Of Cats and Camellias, Boys and Girls

My son doing boy stuff, back in 2010, when he had his hair long and people kept thinking he was a girl. Picture by "B" Gordon

I stood on the sidewalk, watching the boys. They were playing, hollering, running—doing the crazy things that boys together do. I’d walked to Daniel’s house hoping to find him by himself and instead he had a friend. With the friend here, the rules of our usual friendship did not apply. No tea parties or dress-ups, no complicated fantasy book schemes. Should I go home? I stood awkwardly on the sidewalk, which was wet with recent rain, shifting my feet and waiting for clarity about what to do. On the ground around me, worms were drowning, and sodden flowers fallen from the yard’s camellia bush lay flattened on the ground. The sky was ready to erupt again at any time.

“Bam!” yelled the second boy, a redhead. A wet camellia went spinning through the air. I dodged it—barely.

“It’s a bomb,” he said. “You’re dead.”

I didn't want to be dead. I stood there, calculating stubbornly my response to a scenario in which I did not want to play my part.

“Come on, Tara,” entreated Daniel. “Play along. You can bomb him back.”

Well, I supposed. I bent, picked up a flower. It was as soggy as a sponge. Pink like Pepto Bismol, rose-like, damaged by the rain. In my hand it felt substantial, a water balloon ready to be tossed. I chucked it. I couldn't aim and it missed the redhead by a yard. It landed with a satisfying splat on the concrete by the steps. The boy ran away, whooping. The war was on.

Racing, smacking through wet shrubberies, running over saturated grass, we gathered up camellias and lobbed them at one another until out of breath. I was hit once. Surprisingly, it stung. The flower smarted when it smacked me on the cheek! Nothing but petals and yet there it landed, hard as a mother’s warning slap, leaving my cheek red. I felt anger rise up in my gut.

“I’m going to get you now!” I roared.

I came home later, covered in mud, the marks of petals on my skin. The world of boys was enchanting. A world of war and terrible aggression—of letting go and going after—it was a carnival ride, and sword wounds just a bloody grin.

Boys had never really been interesting before, as boys, as suddenly they were.

*

"Come back here!" I yelled and then muffled my voice. The cat with the leaves in her tail would not consent to let me place the tail in water, and relieve her of the leaves. And if someone caught me at this, I was definitely going to be in trouble. Adults, who never really undertook anything of importance, would not understand.

"Bear-Bear!" I insisted.

The bowl of water slid and tipped.

"Mraaaaaooowww!" the cat complained.

Finally, I got hold of the tail, which was interminably tangled, always filled with leaves and things. Her nose was filled with snot. She breathed it in and out—she was a snot-dragon full of tangles, knots and the leavings of old trees. "A permanent cold," my mother said she had. Pneumo-something. 

She looked to me like something needing care. Holding onto the captured tail with both hands, I directed it into the mixing bowl. 

"You're going to be fine," I told the cat in a motherly voice. "You need a bath."

Submerged in the cold water, the leaves got wet and the tangles stayed in place. Over the course of several seconds, it occurred to me that perhaps I'd miscalculated. Lacking a brush and the necessary fortitude to work the tangles out by hand, I let the kitty go, and she scuttled off and hid. I emptied the bowl into the sink and left a small, hairy puddle on the floor. Then I set about making her an apologetic milkshake made of milk with cat food sprinkled in.

*

Right now, I'm thirty-seven. I have three boys and a husband. A boy dog who chews up garbage and a boy cat who pees in anything rectangular which I leave in the kitchen corner that he likes. Two male ducks, one of whom likes to bite my jeans as I turn and leave his coop. There are my egg-layers, of course—six of those; two white ducks who spend spring underneath the boys with the feathers wrenched out of their necks, and four hens, who squat obediently when I go out to pick them up. They all live outside. Inside, there are penises wall-to-wall.

Except for a few moments of wild abandon, I spent my childhood preparing to nurture things. I dressed cats in little outfits, placed them into various houses and set up a battle triage for wounded shrews. When shrews kept dying anyway—because of the activities of my cats—I set up a war memorial for them on the refrigerator door. This was a stark exposition of life lost, bearing simply a date, the cat responsible, and the posthumous name of each shrew. I wrapped them in paper towels and masking tape and deposited them in the earth, where I said a solemn prayer over their souls. And so it was that I prepared myself for motherhood.

