This is where I used to...

A peril of being in a place for a long time...one of my themes, day after day...is this odd sense of needing meaning from the architectures I've inhabited year after year. There's a displacement, a recurring mild angst I've been feeling lately when I walk by a place and I think, "my God, I've been walking by this for 30 years."

Walking into the Rec Center last night in the grace of 6 p.m. April daylight, I looked up at the edifice of the Harding Mott building and thought, hmm, is this a beautiful enough building for me? Is it "in" me after all these years? In fact it feels unremarkable, if imposing -- it's a building I walk toward and into time and again and don't feel much of anything. It doesn't lift me up: the predicament being that I have often, often felt ambivalent about myself and my life in the perimeters of this architecture. Wouldn't anyone? Ah, thus it is, isn't it? Does the architecture shape us, or is it we who give the walls and sweeps of brick and mortar meaning? Could a sad and preoccupied woman be unmoved by the arches of Grace Cathedral, for example, a place I've gone with my brother in SF and never failed to be moved?

I did once write a poem about my first husband picking me up at the Harding Mott building after work called "Walking Toward You, October Thursday," and I like that poem. I realize as I remember that poem, a romantic one in which I wanted him to see me smiling as I got to him, that I was in my 30s then and already feeling the lurking threats of domestic predictability, the threat of deadness, the yearning for something special never to end. It was a moment, there in the curving concrete blocks of the Harding Mott building.

And last night, walking toward my yoga class, where I tread in with my yellow ID card and always say hi to the girls behind the counter, and they always say "Have a good workout!" I felt something akin to happiness -- a pleasure in a repeated routine of walking somewhere I always walk and seeing people who always say the same thing to me and of course, knowing that in the unglamorous basement room of the Rec Center I'll be discovering some new muscle, some new alignment, some new challenge, and that when I come out I'll feel...GOOD.

That room always delivers something. Last night Rachelle had us doing a particularly painful stretch, where we pressed our shins backwards against the wall and then tried to straighten up so that our backs and shoulders also touched the wall. I couldn't come close. When she saw us struggling with it she almost yelled, "you've had a lot worse pain than this, people, you've lost family members, you've lost pets, you've had a lot worse pain than this..." I'm smiling as I remember that now. What's a little muscle stretch, what's a pain, even a stretch that made me want to scream? We've all lost shitloads. Take it, she seemed to say, just take it. We've all had pain, pain, pain.

So tonight it happened again. Vickie and I walked by my old house on Seventh Street, the place I lived with my first husband for 15 years. So much happened there -- so many hopes and dreams resided with us there, climbed the stairs every night with us, slept with me, fed me. It was a dangerous place to go tonight. I felt my heart and my throat clench, looking at that house. I couldn't stop looking. It seems so long ago -- ten year now since I moved out on a mild May weekend. There is where I used to live. This is where I used to dream a certain dream, This is where I was thirty, forty, fifty. This is where I stopped being young. This is where I planted morning glories along the back wall and kept a triangular herb garden. This is where I wrote my novel. This is where I wrestled with many demons. This is where I stopped loving my life. This is where I stopped loving that dream. This is where I gave up that dream.

We turned around and walked away from the house. I let Vickie talk about whatever she wanted to talk about. She liked another house, the big one at the dead end. I said I used to know the guy who lived there. It seemed like there were fewer trees, as if the life cycle was up all along the street. One old house was completely gone, the bare lot startling and freshly leveled. I felt sort of hungry, an ache I didn't want to touch, like my thigh screaming against the wall last night. I've had worse pain than that. Take it, just take it.

Eventually we got back onto Avon Street and crossed the little bridge over Gilkey Creek and strode through the park back onto the side I live on now. It was safer being up there, where I have another life, another dream. It used to be when I walked over here I felt unease -- the houses were grander and I felt small and unfulfilled. Now I think I deserve to live over here, where I have matured, where I am seasoned like these solid old domiciles. It's odd the vanities and cravings architecture can satisfy. It's taken me awhile to get here, barely a quarter mile from where I used to live, and I feel something mostly good. I climb the stairs up to bed every night and climb the stairs down in the morning to a kitchen full of light. In my familiar architectures, those that continually echo a nagging past and those that yield beauty and comfort, I'm continually adjusting myself, as in yoga class -- a woman both the same and continually new.

Of spring, plowing, dandelions and the urge to "verse"

April's column for East Village Magazine:

About this time of year, the days lengthening and the last crusts of blackened snow finally melting, my dad used to get overtaken by an uncompromising compulsion. He had to get out and plow some dirt.

My mother found it endearing. She understood he needed to set aside his preacher garb and dig out his overalls from the year before. My parents didn’t always get along but in early April they companionably united in answering the pull of their garden plot. Even if the humus was still a little frosty, they’d be cheerfully harmonious, at least through the planting, with the promise of their crops.

My mother’s bow to spring meant scavenging for early dandelion greens, which she considered a necessary tonic to perk us up after winter’s depletions. She’d toss the greens together with vinegar, a little sugar, chopped bacon and an egg and serve us several rounds of rejuvenating wilted dandelion. When we moved from the country to the city, she complained she couldn’t find enough early dandelion the dogs hadn’t peed on. She never trusted city greens.

But come the springtime planting season, I’m awkwardly reminded I’m no farmer. I didn’t get the gene.

I’m a “political gardener” like I’m a “political lesbian.” That is, I’m happy to support lesbians and gardeners and I’ll do whatever I can to back their rights and clear their path across and over obstacles. I earthily admire and respect their life progressions.

But it’s always second hand for me: I’m not a gardener and I’m not a lesbian, more’s the pity.

(Wait…how did lesbians get into this? I’m treading dangerously close to well-meaning faux pas. So allow me to drop the Sapphic analogies and get back to gardening. In conclusion, if you’re a lesbian gardener, especially of the metropolitan variety, let me just say you have met my criteria for urban goddess. )

Me, I’ve always connected gardening with being grown up: if you grow your own, you understand the world. You depend on no man or woman but yourself; you take responsibility for your primal needs, you cope with the vagaries of drought, flood and pestilence. You know that not all shoots survive. You know you have to prune, sometimes ruthlessly, to fortify what remains.

I remember several years when my parents’ most cherished crop, fresh strawberries, got flooded out in the bottomland they’d persistently tried to recover. They added truckload after truckload of purchased dirt, but still it often wasn’t enough. I remember their moaning distress at the loss of their first hopes.

But if they were lucky, disaster struck early and they could start again. Sometimes, though, they’d simply say, “well, this isn’t going to be a good year for strawberries. But just wait…it’ll be the year for something.” And they were almost always right: after the strawberries tanked, maybe it would be potatoes thriving in their dark nests, or the cantaloupe would be especially juicy, or the Peaches and Cream corn would be the sweetest yet.

I suppose you’re concluding, and rightly so, that the most I learned from growing up with gardeners was how to craft analogies. I suppose that’s something. The rest is sadly lost on me. When I get the urge to garden I bring back pots from Home Depot that I then plop into other pots. And then I forget to water them, or I forget to deadhead, deliciously morbid spondee, or I forget to ask somebody to tend them when I’m out of town. I think this means I’m unevolved.

