Thanks to Everyone: a video

My original story about Lidija is here. Please read it if you haven't. I want you to know more about this little girl.

I am surrounded by bits of wrapping paper still un-swept, by tablecloths besmirched with trifle, and the clutter of things that don't yet have a place. Christmas happened. We ate roast beef, and it was the best I'd ever had. My father came from California with his longtime girlfriend, spent five days here, and I've already driven them on to Santa Fe. Christmas came in like a whoosh and food went everywhere. Children smiled, or sulked, and dogs tried to steal meat and left wet tongue spots all along my floor. It was lovely.

This Christmas, though, was special because of Lidija.

Thanks to everyone, everyone close by in Los Alamos, and everyone on the internet who would not know the sound of my voice, much less the face of a little girl I know. All these people have been generous beyond what I could have imagined, and I want you to know that Lidija is following it all. She knows people have donated, reads the hugs on her donation page, and is excited about the possibility of seeing a specialist who can help her family figure out what causes her problems.

At this writing, $2,018 has been raised for Lidija on her Give Forward web site and another $283 in cash donations were given as well. We are nearly halfway to our goal.

I want to thank you all of you, and Lidija, for giving Christmas a meaning beyond gifts, beyond stories, and celebration and food, even beyond abstract ideas I have about spirituality and the light returning to the world. Thank you for giving Christmas hands and feet.

A Cloak of Scarlet Velvet: a story for Mimi, my sister-in-law

Photo Credit: Morguefile by ren

In winter, Elsa wore a cloak of scarlet velvet. The cloak shone like the moon on water. It moved with a sound like the rustling of grass. Gathered at her throat and tied with a satin ribbon, it was punctuated in a hood, which framed her face. The cloak swept downward until it reached her calves and fell elegantly about her legs as she walked. It was Victorian tea rooms, teddy bears and Red Riding Hood. It was timeless and perfect. In the cloak, Elsa was unassailable.

Elsa was ten. The cloak had been a gift from Grandma, the kind of thing one only gets once in a very few years. When she opened the box, a stillness fell over the family room.

"Elsa," said her mother in a voice like the whooshing of the air from a balloon, "that is very special. I hope you will take very good care of it."

Of course Elsa would take good care of the cloak her Grandma Nini had given her. She was so much older than they thought she was. There was some talk of rules immediately, which attempted to despoil the magic of the the gift.

It must be kept on a hanger.
And in the house.
And never outside.
It would have to be dry cleaned.
Elsa, you cannot eat any food in that!

And on and on.

Elsa was already in the woods and couldn't hear them. She walked through snowy acres with a basket on her arm. She led an army of wolves through thorny glens to castles black against the aching icy sky. Her arms pulsed with magic. Her legs itched with dances yet undanced.

"Elsa," came a strident voice. "Are you listening to me?"

"Of course," she said.

And then, the cloak became a part of Elsa's flesh. It appeared at the breakfast table, attached to the girl. At first, she was directed to take it off and hang it up, and had to. Then, the day that school resumed, Liam poured half a cup of sugar on his Corn Flakes and David drank all the milk, and that was the day that Elsa wore the cloak unnoticed. She ate a piece of toast and directed all the force of her magic into the direction of the crumbs onto the table and the floor. It took her twenty minutes to eat the toast and she got no jam, but the cloak was clean.

"Elsa," piped a train whistle, "you're going to be late!"

Elsa got up and took her backpack. She left, and the cloak was still on. It was January. There was snow on the ground, but the sky was almost clear. Cirrus clouds left unstirred in one corner of a vast expanse of blue. Made of ice, she remembered. She led the wolves all the way to school, silently. They were so silent they could not even be seen. A pack of six, the leader of them white. That one was Alba, who loped next to her, piercing pale eyes scanning the sidewalks of white. The streets from Elsa's house to Sutton Elementary School were deserted. No children lived on her block but her. She could walk in silence with her wolves and pass into the noisome world of children only just as it reached the school.

