Rain

Oh man, it's been a while since I wrote anything here. I think of things to put down all the time, but usually don't bother to write them. Anyway, this is just some crazy free write from one of my classes. The prompt I gave was, what does rain remind you of?

I love rain. I remember sitting in my bedroom in the house on Park Street listening to my records. Richie Haves singing, "Listen to the pouring rain, listen to it pour. And with every drop of rain, you know I love you more. . ." and the Florida rain was warm and it fell for hours but I never wanted it to stop and it ws warm inside and the music held me and opened up worlds in my mind--of the dark mysteries of love that I would never know in this reality. I sensed I was riding a wave of passion that could never be actualized, that disappointment would meet me time and again, till I wanted to throw myself off the precipice of life. But I didn't. Instead I dulled my edges, extinguished that flame, closed in my lips. Held it tightly, crushed it into something smaller and smaller until it was the size of a nickel in the palm of my hand, and I stared at it for a long time until one day I fell inside and found it was as vast as the solar system and in its quiet way it held me as the rain fell warm outside.

My Uncle Dave

I found these two pages I had written back during Kaleidoscope and I wondered what day that was, then I remembered. It was the day I found out my Uncle Dave had died.

The pages:
This morning as usual I woke up around six something. I pushed off my purple silk comforter and stuck one leg out from under the sheet. I thought about the dreams I'd had. First the one where my mother was driving and clearly senility was setting in. I placed my hands on her face, trying to get her to see. Then in another dream my daughter was a little girl again in pink slippers going into a store. Later in the dream I saw an old boyfriend and I tried to avoid him but he recognized me after all these years.

Waking up I thought about him and wondered what had ever happened to him. Then I pushed the thought away because I would never know. Odd, how many people disappear forever from your life. I began to pray, to thank the Divine for a good day, to affirm that I would be kind and gentle in my interactions today. That it would be a smooth and satisfying day. I spoke my desires to that light that sometimes occupies my head.

Outside my room I could hear the noise of my husband building something. I pushed the sheets off and stood up. The first thing I needed to do was send an invoice to the magazine I sometimes write for. I did so. Always a gratifying moment when a bill is sent out for services rendered. To me, making a living as a writer is the very best thing I could imagine. The cat sat on my lap purring madly and the dog came in to get his scroungy head scratched. Time for blackberry picking and breakfast. Then the phone rang. And it wasn't even yet 7:15, and I knew it might not be good news.

The New Buffalo Slaughterers

You know, someday people are going to look back at our particular era and wonder just what the heck were we thinking. I take my daughter to school in the mornings and I'm surrounded by gigantic Tyrannosaurus Rex Vehicles. I pull into the school drive and am nearly run down by a blond woman in a Hummer. A Hummer! We're sucking up oil from the planet and spewing out filth that eats at the ozone layer, but hey, someone told us we were cool in our Hummers so who cares about the planet? It's just like those white guys on the trains in the old west. Why shoot just one buffalo when you can shoot one thousand? Or the fashionable women in the early 20th century sporting the feathers of birds that were made extinct by their vanity.
I guess the writer of Ecclesiastes was right--all is vanity and we are doomed.

I suppose if I were a good environmentalist I wouldn't drive a car at all. That's not a bad plan. I think I'll eventually figure out how to do that. In the meatime I'll just be out there waiting for the day people realize that a Hummer is one of the ugliest cars on the face of the earth.

My Father's Death

On Tuesday morning Sept. 6 my father died of heart failure. He was 88 years old and had had dementia for several years. We were not close. When I was a child, he did not visit me or remember my birthday or call me. He did not do these things when I was an adult either, though I visited him occasionally over the years. During my teens, there were a few sporadic attempts to establish a relationship and I can't say they were completely unsuccessful. In spite of all this, I believe that he loved me. And I loved him, too. I cried when my brother called to say that he was dead. I had lost my daddy, and it broke my heart.
Three years ago I saw him was at the beach condo where he lived with his beloved wife. They had been together for around 30 years. I was with my daughter and he had to be reminded a couple of times who we were. A clock that said the time in a woman's voice seemed to comfort him. He was still great at spelling! As we were leaving, he said, "Love you." Surprised, I said, "We love you, too."
That was the last time I saw him and I'm glad that's my last memory of him.