One thing I’m good at: somebody found slugs in my marigolds, and told me you could round them up with beer. That I do extremely well: I pour whatever brew I have on hand into little dipping dishes and plant them in the dirt in flower boxes. This Final Solution sort of horrifies me, especially my own guilty pleasure in counting soggy corpses of a morning. It’s downright Shelley-esque the way they die, and sort of poetic in the interest of yellow blooms.

In short, when springtime comes my only plowing is these words, line after line after line. It’s a kind of gardening, a hopeful patience as close as I get to making something flower.

In truth, in April I often feel the urge. My restlessness aims at making verse, a word derived directly from the plowman. In Latin it means to turn at the end of each row, and then to turn again, and then to turn again, making things straight and readying the earth for springtime growth.

My father used to say if you wanted to plow a row straight you couldn’t look down or back. You had to keep your head up, looking straight ahead. My mother said in spring you needed dandelions. Between the two, there’s truth aplenty there to get me going on the page, at least till May.

Equity Isn't Everything: On Daffodils, Cardinals, Bankers and the Ongoing Pleasures of Owning a Home

From my March column for East Village Magazine.

I’m sitting at my kitchen table irrationally exuberant about the morning’s sunlight. I think the word is basking. It’s been a long dark winter already, with more to go.

It’s mid-February as I write this and yesterday, in the lengthening daylight happily remaining when I got home from work, after three or four days of promiscuous melting, spears of daffodils appeared from under the disappearing foot of snow at the side of the house.

When did that happen? When did they decide to start their lovely engines while the rest of us crabbed and scratched and fidgeted in February crankiness?

And briefly, startlingly, I find myself saying as I take it in, “This is mine.” I have always needed something to call “my own,” not for the heft of consumption but for the details. This is the poet’s life -- the same redwood fence every morning, with its criss-cross top and gradual seasoning to gray, the same green bird feeder swaying slightly in the breeze, the same mulberry tree, with that particular bend of its burly five-part trunk, the same red cardinals supplying flashes of color.

Of course, nothing stays the same. The sky changes, the trees slough off dead branches after midnight gusts and ice storms, the birds mate and pass on their territory to the fledglings, the roof tiles crack and curl. That’s the beauty of it – those changes, the way my back yard looks different every single day. In fact, that’s part of what I see as “mine.” I get to watch it all.

When my husband and I were looking for a house to buy in 2003, it was a day like this – late winter, bright 43^rd parallel sunshine, not a bud yet on the trees but something about spring suggestive in the air. We stepped out onto the flagstone back porch and took in gulps of the place, surveying the yard. Just as we did so, a big male cardinal swooped overhead and landed in the little maple tree. It belted out that chip-chip cardinal sound and the female fluttered onto another branch. He fed her a seed.

I took it as an omen, and we bought the place.

Cardinals mate for life and live up to 15 years – meaning, if you read my January column, that their broods all through these years have probably been more cooperative than the less monogamous species. Since Ted and I bought the house as an act of commitment to what we hoped would be a lifelong love, it all seemed right. It’s very possible the fat male cardinal I saw on the feeder this morning is the same one that convinced us to sign all those reams of nerve-wracking agreements seven years ago.

That’s the way I decide to do things sometimes. Obviously, owning a house in Flint or anywhere!) is counterintuitive these days, as my California brother often warns me. But even with our house now “worth half of what we paid for it,” and the mortgage amount slightly “underwater,” when we recently refinanced, this house offers comfort, solace even, through every season, through storm, heat, ice, even in the face of last year’s arsons, the copper bandits, the homicides, the city’s deficits and struggling mayor. I don’t care. I love the place. It has good light, wood floors, crown molding, Faience tile in the upstairs shower, and the solid, square, no-nonsense rooms that go with its colonial bones.

I enjoy my “investment” – ah, sweet anachronistic notion – every day. I can’t say the same for any of my other “investments,” which appear in abstract quarterly statements as rows of san serif numerals under columns like “Value one year ago,” “value one month ago,” “current value.” Spare me that agitating obsession.

Value is a relative concept. On credit reports, mortgage applications and tax forms it’s a banker’s word, determined by the hard and unimaginative contours of lucre, by a bunch of philistines who couldn’t care less about my cardinals.

While as a homeowner I’m clearly part of the mortgage world, shelling out my monthly payments gives me some rights to hang on to my own notion of worth – so to speak. I have the illusion of exclusivity, a sensory claim on a little patch of ground and the upright architecture of a satisfying shelter.

I couldn’t have it without bankers, of course, but I didn’t want to say that here. I want to pretend I’m above all that, or outside it all, warmly cohabiting with the other lucky denizens of Maxine.

In fact, we’ve just decided to buy again. We successfully bid on a short sale across the street, and this time, it’s to keep the neighborhood together. We love the little family renting there and didn’t like the thought of their potential uprooting.

My brother shook his head when I told him, but after I explained everything, he came around.

“Sometimes the counterintuitive moves are the right ones after all,” he said.

I’m glad he sees it my way. Exploring that house, I haven’t yet spied an auspicious cardinal – just worrisome wiring, 1930s asbestos, and a hole in the garage roof. But unlike the boring numbers on my TIAA-CREF report, these are provocations for the spirit, as satisfying in their concrete meaning for my life in the neighborhood as the sunlight on the windowsill.

For more from East Village Magazine, go here.

Riding the Airport Escalator: An Aftermath

...at the Atlanta airport, I experienced a moment. As with any epiphanic spark, there's a host of set-up antecedents: getting up early, padding downstairs for tea and light, feeding the cats, emailing my husband who awaits me at the other end, tucking together boarding passes and last-minute packing decisions, working through the morning's tasks at school, getting to the airport on time, parking the car, riding the shuttle, going through security with the efficiency I've learned, getting settled, getting onboard in the right order, getting my stuff in the overhead compartment, buckling up...then, at Atlanta, that bustle from one gate to another with just enough time.

So, the crux of it: I felt good. I know how to do all this -- it's my life. And the comings and goings of this life make me feel fully engaged.

I was going up the escalator, my backpack on my back -- my trusty, reliable back cheerfully taking its load. My small side bag swung along in my left hand, my very useful and faithful fingers holding on. My shoes felt good on my feet. My feet felt good meeting the ground, grounded evenly on each step. My body moved along the way it's supposed to, calmly energetic and fully functioning.

I looked around at everybody else -- we were packed in the escalator -- and I felt happy to be among all these other humans, all of us so occupied and going places. It felt good to be in the human race, in this amazingly complex world we've made. I was "one of us," pleasantly anonymous and not alone. I don't know how I could say this, after the terrible week of Tucson and after a horrific double suicide of a couple I love, but today I loved us. Maybe it was the aftermath that did it -- the love for what remains, what hasn't died. Oh, yeah, yes, yes -- time for Dylan Thomas:

Out Of The Sighs

Out of the sighs a little comes, But not of grief, for I have knocked down that Before the agony; the spirit grows, Forgets, and cries; A little comes, is tasted and found good; All could not disappoint; There must, be praised, some certainty, If not of loving well, then not, And that is true after perpetual defeat. After such fighting as the weakest know, There's more than dying; Lose the great pains or stuff the wound, He'll ache too long Through no regret of leaving woman waiting For her soldier stained with spilt words That spill such acrid blood. Were that enough, enough to ease the pain, Feeling regret when this is wasted That made me happy in the sun, How much was happy while it lasted, Were vagueness enough and the sweet lies plenty, The hollow words could bear all suffering And cure me of ills. Were that enough, bone, blood, and sinew, The twisted brain, the fair-formed loin, Groping for matter under the dog's plate, Man should be cured of distemper. For all there is to give I offer: Crumbs, barn, and halter.

