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.

Ell if Ent: a one syllable experiment.

Photo Credit: Morguefile by gojo23

Today's post is a response to the GBE2 prompt "Single-Syllable Challenge." The instructions were to write in one syllable words only.



I write in red, blue, green, and orange. And I write in one, two, three and four. I do not write in "one." The beat is like a death march.

    Clap. The. Sound.    

Dull as thuds that knock in a shot vent.  No stairs of words for the ear to climb.  "Cut the fat," Beth says and I can see her smile. I scowl. For years, folks have tried to throw my parts of speech in the trash like gross meat stuck to a brown bone.

"Use Strong Nouns and Verbs."

The parts of speech that make clear a noun or verb, you should kill. Twain should know his stuff. A noun can stand on its own, if it is a hale sort of noun. Say "elm" and then shut up.

I would miss blue if this rule were to be broad. I would miss the age of a child. I might like to know that a thing was done in a quick way or a cruel way. I'm odd that way.

I think I can live in one count for the length of a blog post, if I keep things short, but I would not like to go to the zoo. Here is a thing, I'd say, a live thing that is not a plant. It bears live young and wears some hair. It gives some milk to its calf. Its skin is in folds like bark—grey as a dull steel. The nose of the thing is a tube like a snake that moves with the spell of a song. The thing has a sad look and teeth that need a trim—long swords of white that are no help to it here. Its ears flap like flags.

Say it so and you feel grim. So much more the ease to just say its name.

Ell if Ent. 

Exploring Point of View: Early Morning

Photo Credit: Morguefile by Jade

GBE2 WEEK #72 (9-30-12to 10-6-12): Exploring POV

This week's post is a task set by Beth, aka Word Nerd. The assignment: to write a short piece first from the first person and then from the third. I decided to write fiction and to attempt, for once, to write from a male point-of-view. See what you think.

First Person

Monday I woke up to the bomb blast of an alarm rupturing the dark.  The alarm sat on a nightstand across the bed—on the other end of an emptiness where covers lay almost undisturbed, a pillow still neat and fluffed, a vacancy. I dragged myself there on my abdomen, like a pissed-off nudibranch or a purposeful caterpillar, in search of the button.  I hit snooze instead of cancel. God fucking damn it. Behind me lay wrinkled sheets coiled up about my body like foam around a rock, the neatness of her absence now despoiled. 5 AM. The first words from my lips a curse.

Downstairs, the coffee was brewing. I had needed to remember to set it up last night. That was her job. She set up coffee. I unloaded dishes. How bizarre it seemed now that a marriage should be so much of classroom job assignments and so little of holding hands and jumping together in falling leaves, screwing in hot tubs and pouring out the contents of one another’s soul. Neglect to unload the dishwasher and forget about a smile from your teacher, much less a slap on the ass.

Bitter. The coffee tasted bitter. And the half and half was spoiled, curdling chunks of cottage cheese in my mug. At least there was plenty of coffee. I’d made enough for two.

Third Person

Monday morning Ethan woke like every Monday morning, angry. Maybe angrier than usual. Maybe sad as well. He beat up his alarm clock as if his arm were the extension of a baseball bat. For all his rage, he appeared impotent—a bedraggled man of forty-five, with hair in need of cutting and a face that needed shaved, attacking banal technology as if it might have been the cause of all his ire. He sat upright for a bit and stared hauntedly at his bedroom, at his king-sized bed, now gone to wreck, and then scooted off the mattress and stood, tucking anger under hospital corners of control, to straighten the sheets. When the bed was restored to perfection, he left the room.

Downstairs, the coffee was brewing for Ethan. A cat mewled outside and he didn't hear. Lisa let the cat in every morning, fed it, petted it. Ethan hated cats. He simply didn't hear it. It wasn't there. He had put in too much of the grounds and they had leaked into the carafe, had settled into mud. He didn't see this either. He didn't smell the off-ness of the turning cream. He poured it into his coffee and it rose to the top, forming solid pieces of corruption. He took a sip and then stared at what he was drinking. For a moment, a look of realization was etched upon his lined and tired face, as if frozen in time, coffee in hand, still. He stood this way, second after second, unbearably still. Then, slowly, Ethan lowered the coffee to the counter. A tear rolled down his cheek.

Peace and Pain

Note: Since I recently had my wisdom teeth out and seem to have developed complications from my surgery, I have been thinking a lot about pain and my experience of the spiritual (or, if you prefer, meditative) nature of dealing with it. I have wondered why some kinds of pain are easy to deal with in this way and some are not. I had all my children by natural childbirth and my middle one at home. I suffer from chronic pain conditions. I find that I could meditate my way through childbirth and, to a large extent, through this dental pain, but not through a migraine or through a fibro flare. I still don't know why. Anyway, the story that follows is fiction, but is based, to a large extent, on my experience of my second child's birth.

The post is also a response to GBE2 prompt #67 Peace.

Coiled inward, her own breath sharp through her nose, Kate felt the sensation of uterine contraction wash over her. The last uptick in intensity had near defeated her. She could master her resources to  deal with the pain, and then the pain would increase. She was lying on her bed now, in a fetal position, with no memory of how she had gotten there. Her huge belly was an earth between her scrunched up face and arms and her muscled legs. She bit down on her own teeth and imagined trying not to fall into a pit. The contraction passed.

