly (six weeks is a minute these days). Yes, let’s say the whales are the vehicle I’ve opted for to carry the metaphorical bricks of a life I’ve chosen (and continue to choose) to live. May not work for every reader. Doesn’t have to—so long as it works for me. And at the moment, it does.

750words Apr 14, 2014 ~ Gone Astray. The Words.

Gone astray. The words. They were there in the middle of a pasture of green thoughts and when I looked off in search of one, all the others disappeared. If I had a boss, I don’t know what he might say. Might even fire me from this current position I hold. If he did, how he would go about advertising for a replacement?

Wanted: Reasonable speller although, with spellcheck as a back-up, reasonable may be asking more than is required. Must know the difference between “where” and “were.” Would also be to applicant’s advantage if the “to” “too” and “two” problem of which to choose is a known. Dress codes are not applicable for fieldwork during word herd tending. Must provide own imagination and arrive on time with details at the ready to fill stanchions placed here and there at the edge of the meadow. Employer prefers applicants experienced in word culling, a history of separating weaker members of the herd from the stronger. Sturdy yet comfortable shoes will be a plus as the words often stray out of sight and into surrounding woods. A stick is also advised as the beasts are sometimes stubborn, unwilling to move without a good poke or solid thwack of encouragement. Word counts at the end of each shift are a must. The herd will fluctuate in numbers—this is a side effect of good husbandry and expertise, as mentioned earlier, in culling methods. Noxious “thats” and articles (“the” and “a”) should be weeded from otherwise nutritious green swards of clever clover whenever possible. Articles are often difficult to see; applicant should have a good back for stooping low, knee pads for crawling and keeping his/her nose to the ground in search of these pesky interlopers. Pay is next to nothing and what is paid is offered not in cash but as barter. Applicant works the herd of words with applicant’s imagination and receives, in trade for hours and frustrations, permission to work.

I don’t have a boss. Other than me. So what’s all the above nonsense about? Finding a new me to shepherd the words? Yes. I think that’s exactly what it’s about. I’ve embarrassed myself. Vanity. Thinking what I write, how I herd the words and cull and cajole and spoil the words is better than it is. Thinking when I enter them at the State Fair I’ll be the one winning blue ribbons—not Best in Show—but blue, red or white ribbons to hang on the walls of imagination. Marks of success. Kudos from friends. Applause. Atta-girls. Ovations. Silly me.

I have comfortable sturdy shoes for chasing down and rounding up what’s gone missing. I also have stone bruises on both feet. And worn out knees from crawling through the lushness of what’s good to weed out what’s bad. Additionally, my vision’s gone. Not entirely, but very much depleted, very much dulled. If I can’t see the bad, how can I pull it out by the roots?

You can see my dilemma, can’t you? How difficult it is to lace-up the boots of brown writing and tie off the laces in neat double-knotted bows, to trudge into the valley where words huddle in groups hungry and waiting for stanchions to be filled with details I’ll haul there in buckets. They shouldn’t be so heavy, these details. They’re only airy images of places visited (Italy, Greece, Mexico, Brooklyn, Raleigh, Ann Arbor, Jamaica), houses lived in (on the ranch, above the college, behind Thrifty’s Drugs, near the creek, at ocean’s edge), emotions felt (rage, betrayal, pride, love, love, love), and scents–the perfumes and sweat worn by the living and dead. Yet when they stack upon one another for what seems eternity, they bring this writer to her knees (and not in search of worrying articles).

Foolish writer, me. Wanting a cheering section. What I need to do is imagine myself as a cross-country skier, alone, in the cold, exhilarated, clouds of moist air pushed from my lungs leading the way up a hill and down a slope on a path nonexistent before my skis made visible tracks. Alone, working hard. Managing the trail from station to station. From one cup of steaming hot story to the next.

Or a surfer. I could be on a board, feet dangled in the water, watching the horizon from a seated position. Watching the white caps if there’s wind. Watching gulls soar and swoop. Waiting for words to roll in swells. Words I can ride from the deep to shore.

750words Feb 12 2015 ~ Ellen Bass & Me & Two Odes

Because I’m stuck I’m writing words not mine to establish a pattern of sound and rhythm. The initial words belong to Ellen Bass, the poem is:

Ode to the God of Atheists

The god of atheists won’t burn you at the stake
or pry off your fingernails. Nor will it make you
bow or beg, rake your skin with thorns,
or buy gold leaf or stained-glass windows.
It won’t insist you fast or twist
the shape of your sexual hunger.
There are no wars fought for it, no women stoned for it.
You don’t have to veil your face for it
or bloody your knees.
You don’t have to sing.