Yearning Doesn't End

In case you're young out there and reading this, here's some news. There's no end to desire. Tonight I was restless, after finding out there'd be no "happy darkness walking" with my friend. She got hung up with kids and an Epiphany party out there in a world with babies and harried parents and hanging crepe paper and sparkling lights and sweet cake. And that started it: the old bugaboo of childless isolation crept over me again, for the millionth time; no matter how many times I go around that track it always ends with loneliness and, not exactly regret, but wishing, wishing -- feeling left out of a huge part of human life, knowing that I will go to my grave not knowing many things.

Please understand this is more melodrama than usual -- after all, it's a dark, cold January night at a time of year that I'm often mired in depression and self-doubt. And it just occurred to me that my mother, about whom I've been writing a lot lately, died on just about this day. I'm pretty sure it was Jan. 6. So when I landed on that thought I went upstairs and rooted around, trying to find the evidence of her death date. I didn't find the box containing her obits. But now, who cares? I turn away from psychic possibilities, turn away from that particular melancholy alley.

Instead, I found a bunch of notes from when I was a kid reporter, and a few photos of how I looked then. I was cute: long straight brown hair, parted in the middle, around my face, the smile a bit teasy and a little too knowing. Apparently then I was regarded as a kid with potential -- one of my Kent State profs wrote, "tomorrow is homecoming, and I imagine some day you'll come back as the 'alumna of the year,' after you've had a chance to show your stuff." At the time I had just landed in Laguna Beach, and I was working as a cocktail waitress. "This might be useful for you eventually," he wrote, "especially if you want to write a novel, but I can see you'd want something more." The whole enterprise both struck me with the promise of my youth, my mischievous earnestness, my conviction that I would one day make it big, etc. etc. etc. and the sober understanding I have not quite lived up to the dizzying carbonations of what some grownups thought might materialize from my raw ingredients.

Now I simply have trouble sleeping on dark winter nights. Sometimes I think insomnia is at heart a thick pulse of restless disappointment. The body always waiting for something more to transpire. And occasionally, it delivers these surges of yearning, for something. For something more. So I wander around the house tidying things up, and then I have a craving for the kitchen table, a clean, round kitchen table in the bright white kitchen, where I have barely sat lately. Sitting here with NPR's cheerful intelligence bubbling along from the radio in the corner is a kind of contentment, a grounding in the present.

Tomorrow I meet my winter poetry writing class, and I have to go in there ready to communicate my love of writing poetry -- something about which, persistently, I feel fraudulent. The MFA, the years of writing, the failed manuscripts, the many readings, the wrenching divorce from a literary mating, the long-gone dinner parties with a certain eager panache -- the hopes of that other era, dust in the nose. In this frigid moment, simply self-pity, simply the navel-gazing of a woman who feels really old.

I suppose if you've gotten this far in the blog, dear reader, I owe you some redemptive details. I put 14 cups in a picnic basket for my poetry students: I wanted real cups, and came home determined to provide them after VG's market only had "foam" which I detest, and plastic, which is ugly and simply wrong. I've ordered two carafes of hot chocolate from Brown Sugar Cafe for the first class. First we're going for a walk, and then we're going to come back in and write haikus. And then we're going to drink hot chocolate and eat frosted sugar cookies and molasses cookies and pay attention to the pleasures of our senses: warmth after cold, sweet after bitter, voices after silence. This is what I have to give. And getting ready to start the new, my own life seeks its deeper well.

And so I sit at the clean, round kitchen table in the bright light, clean, solid-paned windows (six over six, as a more cosmopolitan friend described them) between me and the icy darkness, and as my fingers click on the black laptop, I go back to the paragraph I just wrote. Grace of discovery, warmth after cold, sweet after bitter, voices after silence. Having hit on that one set of words, just one sequence that rings true, I feel a small pang of peace. So maybe now I can go to bed, and sleep.

What Did They Know?

A lot of times my ancestors are in my head when I'm going through life. Like I think they know better than me.

But they don't. They're dead. I'm alive and coping with real life the best I can. And I think, presented with the life I'm living, they would not know any better than I how to negotiate the rough waters of reality. I don't think their religion, their persuasive Old Testament God, would help them any more than my agnostic inclinations.

Tonight, it was gin that served the day's anxieties. We had a gift certificate for Admiral Risty, a reasonably swanky restaurant perched over the cliffs in Palos Verdes at the spot where Hawthorne Blvd. dead ends at the sea. I had reserved a window table and we got there just in time for the last streaks of the post-solstice sunset. I held Ted's hand and we conducted several appropriate curse toasts for those who are attempting to torment us. Then we did it again. The sun disappeared but the forthright, deep blue ocean spreading out from Admiral Risty's windows comforted me.

Tomorrow, we'll be back in the hard-edged frigidities of the Michigan winter with which I am viscerally, primally familiar. It will be okay.

Rumination from Feathered Infidelities

In writing my January EVM column, I found myself considering a 2010 bird study that makes me wonder what the shifting partnerships of Baby Boom mating has done to the kids. In true Baby Boom style, however, I end up making the rumination about me -- a Boomer on my second marriage, with no biological kids, contemplating monogamy and my place in the flock. Click here for the whole piece.

My favorite Christmas gift

...Other than the view out our San Pedro windows, which I love, but that's been a gift of my life for the last couple of years. My needs and pleasures are of a very moderate scale. Here's my favorite -- bought on sale on Christmas Eve at Crate and Barrel for less than $40: a hand crank juicer! I love it because it employs simple physics, requires no cords or electricity, makes no noise, and works perfectly. And it's shiny.

Also, note that tumbler collecting orange drips -- it's a Waterford crystal glass that cost more than the juicer. Have you ever drank out of real Waterford? It's interesting that in my old age this is one of the things that pleases me -- touches of luxury I can afford, like a single Waterford tumbler.

On the Pacific Rim Thinking About My Mother, Again

It feels important that she would have been 100 today -- that a whole century has passed by since my mother's birth. She was proud of sharing this day with Beethoven. She was a fighter of sorts when I think of her now, a tough little bird in her later years, never quite happy enough with life, often clearly disappointed by how things were.