In the soft light of her home, she could see the distant movement of her husband Albert in the kitchen, where water was being boiled for instruments. Her midwives sat in living room chairs and smiled like sweet grannies at dressed-up princess toddlers; they were unconcerned and happy with her progress. Beside her in the dark was Maggie.

"It will hurt less if you get on your hands and knees, babe," said her friend, patting smooth her hair.

"How dilated am I?" This seemed critical, this measurement. Are we there yet?

"Probably six or seven. But you don't want them to keep poking you every few minutes to find out, do you?"

Was Maggie chewing gum? She sounded so casual. Her lips smacked happily. Kate found herself resenting anyone who could chew gum.

"No," Kate agreed, hurriedly.

"You're doing great, Kate," Maggie said, her face appearing at bed level, brown eyes soft with compassion. "Just great. Such an good birth. You're a trooper."

Then the sensation began again, as if Kate's whole center had clenched in upon itself, a giant blood pressure cuff that wouldn't stop squeezing. Harder, tighter, harder, and with it that twisting, nausea-producing cervical pain–that being opened up. It was definitely worse this time.

Kate closed her eyes. In the darkness, she could see a torrent of liquid light pouring forth; a tidal wave beating against levees that could not but fail, one by one. One levee stood, like a hand held out in protest. One levee remained to resist the overwhelming pain. Sudenly, she completely understood.

---

"Now, she won't even talk to me," Albert complained with some alarm in the living room.

"She can't, " Maggie laughed. "She's having a baby, honey. She's way past The Veil, getting that baby out. Talk to her too much and you're just gonna prick her little bubble of magical protection."

Albert stared. Why, he wondered again, was his wife friends with this woman? And how was it that she had so insinuated herself into their lives that she, not he, had taken charge of the birth of their second child. What on earth had made him agree to a home birth in the first place? In frustration, he got up, kicking back his chair leg hurriedly and going to fuss with the crib again. As if Kate would ever put that baby in a crib, he grumbled to himself. Nevertheless, he tightened all the screws. At least this would be safe, if he could help it. Job done, he stood up. 

"The baby is about to come," yelled the senior midwife from the other room. "If you all want to see, go ahead and come in here NOW!"

--

Motion stirred around the edges. People, it seemed, were gathering. Kate lay on the bed and the world trembled around her, layers of reality stacked as if in a torte. What a strange thought to have–a torte. Top-most there were people with which she knew she should converse. Bottom-most, blackness and the sound of a slow droning cant. In the middle, she hovered. Levees had fallen and waters lay still, with nothing to beat up against. Pain was present, but Kate didn't resist. Sensation passed over her and she received it; she reacted as she must. She shifted position, she motioned for wet cloths. Mostly she was bent on maintaining that internal stillness, which would allow her to appreciate the fierce sensation of bringing her child into the world. In what she knew was a rage of pain,she had never felt more totally at peace.

She was aware now that her body was expelling. "Baby" was not part of the thought. Her body merely did what the female body was designed to do–it gave birth. Now, that was the only business that concerned her, purely animal. 

With a third hard push, exclamations rose around her and the top-most world came suddenly into stark relief: 

"A little girl! A little girl!"

"Oh, good, job, Kate!"

"How beautiful."

And, just there, she was set back on the top of the strata of existence–awareness of her body fading backwards from her mind.

"Her name is Fiona," she whispered. "I want to see her."

Now.

Start with the silk masterpiece of a spiderweb tenaciously spanning a doorjamb, and shimmering with flecks of mica–luminescent diamonds of mathematical precision that have never known dust. Later it becomes grime made linear, a blemish to be wiped away by an impatient broom. Splendor descending into lowness. Chalk paintings blurred by rain. Spring blossoms scattered by the wind. Feathers, scales, butterfly wings–all washed colorless by time, desiccated by age and decomposition.

Beauty happens now. In the instant someone calls for you to look at a rainbow or passing butterfly. Blink and you miss the passing of the dandelion seed catching the light and bursting into supernova. Close your eyes and the shooting star rains by unnoticed.

It's O.K. Open them up again. It will all happen again in a minute.

Home is the Place You Don't Want to Burn Down: The Story of the Las Conchas Fire

Picture courtesy of  U.S Fire and Aviation Management

On Sunday, June 26, while I was sitting outside the local bagel shop with my friend Shana, we first noticed the smoke. Smoke had not been unusual during this summer of Southwest drought. In fact, a few weeks prior, smoke had traveled approximately 300 miles from Arizona to make the skies of Los Alamos a bleary brownish haze which had me busting out the nebulizer repeatedly in the early weeks of June, to overcome the overwhelming sense of being suffocated by gaseous soot. We had seen other columns of smoke appear above nearby mountains for week. Our unseasonably dry winter had made the area a tinderbox.