The plums bloom extravagantly,
the dolphins stitch sky to sea.
Each pebble and fern, pond and fish
is yours whether or not you believe.

When fog is ripped away
just as a rust-red shadow slides across the moon,
the god of atheists isn’t rewarding you
for waking in the middle of the night
and shivering barefoot in the field.

This god is not moved by the musk
of incense or bowls of oranges,
the mask brushed with cochineal,
polished rib of the lion.
Eat the macerated leaves
of the sacred plant. Dance
till the stars blur to a spangly river.
Rain, if it comes, will come.
This god loves the virus as much as the child.

*

So, the above is the Ellen Bass poem. Now to come up with an appropriate subject other than the god of atheists … and not a god. I think I’ll run with a house. The house of (what?) … The house of love? The house of death? The house of loneliness? The house of happiness?

The House of Happiness

The house of happiness will make your face ache
and drum songs on your sternum. It’s not like the house
of sad, of lonely, of broken,
or wooded with coffins satin-lined.
It makes no promises nor expects
cartoon hearts to float from your eyes.
There are no window curtains, no locks on its doors.
You don’t have to knock your knuckles raw
or ring bloody bells.
You do need to step in.

The rooms are organza,
the decor is vanilla ice cream.
Each sofa and lamp, bed and bowl
is an apple or bon-bon treat.

When day becomes evening,
when lavender spokes wheel the dome of sky,
the house of happiness won’t begrudge you
for walking the shores of midnight, or returning
with sand-glittered feet.

This house welcomes what falls away,
the silica shine of journeys,
the nacre-blushed debris,
totems of chocolate.
Sleep the dreamed sleep
of lambs curled against ewes. Laugh
till stones burble songs down high mountains.
Tears, if they come, will spring.
This house welcomes you, welcomes every lost one.

*

Ok. It’s done. Unedited, but done for the moment–these words replacing a master poet’s words. Ellen Bass is fantastic. Not to be trifled with, not to be matched. Ode to the God of Atheists is a poem found in Like a Beggar — a book full of exquisite work. An apology seems in order:

Dear Ellen,
Forgive me for trespassing, wandering onto your property, taking the paths you’ve created and redecorating your lovely garden of words with different bouquets. Without permission or invitation, I’ve spent time with a blanket thrown down in your forest. Will it help if I mention Prayer, the poem gracing the back cover of Like a Beggar? The opening line: “Once I wore a dress liquid as vodka.” (Who can resist wanting more?) Will it help if I encourage every reader of this flimsy blog of mine to buy Like a Beggar? Such a feast, this book. Such a feast.

I have no excuse for my actions here, other than a desire to improve my skills as a wordsmith. Who better to follow than you? (Yes, Mary Oliver … but her books are not within reach at the moment.)

Respectfully, lynn

*

It’s a thing I do, this imitation of other writers. I’m never certain about the right or wrong of my efforts. I don’t want or mean to plagiarize. I try not to directly repeat the words of others. It’s the rhythm, the sounds, the abrupt change of directions, the use of similes and metaphors, adjectives, adverbs, etc. that I go for–or the absence of same. It’s the syllables, the beat, the simplicity or complexity of syntax, the story arc, the movement from A to B to C, the assonance, alliteration, the esses and efs and hisses, the magic of words a maestra has spellbound me with–and I just can’t seem to stop reaching for that.

750words Feb 11 2015 ~ The Dress Form

Once upon a time there was a dress form made of wandering leaves cut from tin and rigid iron which stood near the window and waited. Rusted bronze in color, the form wore a narrow belt of hammered tin and a pendant in the shape of a clock that opened and could hold a paper cutout heart or a picture of someone dear, or both, along with a lock of hair and a button from a favorite shirt.

The form was headless. Its bottom edge was where a woman’s legs ended once they went all the way up. Crossbars ran from one side of the bottom edge of the form to the other. Where the bars crossed, they rested upon a hollow iron column almost the size of a vacuum cleaner wand. The column supported the form and stood vertical and straight with four curvilinear legs which ended in curly-ques on the floor and kept the form from tilting or tipping over when the weight of the sun slapped it with day’s flat palm of light.