And today I flew into the ether from ice and snow to the liquid blue of the Pacific Rim, again -- for probably about the 50th time in the last ten years. My cross-country life continuing, this time I come into it at a moment of confounding crisis and frustration, and I wonder what my mother would have made of this life of mine. I never thought much of her advice; I know she loved me, loved me with an ambivalent ache; was envious of me; found me "provoking" and loved me. When I was 40 and in a difficult relationship that was already beginning to end, I stood in my brother's large shower with my mother sitting haggard and naked in a plastic chair -- we were both naked and it was the only way we could think of to safely shower her. The blessed water streamed over our two bodies, our shared blood bodies, and in the extremity of the moment, a moment of her own extreme vulnerability, she gave me one of the most important gifts of our life together. As I washed her body gently, my own heart wrenched with her weakness, her poor bony body on its last months, she looked at me, her daughter, and called me by my name. She said, "You have a beautiful body. I hope your husband loves your body. I hope your husband appreciates your body."

We were not a physical family. Our religion made us suspicious of our bodies' mysteries, and our bodies were often problematic to us. We didn't dance. "Premarital Sex" was one of the cardinal sins -- and I grew up to both crave and suspect my body's ardors. We were not a family who called each other "honey" or "darling" or "sweetheart." My mother never used those words for me, and I sometimes wish she would have -- I needed her tender love more than I knew. But that day in the shower what my mother said touched me, and I've cherished it ever since. She, who made my body and gave me life, loved what she saw, even as I struggled into middle age. As it turned out, I needed that love, and on her 100th birthday, I need it still. And love her for loving me -- incompletely, raggedly, but always passionately. She was not an "adequate" mother -- she left me unfinished and full of doubt and lamentation. But she gave me enough, and that day in the shower, her love was perfect.

Nonpartisan Chickadees

Just filled the bird feeders for a clutch of chickadees clustering around the backyard -- they're so cheerful and plucky, with their little high-pitched chirps. And they're so courteous -- they go to the feeder one at a time, get a single seed, and then fly up to a nearby branch to eat it; the next one goes down and does the same; then the next, the next, and then starting with the first one again. It's so orderly and, well, nonpartisan.

On the 100th Anniversary of My Mother's Birth, I Take on the 100 Thing Challenge. In My Junk Drawer.

Before

After

Here's my December column for East Village Magazine, examining the archeological dig that is my junk drawer:

A few years back a guy named Dave Bruno had had it with consumerism and decided to reduce his personal possessions to 100 things. He blogged about it and started a worldwide movement, The 100 Thing Challenge.

This month, just in time for the ceaseless barrages of the holidays, he’s publishing a book, The 100 Thing Challenge: How I Got Rid of Almost Everything, Remade My Life, and Regained My Soul. I bet it will sell more than 100 copies.

I don’t trust people who make spirituality out of everything. I don’t trust “cleanliness is next to godliness,” for example; nature presumably made by God is frequently elegant but also messy—not to mention, bloody. And I don’t like hints that because I might be a little challenged, stuff-wise, I might be in mortal peril.

However, I was raised by a queen of clean, a housfrau of frugality, and this month would have been her 100^th birthday. My mom would have loved the idea of the 100 Thing Challenge. So it seems that the stars are suggestively and neatly aligned for me to make a gesture of propitiation.

When I first heard something about Bruno’s new book on NPR, I muttered to my cats, “Hell, I’ve got more than 100 things in one damn drawer.” The cats stared back sadly.

I meant my junk drawer.

Doesn’t everybody have one? A drawer, usually in the kitchen, where we stash our tawdry little bits of anxious life? A cache of personal anthropology – mirror to our worries, the vault for small stuff, unsellable on EBay, that we “might use” someday? The junk drawer blends the impulse to hoard and that persistent need for security. And, as another Dave, the “happiness researcher” Dave Buettner has been pointing out, “evolutionarily speaking, we are hardwired more for security than freedom.” Yikes. Maybe the junk drawer is a grown-up’s safety valve.

Unlike my mom, I am not obsessed with order. But the idea of exploring my junk drawer had a certain appeal, like going on an archeological dig. The day after Thanksgiving, still high on tryptophan and pumpkin pie, I pulled it off its squealing tracks, and heaved it, making sure to bend my knees, onto the living room floor.

Sitting crosslegged on the carpet, I eventually pulled out and listed 140 things on a legal pad.

At first, it all made sense, a logical collection of utility: stapler, scissors, cat brush, three Scotch tape dispensers, two lint rollers, three soft cloths for cleaning glasses, along with the glass cleaner to do it, 17 “forever” stamps, two Listerine pocket paks, two single-use tubes of Krazy Glue, a tube of lock de-icer – never used, a gift from my traumatized hubby after we once got stranded at midnight after a party on Calumet.

And then, all the stuff obviously there because it MIGHT be useful. Who in their right mind, really, would not understand the reason for 200 rubber bands from Flint Journals and bunches of asparagus? Who would question the need for 37 paper clips, 11 black document clips – great for bags of cereal or potato chips – 9 thumbtacks, a single push pin, a half-dozen twist ties, 15 AAA batteries, 5 AA batteries, 4 C batteries, and an extra nine-volt? There’s even 47 cents in change, in case. Just in case.

But the next layer, from the neglected, dusty back, creeped me out, yielding a succession of items of mysterious origin and way past their time.

What’s this? A fold-up hiking compass! Cool, but I haven’t been on an actual hike, in the woods, for about 20 years. Two plastic canisters with undeveloped rolls of film – anachronism – I’ve had a digital camera for years. Anyway, did I really want to see what might be revealed, what aggravating family gathering, what possibly compromising party? Ah, I remember this little battery-operated hand-held fan with a Las Vegas logo – cherished gift from a compassionate friend when I was still having hot flashes – now long unused, its batteries dead.

Then, tectonic plates of heartbreak and abandoned hope: the brass nametag for my late cat Joey One, dead for five years, his ashes buried in the back yard; a “Women for Kerry/Edwards” campaign button: Rosie the Riveter, with her plucky “We can do it” logo. And a pillbox of folded-up notes I’d written to my parents – saved from their stuff after they died a dozen years ago – notes neither imaginative nor redeeming. “Dear Mom…thank you for all you’ve done for us. We love you.” “It was sure good to be here. P.S. I had a snack before I left.” Why on earth are these still here?

Finally, just a pile of random and marginally disgusting stuff: two clothespins, one red plastic, one wood; a chipped ceramic pentacle tile; a plastic attachment for a long-gone vacuum cleaner; a six-ounce bottle of green automotive touch-up paint; a dry erase marker; two heavy duty locks; a pack of grape Pez; a Ya-Ya’s moist towelette, two packs each of pepper and salt; a half roll of chewable papaya enzymes; eight tiny plastic bags of replacement buttons; a broken birthday candle; two triangular pieces of dry cat food. Easy calls, all – to the trash.

The drawer empty, finally I stood up and took a deep breath. The cats, unimpressed, sniffed around my desultory piles.

So, since I am at least a part-time academic, I retreat now from my dig to profess what this all means.

In summary, I don’t know.

There’s actually a discipline devoted to “things” these days, called, remarkably, “Thing Theory.” An English professor named Bill Brown wrote a book about it. And we poets know how William Carlos Williams declared, “no ideas but in things.” But what ideas in which things?

What I mined from my junk drawer was only this: there are things we accumulate, for whatever reason – out of torpor, hope, sentimentality, or practicality – that give us comfort. Or maybe that’s just me – me and my curious and incorrigibly disheveled existence.