I was the one seated facing the sky, and I realized later I had probably been looking at that damn smoke for close to half an hour before Shana uttered the should-have-been-obvious-to-me statement: "That's close!" Obviously what we were looking at was a fire up in the Jemez Mountains, just above us.  As we got up and walked a couple of blocks downtown, smoke suddenly began to take up half the sky. It was a very odd thing to look at the familiar sky-scape of my town and see that half of the usually turquoise sky consumed with what essentially (and ironically) looked like a nuclear mushroom cloud.

Photo Credit: Flickr by John Fowler

I arrived home, turned on my computer and discovered quickly that a wildfire had started near the Las Conchas trail-head. This particular trail-head, is in my family, almost synonymous with "Eden". In fact, it was less than a week prior that we had last driven out there in search of the lush green landscape that surrounds a clear and perfect stream teaming with tiny fish and macro-invertebrates. Las Conchas is where I go to save my soul, when the pain of missing Northern California is too great, and I am filled with resentment at the poverty of flowing water and the intractable stubby brown saginess of New Mexico. My heart sickened with the potential loss of this place.

It took me the greater part of an hour to register that the fire presented an actual danger to us.

However, as smoke continued to fill the sky, at a certain point, I began to get nervous for something other than the loss of my favorite hiking trail. Filled with the kind of nervous energy that demands one do something, I called my thirteen year-old son, who he was at the pool snack bar to warn him to be careful of inhaling too much smoke and to make sure he had his inhaler with him. I called my husband, who was at the hardware store in Espanola. I called my ex-husband, with whom my older two kids were living that week, to make sure he knew what was happening, and to offer a second nebulizer for the kids to use if needed. I started streaming the local radio station on my PC. With a certain well-controlled intensity, the DJ described the intensity of the fire, which had already been dubbed the Las Conchas fire. Repeatedly, she stated that this was not currently a threat to the town of Los Alamos...not yet, but that it was sparking, crowning and running at unbelievable speed. In fact, at the speed of an acre a minute.

And then, anti-climatically it was time to go meet the other members of my church's religious education committee to clean out a large storage closet that needed to be converted to a classroom. So off I went. If we were going to need to evacuate, we didn't now. There was nothing to actually excuse me from pawing through boxes and boxes of old crafts. At this point, the sky looked totally surreal. I called my Dad on the way to the meeting to let him know what was happening and tell him to send on any national news on the subject he might be able to get.

My father-in-law John Faucett posted this picture to Facebook on June 26, the day the fire began.

 

Two other RE committee members showed up, and there was lots of crap in the storage closet. Decades of extra buttons, boxes with samples of stone tiles, bags of antiquated flour for play dough, swaths and swaths of cloth. I was pretty distracted for a couple of hours sorting through all that. Other than a few stray comments on the smoke, we remained pretty focused on the task at hand. I wonder, retrospectively, if this happens all of the world, as terror draws nearer to groups of people. Villages go fishing. Mothers gather to darn socks. People tell children to clean their room just as toxicity rains down on a population.

On leaving church, I became re-focused on the fire. KRSN started to suggest that we think about what belongings we might want to take with us in the event of an evacuation: Six P's. Pets. Papers. Personal Computers. Prosciutto. Prostitutes. Peonies. I can't remember now. I started assembling various papers, in a nervously scattered fashion. Intermittently, eclectic mixes of music were played.

The evening was spent  listening to increasingly alarming radio reports while making lists of items with which to evacuate. We locked my mildly schizophrenic ginger tabby in the house, in case we had to get him suddenly and go, and he subsequently kept my husband up all night. I gave a great deal of thought to what the appropriate course of action regarding my five ducks might be. I had horrific visions of evacuating to a hotel with them. Additionally, our neighbor residing in the other half of our shared duplex is a firefighter, so we told him we would take care of his two dogs in the case of an evacuation. (I guess I should be grateful that I was no longer fostering the two additional cats, with whom my cat had a less than totally affable relationship.)

Photo Credit: Kristen Honig U.S. Forest Service

We wondered aloud about whether we should leave, in order to avoid health problems due to the fact that we all have asthma. The decision was complicated by the fact that my husband works for the local county government, and by the five ducks and all the furry mammals, and the fear that we hadn't gotten everything done yet that we needed to do. At some point, it came to light that this was the biggest fire in New Mexico history–bigger, in fact, than the Cerro Grande fire which eleven years ago had burned away some four hundred houses in Los Alamos. I worried about my kids, who were with their dad, just because I didn't have them near me, and that felt uncomfortable. I kept telling myself that their dad was once a volunteer fire fighter, and that he would keep them safe.

We closed all the doors and windows and hooked up one of our forty year-old, yellowed swamp coolers to operate without sucking in outside air. Perversely, my husband was at work finishing up installing a red brick patio in our back yard and setting up sprinkler systems, in case our house didn't burn and we still wanted it to look nicer. I continued to bustle about, gathering important belongings and making lists of what we needed to pack. And we just waited to hear what we needed to do.

I was afraid to go to sleep, in case the fire came into town in the middle of the night, but I did anyway. At some point the following morning, when I turned the radio back on, they started to emphasize the need for people with health conditions to voluntarily evacuate the area. Ashes began falling from the sky. And we decided to leave. Mike started calling hotels, I looked up the Santa Fe animal shelter to see if they would take our cats (mine and my mother's) and our dog and our neighbors two dogs.