All day long the form waited, tin leaves never wilting, tin belt without a pucker or sag. Its shoulders kept very good posture through every disappointment, every new mote of dust that settled atop the rounded surfaces of rigid iron, plus all the tickling shifts of light as day walked up the sky and over the roof of the casa where the form was kept.

Because the form was headless, it could not sigh. Air was immobile, did not move outward or inward, was simply there, within the form, surrounding the form, and, because the form was skinless, it could be seen through from all sides—the leaves twining its back like a visible echo of the leaves twining its front. In essence, it was as empty as the clock-shaped pendant worn about its neck: a hollow chamber made of vertical spines held in line by the hammered belt and the absent hands of an artisan who once upon a time sculpted the form of an invisible woman.

The form’s patience was endless as it waited through the morning light, the afternoon shade, the deeper shades of evening, the dark balmy nights pin-pricked by stars and an indecisive moon which showed itself incrementally only to hide itself in the same manner. All the form wanted was to be used. To be useful. To carry the weight of a shawl or a shirt or a dress. A summer scarf woven of chiffon and light as a feather would have pleased the form. Was it asking so very much to sense such a scarf’s supple softness draping its posture-perfect shoulders, the drape of its length running the length of its meandering leaves, perhaps the finely rolled narrow hem of one end tossed casually around its headless neck? These, or any one of these sensations, would’ve brought comfort to the form.

But the form’s mistress, who once crafted sundry items the form could support, no longer busied herself with such things. Rather than a crafter of textiles, its mistress had given over such industry to become a crafter of words. The click of knitting needles had been replaced by the tickety-tick of the keyboard, the construction of syllables ricocheting about the room where the form waited, and the plumes of smoke rising from the numerous cigarettes the form’s mistress smoked during her frenzied attempts to shape words into stories.

If the form owned a head for worry and angst, for whining and winges about its plight of existence, it might have expressed by thought or a tilted angle of its stand the injustice of being left idle, the unfairness of words chained together which could not be worn, the waste of her mistress’s imagination on airy nothings. What were words, anyway? What made them so important? They couldn’t be fitted over the form, couldn’t be straight-pinned into pleasant and pleasing designs, couldn’t decorate the form’s elegant vining of tin leaves, the meandering ways of pressed metals. If the form owned a head capable of emotions, it would be vexed.

As it is, the form doesn’t own any such head. It doesn’t own legs—only a stiffly elegant four-footed stand. It can’t run away. Can’t show its displeasure in regard to being unused, ignored, left by a window to gather dust and sun in the morning, pinpricks of light by night. It might think, if it could, how fine it would be if stories and poems were semi-solid things—items woven from silk and wool, from bamboo fibers and flax—articles woven with structure and beauty, their endings evenly hemmed with perfectly spaced similes, their beginnings draped and tossed lightly about this waiting form’s headless neck.

My Brother Never Had Roosters

I’m convinced Daddy and Mama should never have let them take the roosters from my heels. Those birthmarks must have been red and raised and crowing to be removed from my tiny newborn feet in 1947 for Mama to have agreed.

When I wonder about those roosters now, I have no one to ask. Mama’s only surviving sibling doesn’t recall them at all. Eighty now, he remembers my shoes too white, my dresses too ruffled, my hair too perfectly parted and bangs too perfectly cut. With the exception of Mama’s boring devotion, he remembers no flaws, o birthmarks of any kind, no rooster marking one heel, much less two.

Imagination allows me to re-establish them there, one to each heel, raised like a delicate cameo but in the shapes of full-silhouetted birds. Wings aflap and beaks ajar, they welcome the lines of light that widen to run up blue-black nights, announcing arrivals of breaking days. Try as I may to have these rooster-marks face each other in mirrored affectations, they refuse, adamantly crow toward my left, regardless of where the east and the sun might reside.

What can compare with the imagination of an old writer missing what she was born adorned with? Not much, not when I give those birthmarks personality and substance. Never petulant, never wraiths, they’re rosy as coxcombs overall in color and, being of my heels, possessed of the same sort of magic as, say, Hermes, the crippled messenger of wing’ed feet.

Were my roosters interpreted as harbingers of dark times ahead by my parents? Did their surgical removals leave me with blind feet? shorn wings? No. Their removal left me with infant feet which would later be able to wear shoes without roosters squawking out blisters with every step. With or without those birthmark birds, I was gifted with mother-clucking adoration.