Here’s what I can say for the condition of my soul, my act of contrition in honor of my mother: pared and purged down to about 70 things, the drawer slipped back onto its metal track a bit more lightly.

Would that my restless mind, busy accumulating the next drawerful of comforting trinkets, went along.

Ernest Boyer and Scholarship Reconsidered

Belatedly, considering what happened to me last year in my department (See"So Much for My Dream of the Professoriate), I am reading Ernest L. Boyer's 1990 monograph from the Carnegie Foundation, Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate. In his preface, he writes, "What's really being called into question is the reward system and the key issue is this: what activities of the professoriate are most highly prized? After all, it's futile to talk about improving the quality of teaching if, in the end, faculty are not given recognition for the time they spend with students."

He continues, "...following the Second World War, the faculty reward system narrowed at the very time the mission of American higher education was expanding, and we consider how many of the nation's colleges and universities are caught in the crossfire of these competing goals."

"In the current climate," he asserts, "students all too often are the losers...The reality is that, on far too many campuses, teaching is not well rewarded, and faculty who spend too much time counseling and advising students may diminish their prospects for tenure and promotion."

Boyer's thoughts. supported by a large Carnegie Foundation-sponsored "National Survey of Faculty" led to what's often referred to as "The Boyer Model" for the work of the professoriate -- four "separate, yet overlapping functions." They were "the scholarshp of discovery," "the scholarship of integration," "the scholarship of application," and "the scholarship of teaching."

"What we urgently need today," he wrote, "is a more inclusive view of what it means to be a scholar -- a recognition that knowledge is acquired through research, through synthesis, through practice, and through teaching." And he called for all four of these to be equally acknowledged in promotion and tenure-granting decisions.

That was 20 years ago. If anything, it seems to me, things have gotten worse since then. In a 2006 essay in the Chronicle Review, Stanley Katz wrote:

The new environment for higher education has created a situation in which professorial worlds are multiple, complex, and conflicting. I think I am not simply being nostalgic (though I "grew up" professionally at the end of the earlier world) when I assert that we have lost something along the way. We have lost a sense of commonality as professors, the sense that we are all in this together — "this" being a dedication to undergraduate teaching and not just specialized research.

Considering all this, at least I feel less alone in the diminishment of my real value in the professoriate, which while I was denied access to the tenured ranks, has become clearer to me. Even though things have continued tightening up, especially in resistant and hide-bound departments that keep hanging on to old ways, it is heartening to sense some pressure toward a more reasonable and responsive change in higher ed. If we don't find a way to open up to a wider view of the professoriate, we may find ourselves consigned to irrelevancy, with serious consequences for our funding, for our ongoing public support, and most of all, for our students.

Pursuing a Happy Darkness

Here's my new column for East Village Magazine (eastvillagemagazine.org), the result of an evolving experience of confronting, accepting and sometimes even loving darkness.

Lately I’ve been renegotiating with the dark.

Darkness gets a bad rap, including in my own mind. Each year I dread the coming on of longer nights, culminating in the anachronistic switch to Daylight Savings Time. By then, it’s dark when I leave for work in the morning and dark when I get home. This long winter darkness is so claustrophobic for me, so depressing, that anticipating it is almost as bad as actually putting up with it.

The literal darkness of winter merges, of course, with metaphorical darkness – that “dark night of the soul” that 16^th Century mystic Saint John of the Cross first defined. Some of the hardest, most fearful moments of my life have coalesced at roughly 4 a.m., when the world seems most terrifying, most unpromising, most dark.

I know of course that darkness harbors danger. Evil hides in unlit corners, as our faithful neighborhood watch teams rightly point out. It’s not just nocturnal critters like possums, raccoons and bats showing up, rattling our nerves and trash cans. There are human critters all too ready to capitalize on the dark, stalkers and thieves and pyromaniacs, sneaking around with their badass intentions where we can’t quite see them.

But it’s not really the dark’s fault. Back in the day we feminists used to parade around once a year or so on “Take Back the Night” marches, including several through downtown Flint, and though our efforts only seemed to apply when there were a dozen of us or more, it did feel good to shout out that the night belongs to everybody. At the heart of that movement was a call for safety. For me, there also was a less strident song – that there’s something beautiful about the night, something primally necessary to reclaim.

We spend half our lives in darkness. Life is short -- why should I squander half of it in a state of fear and resistance? Wouldn’t it seem that nature’s effect on humans, the yin and yang of day and night, might have an up side? Why should daylight get all the good press?

Could there, in short, be such a thing as happy darkness?

This question bubbled up over friendship – a friendship built on walks and a restless baby. My neighbor Vickie figured out a stroller ride calmed newborn Frannie, and asked if I’d like to come along. We’d meet after dinner and, with a baby buggy between us, explore many streets in the neighborhood. As Frannie gaped and cooed at passing details, Vickie and I talked about everything, including the languorous sun drooping behind the silver maples of Maxine, Beard, Woodside, Lynwood, Calumet, Blanchard, Kensington. We went wherever we felt like going.

Eventually Frannie learned to go to sleep without her daily wheeling, but thanks to her daddy holding down the fort, her mom and I kept walking.

As the days shortened, we found ourselves starting out in dusk, each night noting decreasing minutes of light. When finally our whole walk was in the dark, I thought we couldn’t keep it up.

There are all kinds of logical arguments, after all, for not going out after dark. It flies in the face of everything we’ve been taught as women. We’ve been marooned in fear. But we enjoyed our nightly strolls so much we didn’t want to stop. So we didn’t. We take sensible precautions, but we’ve found it quite possible to feel at home, in the neighborhood that is our home, even after dark.

Spending three or four hours a week meandering into the night like we own it has been exhilarating and liberating. It is a luxury. It’s an antidote for claustrophobia. It’s a guarantee, almost always, of a better night’s sleep.

After dark, the neighborhood yields a remarkable glowing magic. This matters to my sense of our place, which so often saddens and worries me. At night the houses look calm and inviting, their rectangles and orderly panes of indoor light distinct and intriguing. We appreciate particular front porches, where porch lights frame interesting doors, brick steps, trellises, roof angles, and climbing ivy. We wouldn’t so much notice these in daylight, when many details blend together in equalizing swathes of sunbeams.

That is, we see things differently in different kinds of light. Part of the magic is it’s never really dark. Yet night light is different from the light of day: the variegated oranges, ochres and ambers of artificial light, the silvery moonlight through canopies of hardwoods – it’s elegant, nuanced, etched in mystery.

We pick blocks to stroll that have the best streetlights, and our progress from one cone of light to another is rhythmic and metered. Like a good poem, we move from dark to light to dark to light.

One night Vickie said when you walk the neighborhood after dark, it looks like every family is happy. The quality of inside light, enjoyed from our outsiders’ view, is serene. It’s possible to imagine that lovely light means lovely life – it’s possible to imagine, a cozy, hopeful visual illusion. When we walk by the lit-up houses, in other words, they make us happy. That’s a kind of truth, a trick of the darkness and the light we all provide to counter it.