Disturbances & Dr. Zhivago

There are some people who go thru life at about forty to fifty miles an hour. I don't. I have two speeds--80 and zero. On my zero days I don't want to be bothered. Generally, I won't answer the phone. I especially don't like to be called after say about five o'clock at night. But I have a friend who likes to just call and talk. So I'll say, "I gotta go." But does that stop the conversation--Never. Even on non-zero days I don't like to talk much on the phone except on rare occasions or if it's work related.

You know, I'm finally getting to the point in my life where I just give myself permission to have these days--zero days. My husband, who is usually NOT a particularly helpful person, is pretty good about getting into the driver's seat on those days. Because I'm not leaving the house. My mom asks, "do you need to go to a doctor?" and offers me money. My voice goes all mean and hard, no I am just tired and I don't need to have an excuse or offer explanations. See, some of us--that's the only way we're going to recharge, go all the way down. I don't understand what's so baffling about someone needing one day every week or so to just not do anything. You don't have to be sick. I don't have to be. It's not like it's great fun, but it's necessary. I have accepted that, but my mother doesn't. Then I'm mad and feeling guilty for being so nasty.

I didn't even get out of my PJs today. Instead I watched Dr. Z except when dealing with the two phone calls I got. My daughter and her chum from next door are on an old-movie kick and I almost rented Dr. Zhivago for them last night, but I knew it was long so I got Vertigo and His Girl Friday. They didn't get His Girl Friday, which is kind of a good thing. But Dr. Z was in the back of my mind because I had gone to see that movie Must Love Dogs, which was cute and had some very snappy dialogue. Anyway, in that movie the guy obsessively watched Dr. Zhivago, and so I wanted to see it again. There was so much I didn't remember. I remembered the music, the snow and the battle scene when we register what is going on by the reaction on Omar Sharif's face. How brilliant that was. Now, they'd have to show you every bone crushed and every piece of flesh gouged and they would do it in slow mo and they would linger on the shot of the child being pummelled to death by horse's hooves. But here we just saw the shocked staccato moves of Zhivago's face and it was enough. Enough.

Dr. Zhivago is what we wish all doctors were like, what we secretly believe it means to be a doctor--someone who has such a strong calling to heal that that is what he does no matter who it is who comes to him. We'd like them all to be like that, people with an innate sense of justice, people who are poets at heart--not golf-playing Lexus-driving HMO drones. I read about a doctor like this. He lived in Chechnya and wrote a book called The Oath. A mesmerizing book. Unforgettable really. And my friend T is married to a doctor out of that mold. He angrily related to her the story of a homeless man who was released from the hospital with an open wound on his foot that would have become gangrenous. The doctor went and found him and brought him back to the hospital and kept him there while the wound healed. How much easier to fix the wound than to later amputate his foot.

There was a program here for homeless people set up by a resident, and every week doctors volunteered time to help out. It wasn't an onerous task. The way it fell was that each doctor had to volunteer about twice a year. This year the program was halted because the doctors couldn't give up that time anymore.

The movie represented some interesting parallels to me. But this is supposed to be a zero day so I'll wait till some other time to go into them.

Mopping

This is from an exercise on smell:
I smell lemon-scented cleaner, and I am mopping my floor, which may seem like an onerous task but I don't find it to be so. I have a string mop I keep out on the deck so that it doesn't get stinky. I turn on the hot water and pour in some cleanser. Then I soak the mop in it. Then I transfer the mop to the second sink and wring out the mop, so it's not overly wet and then I mop my white linoleum floor and the smell is clean and lemony and the spaghetti sauce stains and the splotches of mustard, the black and brown blobs of I don't know what fade and finally disappear. I am always alone when I mop, and perhaps that's another reason I enjoy it. When I am rinsing out the mop in the sink, I look out the window above the sink at our big greep tulip tree or the dogwood and the blackberry brambles and the woods. It is such a domestic moment for me. I guess I feel like the archetypal housewife--a woman with a kitchen floor to care for and a family who create a mess.