Above all—I was adored.

Out of that great deprevations of the Depression came showers of protection, one set of eyes upon me and then the next and the next. All those pairs of eyes were connected to smiles and coos and no doubts, none, that I could be anything, everything, all. They were a system, a flock and a herd and a gaggle of care—grandparents, aunts, uncles.

There were cousins, of course. Paul and Joe of the early years. Boys. Different. Somehow outside the magic, beyond the protective lore. They didn’t know to turn shoes at the end of the bed to carry off menstrual cramps. They knew nothing of chicken bones and threads buried in holes I dug and dared not look back upon after circling thrice and walking away—the cure for the removal of warts (which disappeared over that summer between third and fourth grades). Yet those boys, my cousins, were part of the cures, of what it took to ease me from who I was, or might maybe have been, into the woman I became. I was as good as they were. As fast. As strong. As fierce. As kind. And as fair.

From brand new with my surgically flawless heels to fourteen, I moved in the circle of No Doubt Whatsoever About Anything Under The Sun. I had a little light that I let shine every Sunday in church and Sister Martha (Brother Benton’s daughter) had a flannel-covered storyboard: pale blue felt made the cut-out Mary; dark blue felt made the robe Joseph wore; the donkey was brown. Books of the Old and New Testaments rolled off my tongue like birdsong. Catholics were wrong on account of confessions; Seventh Day Adventists were wrong on account of their days were confused; Baptists were wrong on account of some reason I cannot recall; atheists were an abomination; agnostics were not defined. My brother Randy and I were given dimes to drop in the basket when it passed down our row; we were meant to tithe. I was oldest and did; he was younger and bought jaw breakers with his.

Randy never had roosters, was never heel-marked with crowing for a next sunrise, a next new beginning. At Easter Egg Hunts, he did fine, though he never earned a single small zippered testament with a color photo of Jesus in the Garden for memorizing The Beatitudes or any of David’s Psalms.

I had them, the little testaments and the roosters. I don’t anymore. But …

If I believed in heaven and, believing, made it there, I can’t help imagining these heels would resurrect those old roosters, wings aflap. Mama would see them and know I’d arrived, intact.

Bill and Opal – Supper Time

(Retrieved from “Short Sketches” collection, circa 2011)

My father is there, at the table. It’s a chrome table with a gray Formica surface patterned like fractured ice that’s refrozen to leave an idea of lines. The padded chairs are upholstered with plastic to match the tabletop. Where the piping has worn through or pulled away, Mom’s applied duct tape and where the duct tape has curled up along some edges the adhesive residue is dark as fingernail dirt. I imagine Walter Cronkite is offering the six o’clock news in the background. We can’t see the blond television set from the table, but once Daddy comes in the front door from the fields the t.v.’s turned on. After dinner, boots off, his 5’11” height will stretch long on the Montgomery Ward brown plastic-that-looks-like-leather sleeper sofa.

When Mom said, “Supper’s ready, Bill,” he came to the table. And when Mom clears away the serving bowls and dinner plates, all except his, he lingers with his iced tea and cigarette. Even when Mom brings an ashtray and places it next to his used dinner plate, Daddy still uses the plate for an ashtray. “No use in dirtying that, Opal,” he says. “This’ll do fine.” Sometimes he doesn’t say, “This’ll do,” and only gives her a look with the words.

It’s a kind look. His eyes are a clear blue and the sort of shape that is open and unsuspecting, plus they carry dark lashes and brows which seem to communicate a tender heart. His voice is, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, gentle, patient, coaxing.

Mom’s returned look is more often than not, vexed. She could grab his plate up and insist he use the ashtray. I’m fourteen and can’t recall she ever has. She’s not the insisting type. Nor is he.

By the time Daddy leaves the table, there might be three butts stubbed out in the creases of gravy left on his plate. It’s not pretty.

I’m in the kitchen washing dishes by then unless my homework load is heavy. Mom always asks. I’m always honest. When it is, I’ve claimed an end of the table the moment the dishes are cleared. The light’s the best there for homework and the fractured-ice surface is smooth which helps my handwritten papers in the area of legibility.

I get good grades. I make the Honor Roll every quarter and semester. I’m a cheerleader at Jurupa Junior High School. I jointly hold the freshman class office of Activities. I am 5’8” and long-limbed like Daddy. I love to dance, like Mom.