Saint John of the Cross’s poem “Dark Night of the Soul” describes a journey of the soul from its bodily home to its union with God. It’s instructive that that trip of the spirit takes place at night. Saint John’s pilgrimage involves the “purification of the senses,” a step the darkness accommodates very well. We rest our bodies, at night, from the daylight stimulations of eyes and ears, the way in yoga class we sometimes roll soft eyewraps around our heads to give the brain a break. People need a rest from daylight. What we find at night can be a journey rich with gifts. Even in Flint, there can be a happy darkness.

Wow! I'm back, with Roget and Daddy

Here I am again, believe it or not, after four months' silence.

Of course I haven't been silent elsewhere, but for whatever reason, I didn't feel drawn to the ruminative presence of this space. There, just in that sentence, I paused after "ruminative," because I couldn't quite come up with the word I wanted. I love the moment of trying to find the right word.

Sitting cross-legged on the brown couch -- the couch I bought when I lived in Sylvester Manor, one of the first actual pieces of furniture I acquired on my own, a semblance and reclamation of adult life after leaving my first marriage -- I breathed and sat back this Friday night and considered what would be just the right word for that sentence. I stretched one leg out onto the coffee table and looked up, letting my body and mind meander...I considered the word "posture," but that sounded too stiff. I considered the word "stance," but that sounded too rhetorical, too political.

And so I lifted the laptop off my lap and went to the bookshelf looking for my thesaurus. I considered the word "attitude," but it sounded too common, too collegiate rah-rah. But "attitude" was a good place to begin. So I looked up "attitude" in the back half, where the words are listed alphabetically in four columns per page. "attitude" is on p. 689, the page which goes from "attainment" to "auditory canal." Under "attitude" I had five choices: posture, 183.4; viewpoint, 438.7; opinion 500.4; mental ~ 523.1; and in tiny capital letters, "TAKE THE ATTITUDE, 523.6 -- that last a strange little phrase that seems alien, foreign, quaint, strange.

Now, interestingly, I find myself slipping into present tense. I select the first one, which was, after all, one of my original choices. And I'm delighted to find that 183 is labeled LOCATION....this really touches me, for reasons I'll explain later: the nouns under point one in "LOCATION" include situation, place, placement, emplacement, position, hole, stead, region, locaility, locale, locus, site, situs, spot, point, bearings latitude and longitude.

Point 2 includes where, whereabouts, here, there.

And Point 4 includes a fascinating mix, which offers many interesting angles of connection: posture, pose, position, lay, lie, set, attitude, aspect, bearing, port, carriage, air, mien, demeanor, presence, exposure, frontage...

It is the word "presence", there in the middle between "demeanor" and "exposure", that captures what I want.

To write, after all, requires presence. To write one must be present. Sometimes when I am not writing it is because I am unable to be present to the degree required; or, as in the case of my recent life, I am so fully present in some other part of life that I cannot be present enough for the rumination of language, of thought.

But coming back to it tonight, I remember with a rush the pleasure of this presence, this being present with words. Tonight, this is my whereabouts -- to be present in these quiet moments with words.

I suspect, too, that my readiness for this presence was kicked off by the startling convergence with another powerful location -- I find myself wanting to say echo-location, because when my hometown of Canton, Ohio appeared on the PBS NewsHour tonight I was jarred and touched by melancholy and nostalgia. My old hometown, where six years of my childhood in particular rolled out in a beautiful brick parsonage surrounded by leafy maples that I still write about and dream about, that old hometown is now decrepit and struggling, just like Flint. "In the Fifties, a manufacturing powerhouse," the reporter said -- those were MY Fifties, when the town was a great place for families to raise kids, the schools were great, we roller skated and sold lemonade on the sidewalks, the adults dressed up for church, tended roses on white trellises. There was a vigorous adult life there that I only observed through a child's naive lens, but something about it stuck with me -- something about the adult life I sense my parents and others were living -- that formed what I imagined my own grown up life would be.

Now the PBS New Hour featured a haunted house in an abandoned warehouse, where 84 people make scant but cherished money 20 days a year dressing up like monsters and scaring other people, who pay for the fright. And then the reporter moved out to interview struggling families, and when I saw them standing in the streets with October light behind them, I thought I recognized that light, the light of my childhood, and it made me sad. Finally, there was a shot of a shorn corn field with a bank of stiff milkweed, cracked and empty of its fluffy seeds, in the foreground, and that was a field my body understands and remembers.

Finally, I love my thesaurus. As you can see below, it was given to me by my father on my 13th birthday. And as I see his inscription, I also see the seeds of my whole life to come, where he writes: "To help you find words with which to express the thoughts of a very fine mind." What a remarkable thing for a girl to be told by her father. I feel smitten, lucky, and loved in language from my powerful past.
See my father's inscription -- My thesaurus was my 13th birthday present

Chinese Bell for the Summer Solstice

Never published, this poem continues to nettle, to agitate in my craw. What better day to dig it out and air it in the longest light?

Chinese Bell for the Summer Solstice

1.

Long ago, when he was maybe 50,

my father took a solitary walkabout

by Greyhound bus, across the West,

across the Golden Gate, chasing something

he had missed. From a fish shack

on the wharf he called and said, “It’s still light here.”

It shocked me: time zones something startling, new.

(On the only part of turning earth I knew

Ohio was already dark as it would often be,

Perhaps it was that Midwest night

that drove my dad to Chinatown.)

Outside the screen door, a hundred fireflies sparked,

I barely noticed, not yet knowing how

Exotic they were.

. I wanted more

Of California, hugged the black receiver

and heard from far away a gull.

I tried to see my father there, taking in the cobalt sea,

swooping birds, California sun like heaven

in his eyes. Then: “There’s a prison out there,” he

said., “and sharks would eat you if you tried to get away.”

2.

Back home

he gave my mother

turquoise rings and in a narrow box

wrapped in newsprint with Shanghai script,

a simple cone of solid brass from Chinatown.

For years she rang it, calling guests to dinner,

They signed her leather guest book by the dozens,

An inventory of the Mister and Missus

Christians of Ohio, sipping homemade

Tomato juice from heirloom crystal on paper

Doilies and complimenting my mother’s rhubarb pie.

When we closed up their house,

surprised by melancholy memory

of my father’s midlife pilgrimage,

my mother’s hostess rites when he got back, I grabbed

the bell from a black bag bulging and

all ready for Goodwill.

I wonder if she found him changed,

At peace with her and finally satisfied.

3.

Now every summer solstice,

my days in need of ritual

I wait for darkness with

the bell from Chinatown.

I don’t know how the bell got

Mixed up with it,

Proof my father lit out

Against his rampant heart?

Silvery clang against sorrow?

I love the give and take of light

at this, my native latitude,

a daily shifting truth the earth still owns.

I claim this bell, its perfect “ting,” a token

of my father’s restlessness but

also love: he went somewhere

for happiness, and he came home.

4.

I seem to see things best at fading light,

when sharp black birds at bright 9:30

soar out of elms to shifting blue.

At 10 the cherry tree demolished

by a winter storm bares what I hadn’t seen:

dead branches bent like crones on what will be

the tree’s last sun before the chainsaw.