The boys, while I was doing this, were preparing themselves for war. They were throwing down their lives for a cause greater than themselves, unnamed, and collapsing in splendid agony on the concrete to die with howling cries, only to rise again later and launch a last attack. Every day on the agenda: Kill. Die. Rise from death. Kill again. Perhaps die. Win, if possible. Then, snack.

I have given up combating this tendency in my kids.When I initially forbid cartoons and movies, Rowan pretended he was a lion and the girls at playschool were gazelles. The last thing they heard was a roar in their ear before they died. I kept on getting phone calls with requests to cut his nails even shorter than they were. If you want to comment on my parenting, don't. It's too late for me to parent him differently now. He's fifteen and, happily, he's stopped roaring in people's ears. Nobody cares anymore how he keeps his nails. At any rate, it was then that I introduced superheroes. At least they were "good." Rowan stopped being a lion and started being Spiderman. I think this may have been an improvement, ethically.

Boys on the playground, forbidden to play-fight, play-fight surreptitiously or simply get in trouble all the time. Not every boy. Lots of boys. The ones I'm talking about. What is this war they are girding themselves for? Am I missing something about adult male survival that they really need to know?

"I didn't want to play World War II games," confided Mikalh to me, "but that's what everyone was playing, so I just pretended I was an archaeologist in World War II."

"It sounds like a good compromise," I told him.

Later on, he killed his evil brother with one powerful kick to the head. I hope this training will prove useful someday. 

On second thought, I fervently hope that it will not.

Night Wind

The wind kept me up last night. It was groaning, barking, clamoring at the roof. It tried to get in the bedroom window, tried to freeze the hand that was holding my book. I wouldn't relent. I got a frumpy sweater and wrapped myself up—sectioned and bowed—like an old lady in her bathrobe, and I lay down again with the covers pulled up right over the tops of my ears. Only my hand and my eye were exposed. My hand, my eye and the book. Winning. That's me.

Exactly why was the heat in my room unable to combat this infernal wind? It didn't make a sound—not one that I could hear. The vents were cloistered mutes. My heating system had left me to die of exposure, there in my own bedroom, just as if I hadn't been feeding it for years—feeding it money and turning its little thermostat in expectation of hospitality returned.

Wild things tore the night into a thousand pieces while I tried to be asleep.

Cats were picked up by gales and carried away from fences, keening, to be plunked down next to the open maws of dogs. Dogs were beaten stiffly with clubs of air about their naughty heads. The songbirds were taken and fed to the north, which was sucking the whole world in. February, February. I know it's you. You want to lift the dark world up and shake it a little bit. Set it back down and pretend like nothing has happened. Hide behind a corner and make us think that it was March.

My dreams were disturbed by the ripping of the world.

This morning, though, all is silent. The house, except my bedroom, is all warm. My cat comes in, reassembled, and now begging to be fed. No new snow has fallen and of course there will be school. All it was was wind. And the world looks almost the same. But for the cracks on everything, you'd think it never happened while I slept.


Author's Note: Most of this is metaphorical, except for the terrible sound and cold. No animals were injured in the making of this blog post.

In Which My Kids Take Over My Blog

The photo on the right is of his painting of Enkidu.

I am sharing some stuff with you today just because I think it's cool. This falls into the category of "what I'm up to" rather than deep thoughts.

This year, to my great delight, I've been teaching my sons history. My second-grader is currently departing Ancient China for Ancient Africa, and we've traveled a long way already—from Çatalhöyük to Egypt, from the Indus Valley to Mesopotamia. I read him a chapter in his history book while he takes notes on what I say. Then he gives me a narration (tells the story back to me) while I write down his words. We find the area on a map, mark it on a timeline and an add illustration to his own history book of the ancient world. He usually gets to do a craft, and I photograph that to put in the book as well. By the time we've finished  he'll have created his own living history book of the ancient world.

My seventh-grader is in New Mexico this year. Our focus has been on slowing down the relentless slog through time he's used to and setting a while with a place and time so we can really get to know it. He is learning to see how history reaches out its skeleton hand from the grave and shapes events as they happen now. He recently did an assignment called a flash-draft. The idea comes from What a Writer Needs by Ralph Fletcher, which anyone who is either a writer or a writing teacher must go buy right now. In this assignment, the object is to create a character who will allow you to convey some expository information that you are supposed to learn. He has studied Oñate and the Massacre of Acoma, and I told him to create a character that was there. "And I want to be there. I want to be able to smell it," I told him. 