Mom and I play at swing-dancing in the kitchen when I take a break from study and she takes a break from toweling dry and putting away dishes. Sometimes I teach her the moves my best friend, Bonnie, and I have practiced after watching American Bandstand. We do The Stroll to Fats Domino’s Walking to New Orelans; we do the Peppermint Twist. There are dances at the Y and there are school dances—but the boys are all still growing boys and who among them wants to ask a string bean like me? Not many, for sure. And not often. So it’s kitchen-time dancing between cups and saucers finding their shelves and algebraic equations puzzling the gray fractures of a smooth tabletop while Daddy, finally removed from the chrome dining chair, changes the channel to Ward Bond and Wagon Train, props his head on his arm and stacks his stocking feet on the sofa end. After a little while, I hear him snore. And after a little while longer, the pink cinderblock house on Etiwanda closes its lights and nods off.

750words Jan 31 2015 — I’m Pretty Sure It’s Not Art

When I think about all the things I’ve made (there must be hundreds, thousands), I go off course (as with that parenthetical, and this one) because I can’t settle on where to take this sentence, end this thought.

By “made” I mean constructed, built, brought into being via needle and thread, embroidery floss, hoop, yarn and hook, canvas and brush, oils, acrylics, watercolors, sanded paper and pastels, sewing machines, scissors, fabric, beads, looms, buttons, white glue, mortar, concrete, draw knives, logs, seeds and tubers and bulbs, saplings, cuttings, mulch, clay pots, broken china, this womb, classes and jobs and neighborhoods (where friendships bud and bloom), paper, pen, keyboard and words.

With words I’ve built poems, moments, emotions, scenes, stories, landscapes, towns, farms and congregations. I’ve built people from scratch, borrowing fragments from real lives (the broken-veined nose of an old farmer who drank too much, an eyelid that refuses to open from a George Carlin comedic routine, hands and forearms dusted with flower and the knobby knuckles of a grandmother, anger from an aunt’s husband, pathetic self-pity from myself), and patched them into singular beings. I’ve transplanted a beating heart into the breast of the ocean, given swells and breakers a pulse, drowned a dolphin with six-pack carrier plastic, and shared the imagined life of a rock.

With broken china I’ve built benches and bird baths, embedded horseshoes and bedsprings between concrete rubble and marble chessboards to create patios, sidewalks and planters. Gardens emerged from cuttings and mulch—red bud saplings bloomed cyrise through my Februarys, Aprils and Mays. Flags of iris waved, hollyhocks spired to the house eaves, pink roses fell in cascades from the Trees of Heavenly Light along the road to the creek while corkscrew willow curved paths skyward from the muck of the mosaic’d pond.

The sofa in Grandma Due’s Borger, Texas apartment is where I sat as she taught me to thread a needle, embroider the fur on a kitten and french-knot the centers of daisies. The sofa at Grandma Ivy’s is where she showed me how to loop yarn around a finger to cross my palm for tension and maneuver a metal hook in and out of a chain stitch with single, double, and triple crochets. The sofa in the first house Al and I shared is where I taught myself to knit from book.

Nine years later, he taught me how to straddle a log, lean out as far as arms could reach, snug a draw knife’s sharpened edge into bark at an angle—and pull. Long curls of bark peeled away. Callouses toughened my butt as I slid back along those logs. There were 800 of them. I didn’t work alone. His dad, his brothers, our nine year old son, neighbors—pitched in and peeled. Eventually, we hired help. Eventually, we started bolting logs together. Eventually, we had a lodgepole pine home two stories tall and heated with burning love.

From this womb, three babies had their beginnings. (Passive construction is the only way I know how to describe my part in their becoming. I provided fertile territory for seeds to take root and thrive.)

Friendships sprang up across the hills and valleys of this life.

How do I take credit for these? I can’t.

I can’t take credit for any creation listed above. Oh, I did become a tool, I suppose, for continuing with a craft. Maybe a bit more than a tool. Maybe a partner … and still a partner … with Grandmothers—Emma and Elsie—with Mama, Daddy, my children (and theirs), friends, lovers, lovers, friends. But the things—all the things—wouldn’t be, would not have become without the hands-on help and direction of others.

So many others.