Kaleidoscope

I teach creative writing at an arts camp called Kaleidoscope. I missed that movie that came out last year about an arts camp, but I can see why someone thought it would make a great premise. There's so much drama, so many little coming of age stories, and so much life. Our camp takes place at Winthrop University which I think adds a kind of Hogwarts dimension to the whole experience. It's really my favorite two weeks out of the year. For a teacher it's incredibly gratifying to go in a classroom and sit with people who share your passion and who happily do whatever you suggest and yet who have the independence of mind to be able to take assignments and make them their own. Each kid leaves his or her mark on you. And it's fun to see how they change from year to year. Of course, each year has its conflicts and dramas. This year a couple of girls snuck down into the boys' dorm. They were caught, of course, and I think it was fairly traumatizing and humiliating. A couple of years earlier there was a big stink about foul language and some of us almost staged a revolution, but it eventually calmed down. And of course there are always little personality conflicts and romances that ignite and burn out.

Every year I get the same classroom, second floor of the red brick conservatory building. The room has four large windows overlooking a courtyard. The walls are a dull gray with two white boards on either side. There are four rectangular heavy wooden tables and probably twenty rolling chairs in the room. We always push the tables together to make one big one. I throw a ream of paper and my collection of colored markers in the middle. Books on poetry and fiction writing go in the middle, too, and the literary magazines from past years.

They come strolling into the room, five to ten young writers, some of them brimming with talent bigger than their bodies can hold, others who are just wondering if by any chance this could be their claim to fame. I try to sit at different spots around the table each day and listen to their words. We laugh a lot. Sometimes they cry. Sometimes I open a window and music pours in. Other times the music inside is plenty.

For me, personally, the camp is incredibly inspiring. There's a novel that I've been working on forever--a coming of age novel about a girl in the early 1970s. I read a chapter each year and the kids have come to expect it and look forward to it. This year I didn't have a chapter ready so I wrote one in two days. The response was wonderful. Maybe I'll get inspired enuff to actually finish it.

I highly recommend this camp to any teenager who is interested in the arts and has an open mind. We get a little wild, but it's a great place to learn what it's like to live in that world.

Gilmore Moms

For years on television the Moms were pretty ditzy and useless. Even on a show I really liked way back when called "My So-Called Life," the mom was this neurotic narcissist (yikes, is that how you spell it?) and her very cool daughter, played by Claire Danes, didn't like her much. Daughters always like the dads better. The dads are level headed and sane and interested in the daughter's lives--except when they're not. Moms are supposed to be grown up. They're supposed to be a little bit distant but loving. Or else they're idiots.

Then came the Gilmore Girls. Loralie and Rorie (again, my spelling may be way off here) are a perfect match, bantering with each other rapid fire with a familiarity that no other mother-daughter pair on television has ever had. They are friends, above all, friends who love each other, respect each other and would die for each other. And yet this friendship takes nothing away from their mother-daughter relationship. Okay, sometimes Rorie has to play the mom role--when Loralie simply can't cope with her own mom or one of her odd boyfriends, but when Rorie needs a mom, Loralie is there for her, offering love and whatever wisdom she can muster. I remember reading some child "expert" saying, "Your child doesn't need a friend. She needs a parent." I think you can be both.

My daughter and I love to watch the Gilmore Girls. We smile in recognition as the two of them try to hash out their lives together. There's a scene where Rorie graduates from her prestigious school, and Loralie wants her to scrawl her name somewhere. And my daughter and I laugh because on her birthday we passed a house that just had new sidewalk poured in front of it, and I slammed the car to a stop so she could go out and write her name in the wet cement. Unfortunately, the cement had hardened. But it's the sort of opportunity we can't pass up even if her prep-school friends are in the back, wide eyed and open-mouthed.

We are a certain type--Gilmore Moms. The most important person in our lives is our child with whom we share most everything. We understand that she will have secrets, she will have parts of her life she doesn't share, and we will, too. But the private areas are smaller than the parts we share with each other. We like the same music and same TV shows. We watch movies together, go to concerts together. We tell each other how we're feeling. We forgive each other. We laugh together a lot.

Last week my daughter and I drove to Florida. I showed her the church in Jacksonville where I had spent great portions of my childhood. It's like a castle and she was fascinated. I showed her where I had scrawled my name in the choir room in 1967. I took her to stay with my godfather and explained to her he was the closest thing I'd ever have to a father. We drove to Fort Lauderdale and then took a trip to South Beach where we slipped into stores to laugh at the $250 jeans and $150 shirts. We ate on the roof at Ernie's where I used to eat with her father. I showed her the apartment where I lived as a single woman a half block from Biscayne Bay. And the house where her father and I lived before she was born. We had such a good time together. I'm glad I'm a Gilmore Mom. I have someone in my life who knows me better than anyone else ever could. And still loves me--that's the mystery of it.