I am very, very proud of what Devin did with this assignment. He asked me to post it here and I am more than happy to share it with you. He worked hard on it, and maybe it will interest you to see how my kid writes. (His older brother once got this privilege, too.) You get a prize if you can tell me where Devin borrowed the first line from.

Battle on the Butte by Devin Cantua

Background

In 1595 the Conquistador Don Juan de Oñate was granted permission by King Phillip II of Spain to colonize Santa Fe de Nuevo Mexico, the present day New Mexico. The Acomas and Spaniards had been peaceful with each other for decades, since they first met in 1540. In 1598, the Acoma leader, Zutacapan, learned that the Spanish intended to conquer them. They planned to defend themselves when the Spaniards came.

Don Oñate sent his nephew, Captain Juan de Zaldivar, to the pueblo to consult with Zutacapan. When Zaldivar arrived on December 4, 1598, one of the first things he did was take sixteen of his men up the mesa, on which the pueblo was located, to demand food from the natives. After being denied the Spanish attacked some of the Acoma women. A fight raged, leaving Zaldivar and eleven other men dead. When Oñate learned of the incident, he ordered Juan de Zaldivar’s brother, Vincente de Zaldivar, to go punish the Acoma. Taking about 70 men, he left for the pueblo…This is what happened next.


*

Nervous! Very, very dreadfully nervous! What will the Acomas have planned for us when we attack? Whatever they might have, I’m ready! I have to be ready, or I won’t survive.

“Ok men, let’s start making our way towards the base of the butte. Once we get there I will give you further instructions!” said Oñate.

“Yes sir!” we all screamed.

Only few of the men got to be on horses—the higher ranked men, of course. I myself was only one of the lowest ranked men there. I had to keep pace with the horses. I don’t think that I am one of the better soldiers, but Oñate only picked the men he thought were sufficient. So why—

“Ok men, I will take half of you guys up the path where the Acomas will see us and we will distract them with friendly talk. We will do this while the other half of you will climb up the back of the butte and set up the cannons and rifles. Then when I give the thumbs up symbol you guys will fire, Capiche?”

“Yes sir!”

Some more men and I sneaked around the back of the butte and started climbing to the top. I was surrounded by the musky scent of man and awfully disturbing noises. This was hell for me. Just imagine being in a bone dry desert, climbing up the side of a cliff, surrounded by the smell of a month old road kill. Sweaty men who haven’t bathed in weeks smell awful. Plus it was about -12⁰ Celsius with no snow, with the sun shining brightly in the sky. I’m not used to this weather yet.

Once we got to the top we started setting up the cannons and rifles. There were only two cannons, but it was tough. I glanced across the top of the butte and saw the Acomas captivated in Oñate’s “friendly” talk. This was going to work out.

After all that climbing and sweating and building of cannons, my hands smelled like dirt covered in brass with a touch of gunpowder all mixed together. We were all ready; we were in our positions and ready to ambush. My friend Manuel lined up next to me and asked, “You ready mate?”

“After all that training how can I not be ready?”

We both chuckled, focused our attention to Oñate, then waited. We’ve been on the same path since we were little boys in Spain. We both wanted to move to Santa Fe de Nuevo Mexico with the governor and help colonize the new world. And here we are today on the top of a mesa just outside of Santa Fe about to attack the Acomas with the governor—just like we wanted.

A little later he made the thumbs up symbol. We fired a cannonball and charged in with screams and yells to surprise the Acomas, the attack finally began!

The historic battle raged for three days, but by the end, hundreds of Indians lay dead. The ones who survived were enslaved, and the young men each had a right foot amputated. Just seeing the men crawl away in a pile of blood with a stub on the end of the leg… it left a mark in my head for ever. Turning around and seeing the pile of amputated feet on the ground made me feel nauseated for a while after.

I myself managed to escape with only minor wounds, a fractured wrist and a concussion, but my friend Manuel—he didn’t make it through the rough battle. My stomach tensed up like I was about to vomit. I felt that my stomach would burst and I would fall to my knees in tears, but I had to get over it and move on back to Santa Fe. If one of the generals, or Oñate, saw me tearing up they would think of me as a weak warrior; I had to keep cool.