Nobody really wanted the ducks.

Photo Credit: Kristen Honig U.S. Forest Service

Over a period of an hour, Mike loaded every expensive tool in the shed into his Mazda, and, then considered that he would need to be parking this vehicle with thousands of dollars worth of tools in a hotel parking lot in Albuquerque. He moved them all back into the shed, over the course of another hour.

We decided to load all our music, documents and photos onto an external hard drive and take that with us. It kept failing to load, and then Mike had to unplug the computer and load it into the car instead. I resisted taking down all the photos hanging in our hallway, wondering how much time it was going to end up taking to put them back. My six year-old emptied out his clothes drawers and attempted to pack all of his Legos in an overnight bag. At this point, I had deserted him completely to my mother's loving care, and I huffed around checking my list, putting items in a pile and disturbing my husband's train of thought constantly with "What-if" questions.

Mike re-installed a large pond in our duck's yard that we had previously removed, deeming it to hard to clean. He placed heaps of feed in various locations. I started to urge speed, so that we could get out ahead of the other 18,000 people in town, before a mandatory evacuation was ordered. And then the radio announced that the evacuation was now mandatory. We had to leave.

While Mike continued moving objects around and there was nothing more I could do, I decided I would make sure all the neighbors on my cul-de-sac knew of the mandatory evacuation. I ran around, knocking on doors. Some people seemed annoyed, which I won't even go into here, but most were grateful I had thought of them and said they knew about the order. Then I came to the house where the drunk people live.

There, I found a lone woman, brittle, suspicious and red-eyed, surrounded by copious pets, in a house reeking of urine and staleness. She was unaware of the order, but not of the fire. "I am staying here," she told me. "I don't know where my husband is. I have no car, and no place to go." My breath caught. "I'm sure we can find somewhere for you to go," I said. I said several more comforting things, repeatedly expressed my concern for her safety and ran back home to retrieve a piece of information about the shelter provided for evacuees. When I returned to her, her suspicion had evaporated, and I turned my attention to the problem of all her pets, trying to help her determine what to do with them. I found myself offering to take a cardboard box full of kittens with their eyes still closed, and their mother, to the shelter along with my own animals, to which she agreed. I moved each kitten into a carrier and this went fine. However, when moving the mother cat, she and I had a slight disagreement which resulted in a deep, bloody raking of my arm and chest and in her running off.

At this point, several things happened. A nicely dressed woman arrived, explained that she was here to help the woman, who was her sister-in-law, that she had already booked a hotel for them, and the absent husband, a man I recognized as the drunk who had attempted to grope every woman on the dance floor at my friend's retirement party, came home. It was determined that the kittens should be left on the front porch in case the mother returned for them. The drunk woman hugged me, with tears in her eyes, and I left.

Shortly after, we got into three cars with four animals and drove out of town. I had the radio tuned to the local news, and it unrelentingly played the instruction to evacuate immediately lest we face imminent danger to our lives. Tears welling in my eyes, I drove, clutching the steering wheel. A terrible, acrid smell wafted up to my nose. I reeked of the drunk woman and her stale house and her tiny kittens and despair and compassion. I reeked of fear. I cried some more. I left my damn ducks there to burn with my hard-won house. I left with two pairs of underwear and all of my important papers. I left with all of my photo albums and without all my toiletries. I sobbed and wanted to divorce my husband for failing to listen to me while he was packing. I sobbed and hated my ex-husband for having two of my children, so that I couldn't hold their hands. I drove, listened and sobbed.

I drove to Albuquerque and stayed there until they said I could come home, a week later, to a place where, instead of watching fireworks and parades, we gathered for Independence Day in a parking lot to watch our mountain continue to burn, and helicopters, like strange dragons, paced the sky, spitting fire retardant. I came home to find ducks no worse for wear, a neighbor grateful but missing all her kittens, and coyotes roaming the neighborhoods in broad daylight.

I came home.

Photo Credit Flickr: Jayson Coil

The Story of My Failed Career as a Dancer

Here is my six year-old dancing in a little cramped corner of my kitchen. He's actually pretty good. A couple of months after this was taken, we enrolled him in a very expensive hip hop dance class so that he can continue to explore this passion and talent that he has for dance. We are nothing if not encouraging of passions around here. 

Our GBE2 topic this week is dancing, and I would very much like to use this to write a long-winded, highly metaphorical exploration of something important. However, I have spent a good deal of time recently showering you all with love poems for my asparagus, and so I think it is time for me to write something funny again. In my case, dance would then make the perfect topic.

I too wanted to be a dancer, as a child. Any girl child who spends her youth with her nose inside one classic children's book after another is bound to decide to become a ballerina. I was struck continually with visions of myself, suffused with the grace of the celestials and scattering rose petals in my wake, as I spun effortless pirouettes across the playground. Besides, everyone was doing it. It was the thing to do. This is where I first remember my vision of myself running headlong into the brick wall of reality at full force.