Rain Man

Last night my kid and I watched Rain Man. I hadn't seen it in ... a really long time. But somewhere she had picked up the "definitely . . . definitely" rain man thing, and so I decided it was time for a little film enrichment. (Last weekend we watched Some Like it Hot because she wasn't exactly sure who Marilyn Monroe really was. Lord, what a funny film. I love the way they felt free to play with realism back then.)

And so this weekend we watched Rain Man. She thought Dustin Hoffman was fantastic--"Or is he really like that?" she asked.

"No," I said. "In another year or so, we'll watch The Graduate."

I thought Tom Cruise was good, too. Overall it was just a funny, touching, very watchable movie. I loved the way the writers used the big old car and the two brothers' in-depth knowledge of the car and its family value as a plot device. Of course, that opening shot with the Lamborghini (sp?) flying across the top of the screen is classic. It makes you realize how important location is in capturing the viewer's interest.

I have heard over the years some people complain about "the defective character" instant shoo-in for awards syndrome. As if there were something manipulative and false about the way "the differently abled" are portrayed. But I disagree with this view. You go into a movie knowing that you are not watching a documentary or a PBS special. It's a story, a narrative and hence it will not portray anyone or anything accurately. That doesn't lessen the truth that may be found in such stories. The point of Rain Man is not that the system is stupid and that Raymond should be able to live with Charlie. The point is that Charlie has been changed for the good--become more human and more humane--through his interaction with his autistic brother. This is the theme: when we are taken out of our selfish little worlds by having to care for another, our hearts open in ways to beautiful to express in words.

I'm sure I didn't get this the first time I saw the movie fifteen years ago or however long it was. But for the past year I have been caring for my elderly mother. She moved to a retirement community nearby and needs a lot of attention, which isn't all that easy for me to do considering neither of my siblings is nearby and I'm raising a teenager, trying to take care of a house, a man, and two pets, and editing and writing fulltime. It's frustrating at times and physically exhausting and full of worries (like how many more teeth are going to break apart and how much is it going to cost??). It's also been one of the most gratifying experiences of my life.

My daughter sometimes resents all of the attention that has been diverted from her. But I'm hoping she'll take away something from that movie we watched, even if it's only the nagging suspicion that there's more to this "duty" of mine than meets the eye. Taking care of another person who needs you is more than duty; it's a sacred privilege. It's as if the God inside you said, "Here, this will soften your heart. You can't get into heaven with a hard heart." And whoever that person is who needs your help is giving you this gift. Nothing you can do will ever be enough to pay them back for the spiritual growth you've gained in the process. So you don't worry about it. Someday, you may be giving that same gift to another person.

The Neighborhood Perv?

Two nights ago I get a call from my next door neighbor. She says, "Have you heard what's going on in the neighborhood?" I recently got a little notice from the neighborhood association so I ask "About the fields?" I can tell by the tone of her voice that the news she's talking about has nothing to do with the two fields full of wildflowers at the top of neighborhood that developers are salivating over.
"No."
"Umm, somebody's building a fence or a wall?" There was something about that in the notice, too, but I can tell that's still too innocuous an item and her voice is full of foreboding. So, finally I shut up and let her tell me.
"You know that family that lives next door to the Smiths? They have the two kids that you never see. The older one has gone to college I think."
"Oh, yeah." I'd completely forgotten about these people.
"Well, the husband moved out a while back and now he's back and guess what? He's a registered sex offender."
"Oh, crap. Are you sure this isn't some rumor?"
"No, it's on the web and everything. With a picture of him. I'll send you the email."
Well, it turns out our neighborhood sentries are up in arms about this guy. They would like to convince the family to move, but I don't see how that's possible. I mean, you can't shun people who don't socialize with you in the first place. The gossip is that he may have molested family members, and no one is quite sure why the wife has let him move back in with her. My general inclination is to give people the benefit of the doubt. On the other hand, I have a daughter who has roamed free with her pals in this neighborhood for six years. We lived in this little bubble of 1950s bliss, our girls camping at whichever house had something good to eat. From what I know or have read about sexual offenders, they don't get cured. Your standard run-of-the-mill criminal (a variety I once knew well) generally outgrows his or her stupidity or dies young. But sexual predators? Well, just look at how old some of those Catholic priests were. Or what about the "dirty old men" we all knew about when we were kids. I remember my friend Paula complaining when we were about eleven that her grandfather tried to French kiss her. She hated him.
My husband watches FOX News all the time. (I'm not going to get into that here.) They are always swept up in some frenzy of "thoughtful and insightful" analysis into the latest murdered/disappeared child-girlfriend-pregnant wife.
So . . . now when we drive out of the neighborhood, my husband says the perv is probably hiding in the bushes right now. And I tell him not to worry because our kid is now fifteen which is probably over the hill for a true perv. But still we're paying a little closer attention these days.
My thought is that we need to turn this to our advantage. We need to let the developers who want to put their cookie-cutter houses up on the beautiful fields where we let our dogs play that we have a registered sex offender in the neighborhood and that we plan to let any prospective home buyers know it. Ha, so they'll never be able to sell the houses and maybe they won't build them in the first place.