Today, though, there was a boy. He stood in the path across her way, legs apart as if to establish ownership of the sidewalk with his stance. He was taller than she, be-freckled. He had a hood on, but she guessed that his hair would have to have been red. She didn't recognize him. He was from nowhere, a spirit, an ifrit.

"Wolf," she thought.

Alba growled.

He didn't hear.

"Well hello, Little Red Riding Hood," he jeered at her.

"Hello, Wolf," she said. There are wolves and there are wolves, thought Elsa. The ones with fur made no matter. It was the ones with winter boots and freckles that you had to find a way around.

"That's a pretty cloak," he jabbed. I am supposed to be embarrassed now, sighed Elsa.

"Yes," she agreed. "It would look lovely on you as well."

The boy's eyes narrowed into fissures in his ruddy face. Elsa was supposed to be afraid. He was unsure what to do, and he was becoming angry. A sudden hand grabbed at her cloak.

Elsa danced backward and escaped him. His hand lost its grip on the smooth softness of her cloak.

"Alba!" she cried.

The boy looked around. Seeing nothing, he launched forward at her again. This time, though, before he reached her, he was startled by a growl.

_ _ _

"Well, as best as I can tell, it's a freak incident. But, honestly, Elsa, what were you thinking wearing that thing to school? We expressly told you not to! If you don't want to be picked on, you have to make some sort of effort to appear to be a normal child. You have to think about what the other children wear." Whistles, squeaks, and shrills.

"I can't see how they can say it's her fault, no matter what the child says." Bass rumbles and strong periods.

"Well, of course not! I mean, it's not as if she has the power to call every damn dog in the neighborhood and beckon it to threaten a child. I mean, honestly, what was that, though? Have you ever heard of such a thing?"

"I say it has to be something about the child. They say he just moved here from New Jersey."

"Roger, do you hear yourself? Is everyone from New Jersey to be menaced by dogs? I mean, really!"

Alba sat next to Elsa in the back of the car. Her enormous head was warm in Elsa's lap. And the cloak, unblemished, sat neatly about her lap. She smiled.


Note: This post is my Christmas gift to Mimi, my dear sister-in-law, who loves eccentric, precocious children, hates bullies and would probably love a velvet cloak. Merry Christmas, Mimi!

Twenty Minutes

Twenty minutes left before the first child wakes, before the Christmas lights come on and the house says things have to start happening. Twenty minutes of quiet, now punctuated by Mike's alarm. Twenty minutes of coffee, bitter and dark in a quite house. I can't write a blog post in twenty minutes. Now sixteen.

Hanukkah is over. We remembered a lot of the nights and forgot a few. We always do that. We're not terribly observant, not being actual Jews. I'm tired and my muscles ache. This weekend, we made nine million peppermint marshmallows, fourteen billion pieces of fudge and a batch of cinnamon almonds and put them all on plates for teachers and coaches and bosses. We put up the Christmas tree. It is lush and beautiful and gorgeous, quite unlike the toothpick trees we've had for years. It is really too beautiful for us. It leaned into the bookcase, threatening to smash everything.

"It's going to knock over the TV," I informed Mike.

Next thing I knew, he had a screwdriver and put a screw into my window jamb. Around this and around the tree trunk went a string.

"There," he said. "It's fixed."

This kind of thing only happens to us. Its low branches were too lush to permit the pitcher of water to get in. Rowan had to hydrate it with a tube of wrapping paper, which he had angled to create a hose. The perfect Christmas tree, so perfect it's unusable. It looks nice screwed to the window and surrounded by presents. It looks like a mighty effort accompanied by a lame sort of miscalculation which characterizes the people I love. It looks like us, dressed up as Douglas fir.

Six minutes. Six minutes to tell you that my father is coming to town on Thursday, the kids will be out of school on Friday, and the solstice is Friday, too. Six minutes to tell you that the air smells like cinnamon hanging on, like forests, like the plot of a Jan Brett book. Five minutes to light you a white candle of gratitude for reading me when I have nothing to say, when I ramble, when I gift you with hard edges of opinionated pain, or vague story, or soul-searching meditative thought. One minute to breathe in the smell of Solstice hanging on the air and breathe out again. It's time.