Apparently, I have problems learning to follow "steps." My memory of this is congealed into a lump of unpleasantness in third grade wherein two friends of mine who both studied ballet were trying to instruct me in some steps for a "show" we had all created. Their frustration with me was palpable as I kept putting up the wrong arm in the wrong way followed by moving my feet incorrectly and so on. There was a decided absence of the presence of rose petals scattering pleasantly about in my wake. The part I remember most vividly was their recognition of my dismay, which was followed by their trying, with the characteristic transparency of eight year-old girls, to make me feel better. Perhaps this was the moment in life when I first developed the relationship I still maintain to being cheered up, which I rank right with being made fun of in terms of being enlivening to the human spirit. I didn't feel better. I felt like the object of pity. So, there, in the shadow of a portable, on a playground in San Anselmo, died my grandiose dreams of ballet, never to be kindled again.

I continued, however, to be dogged by dance. I liked to act, something that I in fact did quite well and with confidence. For reasons that perhaps only Satan knows, this required that I also be something of a performing poodle. Over the summer break of my sixth to seventh grade year, I participated in a week-long acting camp which performed the musical Guys and Dolls. I was cast in the chorus line, which was an abysmal use of me, in particular, since I could act quite well but danced poorly. We were required to learn a tap step known as "the Irish" and I could just not get it. I muddled through two performances, faking this movement incorrectly, only to somehow master it just after the last performance. I still remember exactly how to do the Irish, in case anyone wants to know. A very useful skill, that.

In adulthood, dance continues to plague me. My husband studied dance for years, and periodically I find myself having to dance with him in public, which is wretched because it makes such marked evidence of my inferior ability. One is supposed to enjoy dancing with one's husband, but I can't say I ever have. I almost want to partner him with a more competent consort so that he would continue to have some avenue to enjoy his hard-won skill in this arena. Instead, I grin thinly, as if I have terrible tooth pain and cause everyone around me to flock over and try to force me somehow to enjoy myself by showering me with unwanted attention. (Word to the wise: Never cheer introverts up by drawing attention to their shortcomings publicly.)

I do like to dance in private. When I have a day with some physical energy, and music is playing, I find myself dancing around my living room, happy as a clam, to things like Kid Rock. My natural style of dance is very much like that of a pole dancer. This used to be some fun to pull out in public–no steps required–when I was a cute looking nineteen or twenty, but it suffers somewhat as performed by the pain-ridden thirty-six year-old mother of three.

I guess that the gist is, for me, dancing like nobody's watching requires that nobody is actually fucking watching me.

Advice from the Medical Expert

Dear Medical Profession,

Hi, it's me–the curly-haired, pale-looking person who keeps making appointments with you. You've probably seen me in your waiting rooms, looking for a magazine to read that isn't on either hunting or beauty advice. I have a writing prompt on confrontation and you just popped right into my head.

At one time, I wanted to be an expert on world mythology. Later, I studied to become–at least in a small way–an expert on child development. I have many interests. However, without meaning to, I have become an expert on going to doctors.

Let me qualify that for you. Within the last four years, I have been to see an ear, nose and throat specialist, a sleep doctor, an allergist, a neurologist, two rheumatologists, a chiropractor, a podiatrist, and an endocrinologist. I have visited my primary care physician so often that we are practically joined at the hip. He is moving in May and I feel personally betrayed. It's a bit like being left by a lover. A lover with an encyclopedic knowledge of my complicated medical history.

I am also getting to be an expert at taking medications. I once tried approximately fifteen different medications, at different times and in different combinations, to get my allergies and asthma under control. Currently, I am taking a cocktail of medicines for my fibromyalgia and migraines which allow me to get out of bed and function, but which have robbed me of my short-term memory and forced me to use an online thesaurus to remember what I am trying to say.

I am an expert on getting medical tests as well. I have had an ultrasound of my thyroid and abdominal areas. They have X-rayed my chest twice and my sinuses once. I have had an MRI on my brain and an abdominal CT, which was one of the most hilarious experiences of my life. A sleep study was conducted. Blood enough to happily feed all of the vampires of Bon Temps has been extracted from my veins and analyzed. Urine has been taken. I have had spirometry and an echocardiogram.


Having spent one-third of the last portion of my life at doctor's offices, and seen the good, bad and the ugly, I would like to make a few comments on what doctors and their staffs could do to better help their patients. Strictly from a constructive point of view, you understand.

1. I don't mind having to wait five minutes to speak to the receptionist during busy times at your office. I know this is outside your control. However, I would prefer not to spend that time listening to a symphony rendition of "Hey Jude" punctuated every thirty seconds by a reminder that my call is important to you. Shut-up and let me look at Facebook in peace while I wait.


2. Stop weighing me already. You weighed me last week. I don't give a rat's ass what I weigh and I am dizzy. I am here to treat my medical condition, not because I can't afford Jenny Craig.


3. Don't ask me if I have contacted a dentist to see about teeth grinding, or employed a variety of other strategies no one has ever suggested, as if I should know that these would be the appropriate actions to take. I'm not the expert. You are. That's kind of the point, right? I am busy surviving my pain, loving my children, and sucking the marrow from each lucid moment I have. Honestly, I'm not spending much of that precious time researching what's wrong with me. If I need to see a dentist, please tell me so.