My children wouldn’t be who they are if it weren’t for who they were to begin with, that mysterious spark of life, that mix of Al and me. My friends wouldn’t be my friends if they didn’t find some redeemable quality in me, if they didn’t have patience with my stubborn side and often moody disposition.

Even these words strewn across the screen wouldn’t amount to much if there weren’t a reader—a partner—taking them in. Like a teeter-totter needs counterweight for the ride to be real, for the rise and the fall to occur, story (or whatever you may want to call this) needs audience. Eyes and minds to decipher what in blue blazes the words may be intended to say. I use the word “may” because the meaning, the base material out of which this construct began, has frayed. Broken threads all over the place. Repairs and alterations are in order. Or not. It could be I’ve built something here. It could be … but … I’m pretty sure it’s not art.

750words Jan 29 2015 — Days like All Night Cantinas

The first month of 2015 is almost a done deal. Two days remain after this one closes its door at midnight. What if days aren’t what they seem and are, instead, like all-night cantinas—with swinging doors and no locks? Wind or a light breeze moves the doors, sets hinges in motion to squeak conversations and remind the folks anchored on chairs and bar stools that things are still in motion: tumbleweeds rolling from somewhere to somewhere else, prairie dogs tidying their underground rooms and possibly tunneling with thoughts of adding an east wing to their domiciles, caterpillars sleeping all cozy within their white cocoons while wings make their way into being and dreams of flight become real.

What if days didn’t end and the dark and light shades of a span of time were nothing more than shadows like the shadows trees along a highway through the forest cast across passengers in a car, across the car itself? Answer: This would still be Day One.

Instead, we move through time and notch its surface with dates by way of numbers and when the numbers reach a particular point—thirty-one for January—we restart the counting with a new governing name. February stands in line, waiting to carry its notches, while March cowers out there, collecting courage for its debut.

Imagination’s a wondrous tool! Depending upon where a mind wants to travel, it can reshape all manner of things. For instance, carving months into branches—each branch the governor (or mayor, if you will) of a town of leaves. The leaves into days, the trees into years, the hundred-branched trees into centuries. Forests, orchards, jungles—all those branches, trunks, roots, and leaves—living and dying, rotting and sprouting again through the course of a long, unending, singular day of light and shadow.

Think about it.

There would be chaos, of course. If time didn’t have markers, didn’t have clocks to chime minutes and hours, didn’t have calendars to X out the days and months and years—how would we know when we’d come of age to collect Social Security? Without a closing bell, how would the brokers know when to stop selling and buying? the bartender at the cantina know when to stop serving drinks? Without a buzzer of some sort, how would horses at the track know when to run? bees in the hive know when to fly out for honey? contestants on Jeopardy! know their time to offer a question was done? Plus all the schedules of subways, buses, submarines, hot air balloons, planes, trains, and space shuttles—where would they be without Stop and Go buttons?

Imagine the pile-up. All that singed silk from the hot air balloon draping a submarine’s coning tower on train tracks near Yellowstone where a buffalo paused to watch a United flight soar into a flock of Canadian honkers. Chaos? Oh yes indeed.

Of course the imaginative flow of my treatise on time has its flaws, is shot through with surrealistic bullets leaving holes an eighteen wheeler could drive through without a scrape. The one-long-and-continuous-day theory can’t hold up, not when the geese get in the way. And the buffalo. These creatures don’t name the incremental parts of time. Even if they could hold a knife in their talons or hooves and manage to score a notch in a metaphorical branch of time, they wouldn’t because what is and isn’t—is internalized. Doesn’t need names. And unnamed, needs no notches.

So what am I trying to say?

I guess it’s this: Sometimes I find myself where I don’t belong (like that damned submarine on a train track near Yellowstone) and can’t figure out how I landed there or how to get back to where I think (imagine) I belong. Other times I’m sure I’m exactly where I ought to be and, BAM! I get knocked right out of the sky. It doesn’t matter if we name time or not. It doesn’t matter if we trod upon a forest floor littered with fallen days or the simple leaves unable to hold onto (or be held by) a branch. The important thing is to be in it (the “it” being time) and drift with its current, whether that current be swift or slow. It’s all in a day’s journey. The rising up, the settling down. All I need do is listen, hear the squeak of this all-night cantina’s doors, dance when I can, continue to step inside this great woven basket with sand bags weighting the sides, watch the colorful stripes fill with hot air, the silk riffle out to sway, expand, carry me above the trees holding decades and eons of this singular day.