Was what we did the right thing to do? After all these years are the Acoma people still mad at the Spaniards? I don’t know, but what I do know is that I followed my dream and that is most important to me.

“Wow!” the kids said in amazement.

“Will you tell us another one? Please Grandpa, please?”

“Sorry kids but I think we’re done for today.”

I sat in my chair as I heard the kids walking away saying, “When I’m an adult I’m gonna to follow my dream like grandpa, and I’m going to colonize the new world, too!”

“Well I’m gonna be the governor in the new world, when I’m older!” said Diego.

I just chuckled to myself and puffed on my pipe. I guess they’ll find out what it’s like when they get there.

The Art of Making Things Beautiful

The new shelf

I'm late. I needed to start my seeds—a few weeks ago, most likely. Is it already gardening time again? The weather here feels like spring. It's practically balmy. 44 degrees yesterday, sunny. I had on a light jacket as I moved about my chicken yard, dropping handfuls of compost for excited birds, who pounced on apple cores and soft tomatoes like they were plum puddings, kicking them around the yard. I have moved my little hen in with the other hens, leaving behind a chicken yard that will become a new garden bed this spring; its soil scratched up and fertilized, all the bugs picked out. I have empty palettes, and it's time to imagine what will fill them in.

Our wee little kitchen. Imagine it without the shelf.

That task is easy enough. I've been looking at heirloom seed catalogs again—glossy centerfolds full of exotic vegetables making gorgeous love to the camera lens. Tomatoes—white, green, deep burgundy, red. Purple tomatillo. Yellow, purple, and red carrots. Names like dragon, atomic, amarillo, scarlet Nantes. There are lettuces, crisp and soft and streaked with red, veined with purple; bitter, mild and sweet. Yes, I swooned, I am ready. I am ready to try again. Last year, my seeds suffered in a makeshift greenhouse adjacent to the front wall of my house. I couldn't keep them wet enough or warm enough. They cooked by day and froze by night. Once full of possibility, they ended their lives as dried-up stalks up death in my compost pile. Then I had to shell out for starts.This year, I'm learning. I'm moving those suckers inside. Where, though, in my tiny kitchen, might they go?

A shelf! Suspended above the chest freezer, in my window. Yes, yes, right where I spend half my life. There I could have seed trays and nurse them with the tender care usually reserved for heart patients on a ward. I need space, I boomed. I walked around muttering. Space! And now.

In an effort to make his wife happy, or perhaps to silence her, my husband then began work on a seed-starting contraption: he bought lumber, sawed boards, and hauled it all in to assemble in its place, all with the enthusiasm of a pall-bearer crushed under the corner of a coffin as he marched. Perhaps there should be a support group for the partners of gardeners: a place where they can talk about the paces we put them through. Oh, hon, I just need you to make some row covers. Can you fix the watering system? I need you to build a box without stepping on my seedlings while you do.

At some point, though, as he was doing all this pacifying shelf-building, he looked over and saw his wife grimacing at him.

"What?" he demanded.

"It's just—really ugly..." I muttered.

Ugly, of course, is the last thing that matters to these men with nails and saws. What? It's going to hold seeds, right? You want it should like a Mona Lisa while it does?

"It doesn't go with with the kitchen," my mother explained. All this was lost in translation.

She was right. It looked like a big, stupid scaffolding hung from my ceiling. I like my kitchen. It's the least awful room in my house. My living room floor is unfinished, with vinyl still attached to the places where we pulled off linoleum. The front door jamb is unpainted. The back door is part duct tape and part glass. I like my kitchen. In my kitchen, I can imagine that I live in a nice house. If I just stayed there, I could almost feel something like pride. I need the seed shelf, though. Where else will I start tomatoes all the colors of balloons?

"I could paint it," I proposed.

A long conversation ensued about paint. White or green? Could I match the green of my counter tops? Did I need to sand? OK, I can paint it. It will be OK. I could have my seeds and my sense of pride as well. I couldn't help but feel I might be missing something, though.

I've lately been reading blogs about decorating with junk. It occurred to me rather suddenly to embrace the crate-like quality of the shelf. Was there a way to have it look intentionally trashy rather than accidentally so?