I’m glad I caught its last two blooms:

the one before the gale, when flowers

rushed our weathered fence, then mournful pinks

of this year’s brave but meager encore.

5.

It’s not quite dark but tough times anyway,

Today, in fact, in floods of Iowa, a farmer

had to kill his pigs. A few survivors

screamed when roped and lifted

from the bilge. They’re all that’s left , he said,

but who would want to eat them now,

soaked with diesel fuel and shit?

What misery – saved, then euthanized

by what was in the flood. This solstice poem ,

at first a song to days, now seems to want

a hymn to night: why do those doomed and salvaged

pigs want in this poem, a poem that’s struggling

with the light?

6.

At 10:15 three fireflies flash the purple yard

And I recall that childhood night

my father’s voice a promise

from the glamour of the bay

but I wonder if when summer dawns

less light may come as a relief.

I ring my father’s bell -- And now

begin invoking myths

for those who followed light

and disappeared.

In the White Room, With Black Curtains...

It's quite possible I lost my virginity to Cream's "White Room." Back then -- "then" being the late Sixties -- the melodramatic strains of "I'm so Glad," "Spoonful" and "I Freel Free" were regular accompaniments to the rebellious forays, experiments and exuberant separation adventures from our parents that kept us energized for years. I avidly pursued my independence in dorm rooms at first Miami U. of Ohio and then the much-sought after "off campus housing" (1009 Vine, true 'nuf, which you know if you read my novel) of Kent State where I drank Thunderbird, sampled skinny little rolled-up tastes of pot, and tried to get laid.

"Getting laid" sounds like the way a guy would put it. Oddly, I can't remember if those are the words I used for it then. But I know I wanted to "lose my virginity," strange erasure that that implies, well, I wanted it so badly that Mike Davison and I, both untutored in the mechanics of sex, tried for about three weekends in a row to make it happen, and stopped each time because it frankly scared us back into our bell-bottom pants. He was afraid to hurt me...I was afraid it was going to hurt. But finally that novel feeling, to be entered, to be filled -- and then all that movement, all that exertion, me "laying" there under him, paying exquisitely close attention to my body, to his body, feeling him sweat, feeling his breathing and already asking, I swear without guile, innocently, "so that's it?" -- well, we managed to get there. I was determined -- dogged, even, in a typical Scorpio fashion -- to have that experience. When Jimi Hendrix said "Are you experienced?" I wanted to be able to shout back, "Yes. Yes. Yes."

I'm remembering all this now because Saturday night Ted and Dennis and I went to Alva's Showroom on Eighth Street here in Pedro for a "Cream Tribute." It was performed with respectful exactitude in this sweet, small-scale venue by Kofi Baker, Ginger Baker's son, along with Fran Banish (fabulous name -- I looked it up to be sure I heard him right!) taking over the Clapton guitar parts and Rick Fierobracci emulating Jack Bruce's bass. They opened their two sets with "White Room," and the crowd lustily cheered. Including me.

Young Baker is a remarkable drummer himself, though far cheerier and, well, robust than his dad, who glared from album covers in the Sixties like somebody who's really, REALLY mad at "old people." Baker Junior and his mates have been making the rounds playing Cream and Blind Faith favorites, and at Alva's, the crowd, populated by folks of at least my age or older, ate it up.

And, sitting in the dark of Alva's, sipping Dennis's champagne from a plastic cup, I remembered Sixties sex.

My first lover and I worked at sex, as I remember it, in a low-ceilinged attic room in the house, which somebody rented out to about five or six Kent State "girls." I remember none of their names. It was usually messy and there were fights about food and who was supposed to clean the kitchen. My roommate for a time, a classically gorgeous blonde, had sex with her boyfriend in a single bed about three feet from me for weeks before I angled for my own room upstairs. I remember candlelight and incense burning -- I'm allergic to incense and had to bury my sneezes so as not to distract. She and her boyfriend didn't care I was trying to sleep right next to them. They were condescendingly worldly and didn't find me cool. I had a black portable stereo I'd bought from my tips busing tables at a Brown Derby Steakhouse. It sat on a bookstand at the foot of my bed. It had those two little matching speakers that attached on either side of the turntable. I had a small stash of records under an Indian scarf that covered the bookshelf: Al Kooper, Mike Bloomfield, Janis Joplin, Cream -- my shards of worldly accomplishments. In the game. One of the "us" that crowded into the culture then, making so much noise.

It was more like "so that's IT." Quiet, satisfied that I'd made it happen. Not the more cynical, jaded, pissed-off feminist reaction of later, "So THAT's It?" of later. It didn't feel particularly good physically. It was interesting. But not particularly pleasurable.

Part of the poignance of this memory -- this set of memories -- when I think about it today, an old woman of 60 on this longest day of the year, 2010, about 42 years since I lost my virginity, is how long it took me to learn how to fully experience pleasure in this world. Back then sex was so often about misplaced revenge, getting vindication for what I felt to be the smothering sameness and boredom of my earnest parents' lives. The fresh air of my new life, my freedom at 18 and 19 and 20 was endlessly intoxicating. And also intensely consuming, not exactly relaxing. Not relaxing at all.

It's possible to make a case that I didn't learn how to relax about sex until about a year ago.

I spend time every day teaching myself, over and over again, to Be Here Now: it is easier these days, with life's limits clear and most of my big decisions behind me, to simply Be Here Now. It still takes practice.

But I am grateful nonetheless for the energy of those tense years of my late adolescence. And I feel affectionate and appreciative of the rich, marvelous backdrop that came with it: music permeated everything. Cream -- Ginger Baker, Jack Bruce, Eric Clapton -- were there, pounding out their complex symphonies, soulful accompaniment to the melodramas of my own young life. It was fun to hear these young kids play it all again, and to remember.

Taking a Breather

Back in San Pedro, and as usual I am keeping busy during the day while Ted's at work -- busy, busy, busy with my own work. I never seem to be entirely free when here...was there ever a time when I could simply sit and "create"? But who ever has such freedom? Anyway, my head is buzzing and achy from putting together my summer online creative writing class, which starts July 6. My first ever all-online class, and I'm very uneasy about it. To help me prep, I'm enrolled in UMF's "Intensive Course Development" class, an eight-week boot camp I took once before, about four years ago, but I swear this is as if I'd never done it...a new version of Blackboard is kicking in, and I'm feeling stretched to the limit technically speaking.

I've made it into Week Five...every day requiring more reading, more posting, more fighting with Blackboard. Safari doesn't like it and it keeps booting me off. Maybe I'll download Firefox finally which is supposed to work better -- it's all fight, fight, fight with various systems most of which I only minimally understand. Trial and error, cussing, making it work...I've been a noisy complainer about all this on the ICD discussion board -- so loudly yesterday I finally felt the need to apologize.

The requirements for clear "learning objectives" has been a rigorous exercise for my left brain, while my right brain is chomping at the bit to invest the class with the "fun stuff." Yet to make the "fun stuff" work online, I'm having to wrangle with set-up -- endlessly detailed, front-loaded...I wish I knew HTML other than my little bits and pieces of it, carried over from this blog, actually. The ICD teachers, headed by a terse math Ph.D., are relentless about "outcomes." This consciousness, this conscious insistence on knowing what we are about, what we want our students to do, how to set up and measure "mastery," is at the heart of responsible teaching, of course.