4. Stop asking me, when I am having trouble walking into your exam room without my husband's help, if I am able to get regular exercise. No, I'm not.


5. If you are going to prescribe me something that will make me feel nauseated, lose all interest in sex, forget how old I am or not be able to feel my legs, a heads-up would be helpful. Honestly, I may still take it. I'm that desperate. But I'd love to know about this little detail. 


6. If I suffer from migraines and you prescribe a drug with a side effect of headaches, I have a great  idea. Give my neurologist a call first. Since I have a history of asthma, drugs that can worsen breathing should be discussed with my allergist. You guys have the medical degrees. I'm just the poor asshole with all the medical conditions. I don't want to play "telephone" with a bunch of specialists. 


7. I know that you are sincerely trying to be nice, but please stop telling me that we are going to get this all figured out and I am going to feel better, that I just need to be patient. While I have been waiting for the next medication we are trying to work out, I have had to miss work four times. While I waited for a bunch lab results to get sent to my PCP, I spent three consecutive weekends laid up missing time with my family. All these fragments of waiting for one piece of information or another have now added up to a year and a half of my life spent waiting for something to work. That's long enough for two babies to be brought to term. It may be easy to tell me to be patient, but it isn't the most useful thing to hear anymore.


8. Fax the motherfucking records. I shouldn't have to call you twice or walk to your office or fill out a special form so that I can get a copy of my own medical records to give to another doctor. Stop acting like I am stealing your favorite Pokemon cards.  


9. Train your office staff to act more proactive than observers casually munching Cheetos at the scene of a car wreck. If I walk in to say that I have developed hepatitis and need to see my rheumatologist, don't just tell me she has no appointments and go back to shuffling papers on your desk. If I am out of a medication right now that will cause withdrawal symptoms tomorrow, your staff should not insist that we have lab work done before the doctor will write a new prescription. That's stupid.

In summary, if you could remember that I am a real person with a real life, more than one major system in my body and limited time and resources, it would go a long way. A waiting room espresso bar would also be nice.

Sincerely,

Tara Adams
(Think of me as a mystery shopper for medical care.) 

What is Not Simple

"Lovely Weed"

Easy as ABC. Simple as 123.

What could be simpler than setting pencil to paper, than cutting and pasting a letter in the proper position? What could be simpler than standing and walking in line, than sitting in a seat?


These things are so easy when a child is equipped to do them, it is hard to imagine that they could be difficult for anyone. Almost as simply done as flipping a light switch, the proper instruction is given and the light will turn on. This seems to be the hope and expectation of almost every teacher.

Frustratingly, though, often we flip the switch and the room remains in darkness. The child, though obviously intelligent, sits fiddling with his pencils and the worksheet is incomplete. The temptation is to flip the switch again. Again. Again. Now the child, although he has not completed the worksheet, has still learned something new. He has learned that there is something wrong with him. The light switch is simply not wired to work in this way. It cannot be cajoled or punished into triggering. It will not light until you discover the secrets of its wiring.

Children are not simple.

I work in education and what I know of teachers, generally, is that they work harder than you know, and that they care more than you suspect. Teaching is more difficult, more draining than you think and classroom dynamics quite different than people outside of classrooms understand. The comments left by parents on some blogs I have read, criticizing teachers for what seem like completely ordinary acts of discipline–which I have observed in every classroom I have worked in–leave me puzzled. What do these people want exactly?

I have two children with IEPs and have worked in a school for five years, and I will tell you that implementing an IEP, as it is written can be extremely difficult, in a room with twenty-four other students and limited staff. Sometimes it will dictate that a student have a scribe, but there will be only two adults available to the entire class. Sometimes a student needs a quiet environment and the classroom is small and crowded. They need additional time to work, but from where should this time come? From their play time? From recess? Often IEPs are written in ideals, and when translated to reality, things look entirely different.

Teaching is not simple.

My six year old son reads at third grade level. His handwriting is illegible. He demonstrates higher order thinking skills but can't fully understand the difference between reality and make-believe. He understood how to increment a digit in hexadecimal when shown by my husband, but has trouble completing addition worksheets because...they are worksheets. His teacher knows he is incredibly bright and grasps the concepts she has taught but has very little physical evidence to demonstrate his mastery of material.

Mikalh (MEE-koll) spoke late and didn't string sentences together at the typical age. He received the services of a developmental specialist which were, at one time, almost entirely focused on encouraging him to play imaginatively. This, for a child who now, has more costumes than clothes and spends every unscheduled moment of his day involved in make-believe. I felt then that none of this "help" hurt him, but I hardly felt that the diagnosticians had really seen my child, in all his beautiful complexity, for who he is.

Development is not simple.

Throughout all of Mikalh's years of being watched and diagnosed, notes have been made on his tendency to wiggle, his inability to "pay attention", his general spaciness. To anyone reading his file, flashing red lights appear around the obvious truth that Mikalh has AD/HD. Mikalh can't pay attention. It seems perfectly obvious.

Is it?