It's time to begin the day.

The Duster

Photo Credit: Morguefile by Anita Peppers

Today's post is a response to the GBE2 prompt: First Car.

My first car was a Plymouth Duster, and I used to climb in the windows like the Dukes of Hazzard because I could. I was nine then, and I wanted a pair of Daisy Dukes. I also wanted to drive, but not really.

Later I got to have the car, which by some sort of alchemy, still ran, but not really. A cloud of fetid smoke erupted from its bowels as I turned the corners of my winding streets. On the roads it made a sound like a heavy corpse shifting in a tilting metal room. I beat the dashboard to get the lights to work.

The car was legend. I had one, and some of my high school friends did not. Its seats had been chewed by ravening cats, its turn signal had to be operated like a clavé with the repeated strike of a hand, it smelled of mildew and of old magazines and years of my father's exhaled smoke.

"I can smell you coming," said my best friend Anne one December Wednesday. "And I can hear the sound of your car breaking as you drive to get me on the way up my street."

"Well, at least it gets your prissy ass to school," I told her.

She sniffed. "No reason to get your panties all in a bunch, Violet."

Rich kids with no cars. They pissed me off. She'd probably get a BMW the day she turned eighteen, so she could drive sloshed into a telephone pole in style.

"Mind if I smoke?" asked April, getting into the car.

"No," I told her. "I'm trying to keep it nice in here."

We drove without speaking, the sound of cigarettes flaring and Bic lighters flicking accompanying the percussion of my hand-operated turn. The girls exhaled. Anne blew smoke rings, like she thought she was Gandalf, as if blowing smoke rings did something that improved her general status in this world. I parked the car. Brakes ground, gears ached and groaned. The exhaust pipe belched putrescent fog. Gravity settled the Duster into place, and the teenage princesses issued forth, like clowns out of a circus car, grabbing onto satchels and cigarette packs and hairbrushes and illicit whispers they'd exchanged in the back. They walked off, gyrating hips with intention, shaking asses just like upright ducks, skirts all ruffles that drew the eye like the rumps of two baboons. I looked after them for a moment, feeling the pavement spread between us like years that could not be abridged. Then I turned to the Duster and locked the asshole up, placing the key in my purse.

"Do you think that's strictly necessary?" said a voice.

I turned. A tall, ragged sort of a boy stood in front of me. Brown eyes. Brown hair, longish, unbrushed. A leather jacket, nice but very old and covered with sewn-on patches. He looked half-awake, half-caring, halfway to being a man. Stubble punctuated his face. Too much silence had passed while I looked at those patches, at that stubble, into those strangely probing eyes.

"What?" I said.

"Do you think that you gotta lock that sucker up? Someone's going to steal that, you suppose?" A wry smile lifted one corner of his mouth.

I surveyed the parking lot, finding ten year-old Chevys, older Beemers, plebian station wagons, the occasional brand-new car.

"No, I suppose not," I conceded. "but my dad likes me to lock it up." This sounded ridiculous the instance it left my lips, and I suddenly wished to be anywhere else but talking to this boy, standing next to my wreck of a vehicle, in a parking lot that enshrined by status as the lowest of the low.

"No, it's cool," he allowed. "The point of a car is that it gets you where you want to go. Does that Duster take you places—?"

"—Violet."

"Violet, does that car take you places? Anywhere you want to go?" He looked straight at me. I realized then that no one had ever looked at me before. He saw all of me, right through my clothes and my skin, down to the muscle and the bone. He saw each instance of cat hair on my jacket, the torn lace on my panties, each freckle on my hipbones and my back.

"It takes me to home and to school," I told him.

"Then, Violet," he told me, with a penetrating stare. I could taste my own name in his mouth. It sounded like chocolate.  "You are doing it all wrong. A car should take you where you want to go. Where do you want to go, Violet?"