My First Blog (On television drama)

So here I am. This is my first blog. Woo-hoo. I should be working on my next novel, but this seems like fun. When I went to school in Tallahassee, I used to write a column for the now deceased Florida Flambeau (ah, the good old days before the frat boys killed it because Mary Jane Ryals made fun of their stupid beauty pagent). My column was called Lifestyles for the Poor and Unknown (I've been trying to overcome that stigma ever since) and I wrote about whatever weird thing I had done lately. I don't have nearly such an adventurous life these days but I still have this desire -- like so many of us I guess -- to publish the things I happen to be thinking about at the time. It might also be a good outlet for those little pieces of writing that I know I'll never send out. I'm not sure whether anyone else will read this. I don't profess to have some inside scoop on what the White House is up to. FOX News will never quote me. Thank you, God. But here it is. My first blog.

This morning my friend Patti called me. She has stopped watching "The Medium" because of a recent show that had to do with doctors who were possessed by an evil spirit cutting open fourteen-year-old girls just for fun. She says she loved the show at first but now it seems they're jumping on the CSI bloodthirsty bandwagon. I watched that particular episode of The Medium. (I hadn't seen the show before.) It was nowhere near CSI. If the CSI writers had been in charge, you would have seen the distraught parents walk in to find their daughter a mangled corpse. You would have gotten to truly experience the horror of inexplicable evil. And if you were a regular CSI viewer, you would have said it was entertaining. I hardly ever watch CSI, but sometimes when I'm tired and mindlessly channel surfing it'll snare me. The visual work is stunning, the actors are all easy on the eyes and the dialogue makes you think that something interesting is going on. Then I always get sucker punched. Some vicious example of human behavior so twisted as to make Hitler and his minions look almost kind by comparison pops up on my television screen and scars me for my life. I can't get to the remote fast enough to turn the TV off. Who could possibly like this shit, I wonder? (Okay, nothing would make the Holocaust look kind. I'm just trying to make a point here.)

So The Medium wasn't nearly as bad. The problem I think is with the whole format of the one-hour drama. Leonard Hill, in an essay called "The Hijacking of Hollywood," explains why one-hour dramas are so empty and so unsatisfying: "Only twenty years ago the typical one-hour dramatic series episode had a running time of approximately 48 minutes. Today the typical episode contains roughly 42 minutes of content."* You wouldn't think that six minutes would make that much difference, but it does, and I think it's a major difference. It's nearly impossible to get emotionally or intellectually involved in these shows. And major plot points are NEVER explained. You simply have to accept the fact that the problem was somehow solved. The "how" of the solution is not delineated. One show that I really like is "Numbers" --which is stylish and intriguing (well, Ridley and Tony Scott created it, I think), but it suffers from the same syndrome; there's not enough time to delve into the cool mathematic calculations that form the basis of the show. I wish it were on HBO or one of the other commercial-free stations.

Patti says she's spoken to several other people who have stopped watching "The Medium" for the same reason she has. They liked it at first but find that recent episodes have been too disturbing in a way that seems not narrative-driven but disturbing merely for the shock value. Hmmm, shouldn't "shock value" be an oxymoron? I guess it isn't. It's unfortunate that the producers/writers feel they have to pander to the prurient mindset that seems standard in our culture rightnow. It would be nice for there to be television for the non-sociopathic minority.

* I read Hill's essay in a book called News Incorporated: Corporate Media Ownershop and its Threat to Democracy. This is a must-read book for anyone who cares about what is going on, politically and culturally in the United States.