If there is one thing you should know, it is that I am not opposed to diagnostic labels. I also am not in any way categorically opposed to psychiatric medications. I have only somewhat jokingly written that my entire family has AD/HD. Two of my children currently take medications for this condition and I am the person who asked for the team meetings at school on the subject and who asked the questions that led to these diagnoses. My intuition as a mother told me that this was the right thing to do. 

With Mikalh, I just don't feel so sure. There is, at this point, no resounding "clunk" of recognition within me when it is suggested that my youngest child has AD/HD. He may, but I don't know how much of who he is can be explained by that particular label. My intuition tells me to be skeptical but still cooperative.

Parenting is not simple.

Mikalh is so young that no one really knows fully knows what makes him who he is. He is currently being served at school for language processing, fine motor and sensory issues, and is also seeing a therapist to deal with the fall-out of his extreme emotional sensitivity. He has a high IQ and a tendency to think creatively. How all of these factors complicate what we are seeing in him is impossible to tease out.

This child, who is apparently paying no attention, will walk up to his teacher, as the other children are leaving for recess and recount for her the most interesting portions of the story she read while he wandered aimlessly around the room. After a day of completing no work on a science unit on liquids and solids, he will come home and conduct experiments in our sink, chattering happily about why the table is solid and why his soy milk is liquid. In a quiet classroom with the attention of his sweet teacher or in our own kitchen, he blooms.

My deep suspicion is that the world comes at Mikalh undistilled. He seems to be attending to the sound of his teacher's voice, to the motion of classmates in the room, to the rhythm of the noisy heater, to the graceful ballroom dance of swaying branches in the wind, visible outside the window. The world gushes into him, full of beauty and horror and confusion to attend to, and he vibrates with the sensation of its touch. The endless worksheets shift like pieces of a Rubik's Cube, meaningless as clutter. The seat beneath him confines him.

He is a song composed of golden riddles and velvet images, forged to evoke instead of explain. The world wants not music, but a simple explanation from him.

Mikalh feels intensely the softness of fleece and the hardness and scratchiness of a plastic school chair. He stops to examine the beauty of individual snowflakes. He feels, with eyes wide and full of contemplation, the pain of toiling slaves, who lived and died one hundred fifty years before his birth, and the fear and bravery of Helen Keller. He wonders why it is ethical to put an injured animal to sleep, whom we cannot heal, but not an injured person. He is fascinated by the intricate design on the back of a spider.

Who is not paying attention?

My child is not simple.

Simplicity can be the ultimate truth and essence of the world. The room free of clutter, the Japanese garden, the raw and uncomplicated gorgeousness of a sunset over mountains. A moment of quiet meditation. Many things have been written in praise of simplicity, and they are beautifully true.

But simplicity can also be a shackle. When your heart is full of poems and the world wants neat demonstrations of knowledge. When creation settles on you in a bedlam of rich color and detail and you are asked to name the thing most important, but perhaps, not most interesting. Simple plans and objectives fail the child who is a swirl of lovely chaos.

He is a rangy, delicate wildflower in a garden of orderly tulips, and I am dumbstruck by his beauty.

I do not want for him to be more straight and tidy. I want, instead, for the world to love wildflowers as much as I do and renounce its blind devotion to simplicity.

Do-over? Not me. You might want to take notes.

Do-over.

If you know anything about my life history, you will know the thought of "do-overs" has occurred to me. One cannot live a life that includes addiction, a divorce, and the bearing of children before finishing college without some self-reproach.

I really don't live much in regret, though. I very much fear that any explanation of this will sound trite and involve lemons and lemonade, or worse, something suspiciously like truck stop quality Buddhism.  However, the honest to God truth is that after I am done briefly fuming about whatever misfortune I feel Fate has handed me, and what I have done to make the situation worse, I see the past as sort of interestingly irrelevant. It continues to be sort of amusing as the subject of stories, but it is just the Past, as immovable and solid as a stone. Perhaps this is the survival strategy of the prodigious fuck-up. It's aallll water under the bridge now, folks. I'm moving on.

Here are two examples of situations that might summon up a desire for a Mulligan in the average human being, but which I have handled using my champion positive self-talk. You may want to take notes.

Photo Credit: Flickr

While living in a tiny cottage in the redwood forest of California, I failed to have my chimney cleaned for several years. As a result, while I was at a social gathering nearby and my children, then, two and and five, were with a twelve year-old babysitter, my fireplace erupted in flames. I heard the town's fire siren howl and casually told gathered guests from out of town that this happened all the time in our little town. Only moments later, I received a call from one of the local firefighters of my very, very small town letting me know that he was at my house.

My reaction: (after checking on my kids and installing them somewhere safe) Well, there is really nothing for me to do now. Everything is all right. I can't have the fireplace cleaned until tomorrow, and no one seems upset. Hell, I am going back to my evening event. 


I was driving to some friends' house out by the coast, on roads that were completely obscured by a fog as thick and white as sheared wool. My two sons, three and six, were in the car. Although I had been to these friends' home before, never had I gone at night and never when visibility was so poor. I missed the turn to their long, winding driveway and instead turned into another. Where I drove straight into a ditch dug in the middle of a yard. With two wheels off the ground, I could not get my Volvo to reverse and, stuck in the dark and fog, in the middle of Bumfuck Nowhere, with two young children in tow, I had to knock on the door of a strange house for help. The man within, although surly looking, was not, in fact, a serial killer, and he helped me get my car out of the ditch and then pointed me on my way.