The air became a colloid and the wind shut up. Nothing passed through that moment but the look between he and I, as I stood there staring into the question of where I wanted to go. Autonomy and lust fused together in my solar plexus. They felt like truth.

"I want to see the ocean," I whispered.

"Get in the car, Violet. Get in the car," he said. "Let's go."

He was right. That Duster took me exactly where I wanted to be. And, with a blanket thrown down, the chewed-up seats weren't even as bad as I'd thought.


Note: This is fiction. I completely made it up, except that my dad did have a Duster when I was a kid. By the time I was in high school, he had a Hyundai, but I never had my own car until later on.

Grammar for the Gluten-intolerant

Used according to terms by someecards

Is there gluten in this sentence?
Does its subject agree with wheat?
Have I splinched its little nose,
knocked it off its little seat?
Does its infinitive need mending?
Have I verily cut it in two?
Must its dangling preposition
wonder where it's running to?

Grammar ruins the written word
when master not servant it lie.
The nuance of a poem
made an algorithm dry.
Place your commas where God requires them,
but give the initial "and" its beat.
Is there gluten in this sentence?
I can't tolerate the wheat.

More On this: Seven Outdated Grammar Rules by Ecoscribe

Thoughts on Nutcrackers and Fibromyalgia

Physical pain. Sometimes it edges just over the rim of what seems tolerable, scattering a grim light on the ordinary world. I live daily with pain like the buzz of a refrigerator motor, a noise made almost-silence by its all-the-time presence in the background of my life. Then, the barometric pressure drops and, like a frost-bitten flower, I blacken and die. Today is one such day.

Every fork scraped on every plate is a glockenspiel; every door shut is a gong. I'm going to throw up. No, I'm not. I'm at sea, tossed this way and that, my stomach moving with the waves. The fine points of arrows have been driven into both my eye sockets and the joints that operate my jaw. From my neck to my toes, I am cast in plaster, moving only slowly, with caution—in this body that used to dance.

I take my medicine. I sit. And I do not resist. Instead, I live more and more in my thought-life, letting my body do the pain part on its own. Quietly, I watch it—the storm outside my window, the animal behind a cage. The pain knows what to do. I have fibromyalgia. But I also have children and chickens and books and a collection of ridiculous Nutcrackers, arrayed upon my shelf.

"How are you, Tara?" they ask me with concern.

"Fine," I always tell them. "I'm good enough. And how are you?"

Prophylactics for Writers

Photo Credit: Morguefile by Taylor Schlades

Recently, I have suffered from writer's block. This is not a usual problem for me. Although I am both shy and introverted, I am neither quiet nor short on words. I have, in fact, boasted frequently that I will never run out of things to write because there are always things to experience. I merely translate one into the other. I suppose it had not occurred to me that there are simply things one might not want to say: sentences running through one's head, heavy with thought and emotion, that are perhaps not worth chiseling into anything that one might read. Some thoughts are sand paintings and exist only to be blown away. Writing is the act of pressing a copper tool into hard stone. Forever in writing we commit a thought to the world, as if it were anything more than the ash off a blaze, alight for a minute, and later revealed to be grey and dead. People read it full of fire and they wonder. For the writer it has long been something cold.

I have woken full of embers that want to leap into the sky. I watch them to see what path they'll take before they extinguish themselves upon the earth. I am full of things to say. Noisesome, indulgent, wretched things. Things that feel hot and true as they burn into my skin. Up, up they go—past the edge of my consciousness and down again. Fireflies of sorrow in the night. The word is a powerful way to kill your future, if you lend fire to embers that burn too close to where you live.

So, in silence I sit. Nothing, I think. There is nothing. Nothing really to say. Just the exercising of words like muscles to keep them limber, the motion of keeping warm. So much mooing and baying and caterwauling at the screen that receives the noises which turn to letters and to words. Things without meanings, divested of the spirit of my voice.