But it's making my head hurt.

I just want to sit here looking out at the harbor, where the morning's cool marine layer hasn't yet lifted, and watch a barge slide into the harbor. I know I've got a poem in me somewhere. Some new poem waiting to be written. With only a gray legal pad and a pen. Not HTML. No power source. Just paper, pen, and my wandering, restless mind.

Scrub Brush: "This is It"

Tools of Rage and Poetry, With Cat


A new era...is how it feels, continually adjusting to life events. I'm struggling in my own quotidian rhythms to embrace and accommodate to and balance among my particularities -- the personal wrestling of my individual circumstances -- and a concept of "greater good" -- the ways in which the community -- my community or communities -- and in fact the natural world go on with or without me. What is my role in this? How do I keep my individual body going, my mysterious individual consciousness, the consciousness that inhabits me and in which I am trapped for the duration -- as are we all, of course, humans moving around in these limited containers held together by our sturdy skins.

Saturday night's reading (see below) was a fine moment -- four readers, as it turned out, an audience of 50, double-digits of wine bottles, red and white, flowing along with the concertos of voice and word. Connections with my history; I was present at the opening of Buckham close to 30 years ago; I was present when Alan Ginsberg performed there; I have reviewed many art shows staged there; I have read there myself a number of times over the decades.

Waiting for people to show up the other night, I stood in the open window at the back wall and looked down at the Torch parking lot, the brick law offices, the southbound traffic on Beach Street; it was a mild lovely evening and downtown Flint smelled like a city, delicious, evocative -- a mix of asphalt and exhaust with a bit of stubborn spring green mixed in. Framed in the window, that swatch of Flint on a spring Saturday night seemed romantic and melancholy, my own history and desires and sadnesses inescapably in the air. I went to the gallery's bathroom where I've retreated for solitary earthy functions uncountable times during uncountable art openings. There's a full-length mirror in there, and I inevitably looked at myself, my whole self, before going back out into the world of the life I've made. Hmm: yes, that's me, I had to say. Still me. I recognized myself, still there. In that one specific moment. As Sheldon Kopp says in Item One of his Eschatological Laundry List: This Is It.

Before the reading I was in a foul and volatile mood. Trying to load paper into the empty printer, I couldn't get the packaging on the ream open and in a sudden fury, slammed the whole pack down onto the floor. Ripped off my glasses and threw them on the floor too, violently swearing. The symbolism isn't lost on me. Language, my beloved, trusted soul tool, so often resists. The world so often resists our words, or doesn't care. And what I see, sometimes clearly, the evidence of my senses, often leads to pain and disappointment.

So I abandoned the upstairs and, in the spirit of Gaston Bachelard, stomped down to the basement. To clean the cat litter. In the pungent cool darkness. Still in a fury. The place smelled so strongly of ammonia my eyes watered. Back from Pedro, we had somehow forgotten to check: forgotten our duty. Three litter boxes overflowing, the cats had peed on the concrete floor and pooped in cool corners. I took over the basement with dangerous energy. Ted came with me. That fact. The man who loves me: In the basement, holding the bag for cat shit, holding the dustpan for piles of scattered litter. I filled a bucket with bleach and water and got down on my knees, slopping the mix onto concrete; me in a teeshirt, old socks, raggedy shorts and rubber gloves, daring Ted to laugh at my flaggellating getup. He refrained. He simply held the bag. I scrubbed down the stink and my rage with an old scrub brush. I like that word "scrub brush." My scrub brush helped.

The basement smells clean now. The floor is soothing and cool and free of crud.

The eight poems I read Saturday night were, as my new literary pal Matt Falk said, a "set" encompassing a range of emotion. On the whole, indeed, I felt them as a sequence, a cri de coeur from my whole Flint life -- one poem I first drafted in the 80s, several others I wrote within the past few months. It felt good to cry them out, to declaim. I am at cusp these days and the act of witness, of saying my life, of working the sounds of my life -- all of it was gratifying. I slept well that night.

See, I am taking this as a serious occasion in my life, even though my current poetry manuscript has been rejected at least ten times since September. I am taking this as an act of scrubbing into my life, doing what I can do. On my knees in the cool basement, taking it in, taking it in, making my life whatever it will be.

Ink Takes a Village: and that village is FLINT

Nic Custer, Alan Matthews, Kelsey Ronan, Grayce Scholt, Jan Worth-Nelson

Join in to hear and see a dynamic lineup for a memorable night in Flint-Town -- the East Village Magazine writers.

Those of us who have lived here for years have powerful stories to tell. AND there will be wine from D'Vine Wines and hors d'oeuvres from Oliver T's. This is a literary event not to be missed.

Words for Flying High and Coming Down

Hawk over Angels Gate, closest I can come to a flying image at the moment

This is a first for me -- a blog from 30,000 feet. In seat 22C on a Delta flight east, coming back to Flint from LA on an otherwise ordinary Tuesday. It's my first time to encounter WiFi in a jet. As I noted on FaceBook, I'm not sure if this is good or bad...usually, being free from email and other electronica for four hours in the air means that these trips, my many commutes, are times when I've started new writing projects and read books I'd long neglected. Another zone of solitude changed. Instead, I'm cramped up in my teensy seat, my elbows scrunched back against the inadequate cushion, the laptop on the tray table. Not an empty seat. They've finished beverage service and most people are asleep including, blessedly, the infant two rows up in 20F who bawled the whole way over the Rockies. I'd bawl too, actually -- tough way for a baby to spend four hours, not to mention her harried mommy and daddy.

And beverage service: let's see. Now we are told via not so kindly intercom that we can only have ONE packet -- peanuts, pretzels or cookies -- and we should be thinking about it ahead of time. We still get free juice, water or coffee, but the booze is $7. I learned long ago I'm better off not drinking up here in the high clouds, so I save myself that expense. But I studiously select a package of peanuts, issuing my decision quite responsibly when the old ladies (they're all close to my age these days) rumble the cart down the aisle. I buy a sandwich for $8 -- turkey, provolone and greens of some sort in an oversized bun. I shouldn't eat all of it, but I feel sorry for myself, trapped up here. No cash anymore: credit card only...so I have to twist myself around the tray table, dig my backpack out from under my seat with my feet, do a perverted yoga bend to unzip the outside pocket, pry out my wallet, get the ELGA debit card, and hand it over...the flight attendant slices it through a little holstered box and declares me paid. I ask for a couple of extra napkins to sop up the bad balsamic vinaigrette dressing and that is what I get -- exactly two flimsy leafs of napkin, as insubstantial as onion skin.

Oh, did I mention Ted got upgraded to First Class? So he's up there enjoying free everything, the bastid, stretched out in his capacious seat, wiping off the angst and sweat spreading like a cloud of Agent Orange from back here in steerage. Oh, no, the kid just woke up. She's not happy. I know why. My ears are telling me -- we're coming down. Coming down indeed.