My reaction:  (upon arriving at my friends') Well, I'm awfully glad he was home. Are there any baked potatoes left?


The real reason I have so little room for regret is because of my advanced skills at worrying about the future. I am really a forward thinking person. If you enjoyed this, I will soon write you a helpful list of concerns you might consider having based on extraneous events that happen in your life.

You're welcome.

Upset: I don't especially like orchids, and I don't like feeling like one.

Back in early December–back before I participated in Reverb Broads, back before I jumped into January's National Blog Posting Month...and then February's National Blog Posting Month...before I knew that every damn month was National Blog Posting Month, my Dad did something wonderful.

He offered to send me to Dayton this April to the Erma Bombeck Writer's Workshop. He did this despite the fact that all I had to show for my "career" as a writer was a silly little vanity blog with a following of friends and acquaintances and a renewed interest in my writing. I had not shown such interest, though, since I was a maudlin teenager punching out short stories that read like Catcher in the Rye soaked in peach Schnapps and abridged for Tiger Beat. Maybe this is what caught his attention.

My Dad believes in me. He has many fine qualities, and this is one of the nicest. Especially when you consider that, in his lifetime, I have done things like have more than one child out of wedlock, change career paths as often as my underwear and become a practicing witch.

Truly, I have done lots of things which have kept both of my poor parents on their toes all these years. It's nice that they still choose to see me in the fond and admiring terms that they do. (My theory is that they have no other children, so they can't really shun me, being the nice people that they are.) 

But I digress.

I think my point was that my dad paid for me to attend this conference. Which is way cool. I get to travel all by myself to a real event. Unlike everything else I attend, this is neither going to be put on by child actors or be mandatory for all church members. The purpose of the whole event is to further my writing "career," and I get to stay there all weekend.

Oh, crap.

It's February now, which is very close to April. There is but one month between them, in fact. I have to go to Dayton by myself. It may irritate many of my readers, but this is somewhat problematic for me. Not that I have never flown alone before. I have. But this time, I have to change planes both ways, get a shuttle to and from the Marriott, and survive a conference all weekend despite my weird new physical limitations. 

Recently, the only way I can sit through church, which lasts one hour, is to have my husband brace the back of my head with his hand the whole time. (I don't think they will let him come with me to do this at the Writer's Conference.) I get cold. I get migraines. I get debilitating cramping. I get mental fog. I am not sure I can sit for an hour and a half at a time–much less hours at a time, whether I will need help if I become really ill, or how the stress of the travel will affect me. 

The worse my symptoms are at any given time, the more I become like a sort of penurious orchid, requiring constant care and maintenance to subsist on a basic level. Any change in temperature, light or humidity could be disastrous for me. Travel requires constant adaptation, something a normal organism does with relatively little effort, but which for myself, the orchid, and various exotic frogs, is terribly troublesome. I do not wish to end up a puddle of decomposing amphibious goop stuck to the bottom of a Delta seat.

I don't especially like orchids, and I don't like feeling like one. My deepest fear, I think, is that I will end up hating the whole experience of the Conference, and that by hating it, I will have disappointed my dad, who had the blind faith to believe in me for no good reason. 

I am not great with taking care of myself. I tend to want to control things, to do things myself, and not to miss out on anything. I have adapted to life with the understanding that Serious Shit is relying on me, and I had better deliver, or there will be Hell to pay for it. This has made managing my chronic illness difficult. My personality is great for being depended on, but not for depending on myself. I'm lousy as Hell at that.

Luckily for me, I have great friends who help me work things out by listening to me in a magical kind of way. This kind of magical listening is so rare and special that hardly anyone can do it. But my friend Amy can. She knows how to listen to me be upset, and just let me be. She doesn't try to fix me, give me advice, shush me, or get me to be positive. She listens to me, but she listens not to the me that is the complainer but to the me that is the commitment that I have. And then she says whatever there is to say. I talked to her for some time about the problem of this conference, she listened magically, I talked some more, and here's what we worked out:

I will take everything in my arsenal–every medication, every pillow, every strategy to get me through. I will have it be OK to take breaks, even if I have to miss things. I will rest if I need to rest. I will make my well-being the number one priority of the whole adventure. I am going to get something fabulous for my writing from being there. The place will be jam-packed with excellent humor and human interest writers, so I can't fail to garner some gems of wisdom.

But, if I can get through the upset to my system and still take care of my body and soul, that will be an even larger victory for me. That would be worth the whole damn trip.

Upset. This post is supposed to be a reflection on upset.

Upset can wrap my stomach in knots, give me heart palpitations like a rabbit with an aspirin overdose, sour the flavor of an entire day. Some upset I just don't know how to resolve. But upset can also be an opportunity because I am lucky enough to have friends that can examine it with me, as if entering a cluttered room together, where they help me sort out the contents of my emotions, separating the usable from the waste.

If bravery lives inside of fear, then transformation lives inside of upset.