This is writer's block: a dam against one's saying the things that it is better not to say. Perhaps I should not hate it. The keeping of certain thoughts in treasured boxes reveals them to be the repeated rantings of a lunatic with a pen.

December 4, 2001 There is a zombie in my closet. Last night, I could feel its approach. The cold hand of death was inches from my neck when I awoke. 

May 14, 2007 Tonight as I fell off to sleep, I heard the stumbling of a corpse in the bedroom closet, a thing animated and gruesome. It hid as I turned on the light. I was awake the rest of the night.

September 10, 2012 It seems impossible, but I believe there to be a zombie in my closet. I must think what action I can take.

This is the problem with journaling. You start to know yourself as someone who repeats things, like a fading Alzheimer's patient, as if you were trying to hold certain thoughts carefully in the forefront of your mind lest you accidentally forget. It is critical to remember why I became angry with my cousin in 1991, the reasons I am not a Republican, the fears I have of driving in the dark. The things one can say are finite and limited. We call this "our personality." I am sick of mine. My writings read like the repeated murder and animation of the same poor corpse. I ooonnnnce was lossssst and nowwwww I'm foouuuuuunndddd...was bliiiind, but nowwwww....I suspect I'm still blind. I'm bumping into walls and pretending I can see. This, I suspect, is the state of being human. I am sick to death of it.

Before the invention of existential angst, I am not sure what people got me for Christmas. Probably drear socks and merry bursts of song. What I really like to get is something that allows everyone to look at me, with that bothered skepticism in their eyes, and say,

"What the Hell are you talking about, Tara? I don't know what you mean."

Writer's block. It's like prophylactics for writers to protect against the venereal disease of being misunderstood. In advance of anything, sheathe oneself in latex and be careful you do not let pass the essence of your thought.

It would have been infinitely better to have done so in this case.

A Christmas that is not Religious

The December holiday season is and always has been my favorite time of the year. This is true despite the fact that I often treat whole endeavor as if I were appearing before Emily Post in the Egyptian Underworld, where she will weigh my homemade rolls to see if my soul must be devoured. Even despite the lists and budgets with numbers climbing up and down, even despite the rushing about as if from one end of the Titanic to the next, I love the holidays. One reason: having grown up in a religiously eclectic family, I get more of them than you.

This year we will begin our celebrations with Hanukkah on December 8th. To do this right, I have been known to make latkes from scratch, pressing all of my children into service with cheese graters and the little knobs of russet potatoes that remain stubbornly un-shredded in my hands. I cook a whole chicken in the oven and the house is redolent with the smell of roasting fat. We buy doughnuts cooked in oil because the oil in the temple lasted eight days instead of one. We light the menorah, reciting the prayer in Hebrew that I was taught when I was too young to understand. Memorized in phonetics and unattached to our religious beliefs, we say it anyway. My kids argue about whose turn it is to pray and light. I read to them about the miracle and forget about the horror of war and oppression, pressing my mind instead against the truth that plenty often comes from very little, from what seems to be nothing at all. We pray because this is true. We pray also because our ancestors were taken away from their families and murdered like rats for being Jewish. We pray because all prayers change who we are. For eight days, we remember that we are Jewish, as well as many other things. We pray so that we might never forget.

Next comes Solstice. When my older children were very small, before the schools owned their mornings from before the break of dawn, I woke them in the dark and stuffed them wrapped in blankets into car seats, settling hot cocoas in their little hands. We lived in Northern California, and we drove a few miles out and up to where a green hill rose up above everything and an apple orchard stretched across the bottom of the sky. We waited in anticipation and glanced excitedly at the hills.

"I think I see it!"

"No, it's just a cloud."

"No, there! It's here! It's coming!"

Silly with cocoa and morning glee, we watched the sun rise. The baby sun, I explained to my youngest, is being born. The light is returning to the world. My children danced and sang and then chased one another through the wet grass until we took them home. We still celebrate Solstice most years at our church. To me, Solstice is the essence of the true religion of December. We meet the dark, it seems to encompass everything and then, in that nadir of blackness, new promise is reborn. This physical fact seems to me to hold the key to understanding our lives. It may be black as ink now. Yes, it is darkest, but just wait a minute and see...Wait one more minute and you will see.

Christmas itself will always and forever be the tradition of my Grandmother. She died the night before the solstice three years ago, at the age of 103. I found myself surprised that she didn't wait a few more days to partake in the roast beef. Grandma, being British, was good with the roast beef and served it with Yorkshire pudding. My grandmother was a Unitarian, the wife of a minister very important in his day, and she herself was a director of religious education involved lifelong in her church. On the occasion of her hundredth birthday, she was, in fact, named minister emeritus of River Road Unitarian Universalist Congregation. Deeply religious, she was not certain she believed in God and didn't seem to find the question important. Therefore, our Christmas growing up had very little of the story Christ and a great deal to do with the outpouring of love for one's family, the aesthetic beauty of a lovely meal and the importance of doing right by our fellow human beings. We continue to celebrate it this way.

My children don't make lists of things they want. Instead, I ask them to make lists of things they want to give. Whatever gift they receive, the idea is that they will be happy with it because it was given freely and with love. This year, none of them has asked me for anything. That is the way it usually goes. We plan our giving carefully, shepherding what resources we have and we often give things that are needed to our kids, rather than things that would simply be fun. This is not so much a matter of Puritan ethics as simple mathematics, but my children seem glad to have whatever gifts they get. The grandparents do better by them than we. The older boys save their allowance to buy one another gifts. I find myself very proud that our holiday is not about wanting things, but about thinking about others, finding some way to honor them with a token of your love.

The weeks leading up to Christmas are filled with little events that punctuate the lavish beauty of the idea contained in that word: "holiday." We will spend a day in the making of fudge and other goodies to give to teachers and coaches, co-workers and friends. We make gingerbread cookies from scratch, with royal icing and spend an afternoon decorating the finished cookies with Red Hots, raisins, coconut and chocolate chips. The ginger, the molasses and sugar, all of it makes the house smell like love. We sometimes cut a tree from the national forest, a straggly, thin-branched thing, something of which you can say, if you squint, "It has potential." We decorate it with ornaments that we have had for ages, silly oddments of child-crafted things and legacy handmade clothespin dolls. It is beautiful in the way second grade hallways are beautiful. The cat sleeps under it and drinks water from the stand, happy we have brought the forest to him again this year.

On Christmas morning, we open our gifts in turns from oldest to youngest and watch one another with pleasure as each enjoys what they have gotten. We bust open holiday crackers, eat lavish meals and tell one another stupid jokes. Holiday music plays.

Christmas itself for me is not religious, except in the sense that life is religious. I believe fervently in the birth of hope, in the potential for help that comes from nowhere when you need it most. I believe not only that these things are miracles, but that they are predictable enough to be celebrated on the cycle of a year. They are part of the very nature of life. More than anything, I believe in the need to create rituals, in the need to say that this day is special, to cook special foods, to gather together, to decorate our homes. All across the world, we do these things, whether we have little or plenty, whether we believe or not. It is part of what it means to be human, this setting aside of days.

"For so the children come

And so they have been coming.

Always in the same way the come—

Born of the seed of man and woman.

No angels herald their beginnings

No prophets predict their future courses

No wise men see a star to show where the babe is that will save humankind

Yet each night a child is born is a holy night.

Fathers and mothers—sitting beside their children’s cribs—feel glory in the sight of a new life beginning.

They ask where and how will the new life end—will it never end

Each night a child is born is a holy night—a time for singing

A time for wondering, a time for worshiping."

~Sophia Lyon Fahs

Note: This post is in response to the curiosity of some of my online friends as to how Christmas is celebrated in the house of people who call themselves atheists, meaning us. It's funny because I suppose it never occurred to me that I celebrate it any differently from most people I talk to, but perhaps I do.  It seemed like a very interesting topic to write on, anyway. Thanks for the suggestion, Margi and Jewels.