Stencils! I thought. I'll just make it look like that was the look I wanted all the time. I bought stencils.

"I want to hang herbs from the bottom to dry," I told my husband.

"You'd have to hang them from the side," he said. Of course I would.

Eureka! I purchased three antiqued brass rings for herb hanging attached to the side of the crate-shelf-blight.

All this done, maybe I've just inhaled something, but I actually like this shelf. It looks—chosen. And there's something to this choosing of things that end up hanging around bugging us, things we would rather do without.

Some people start with an empty house and imagine what they want. Then, they fill it in, piece by piece, building toward the effect that they hold perfectly in their mind. They can see it before they see it. They know where to put each piece. They know what to get. Some people start planning in high school. What do I want to be when I grow up? They take classes. They choose a college. They choose a career. Later, they marry and, much later, they have kids. They put each piece in place carefully. They build a real life from what they conceived of and planned for assiduously.

Myself, I start with a bunch of random objects. A couch someone gave us when they upgraded to a better one. Figurines that were presents to me over the years. Children's art—the kind of which the child is especially proud. Kachina dolls my husband had an idea he would sell and make some cash. I started with love and impulse and worked backwards to make all the pieces fit. Kids first, then marriage, and career not at all. This is my life. The life I love. Things happen and I work them in.

Things—and lives—are beautiful, I think, because we want them. When they're dusted and painted, when they're cared for, they belong. We find things to compliment them. We find ways to make them shine. We see them as belonging where they are.

Things out of place, by contrast, are things unchosen. Realities we'd rather not love because, in hating them, we hope that they will somehow disappear.

This making things beautiful is the art of taking what we're given, choosing it, and marking its beauty with the tender hands of love. It's easy once you see it, once the flaw becomes a strength, once you stop wishing for what you do not have.

A shelf, I think, is a really good place to start.

It's Awards Season Again

This is embarrassing.

Way back on December 6th, I was nominated for the Liebster Award by the perfectly lovely Alicia of Forever Changed, who is so honest and intimate with her blogging audience about the journey of her widowhood. Thanks, Alicia! I really do appreciate it. I gather from her last post that she may have stopped blogging and perhaps this saves me some embarrassment. You see, I thanked her (late) and then I never accepted the award. December was, for lots of reasons, a hard month for me. Things were happening that were ultimately good but felt a lot like persistent nausea at the time. Then Christmas started to come. I had everything I could handle just making ready to receive it. So, I did nothing. I had writer's block and I didn't feel like I deserved a blogging award or wanted to answer eleven questions about myself. I didn't feel clever or funny or grateful or sweet. I'm feeling much better now, but I let the award go. The time, it seemed, had passed.

Then—just this Tuesday—Lorinda J. Taylor, the talented science fiction author blogging at Ruminations of a Remambrancer nominated me for the Very Inspiring Blogger Award. I will thank Lorinda both for nominating me and for being a consistently interesting presence on my blog. I always look forward to a comment from her, knowing it will be well-thought out and anything but trite. She nominated me, and here I still had half of this post sitting in my drafts, taunting me that I really, really didn't deserve another one. This time, I decided not to listen. I don't want to let another opportunity to express gratitude pass me by, so I am going to play this time—but I warn you, I tend to break the rules. I am going to accept both awards at once (which takes a bit of audacity) and change it up a bit. These are the rules for Liebster:


How It Works-Liebster: 1. Add the award icon to your blog!
2. Link to your nominator to say thank you.
3. Post 11 facts about yourself.
4. Answer the questions the tagger has set for you.
5. Create 11 questions for your nominees to answer.
6. Choose 11 up-and-coming bloggers with fewer than 200 followers, go to their blog, and tell them about the award.

How It Works-Very Inspiring Blogger:
1. Display the award logo on your blog.
2. Link back to the person who nominated you.
3. State seven things about yourself.
4. Nominate 15 bloggers for this award and link to them.
5. Notify those bloggers of the nomination and the award's requirements.

I have a hard time with this gifting of awards. Many awards go around and I have sometimes made an effort to give them to people who haven't had them in the past, by searching their entire sites. I would like to avoid giving them to all my blogging besties over and over again. I don't know how many followers everyone has. So, here, instead, as a public service, I am just going to go ahead and name some of the bloggers whom I particularly enjoy reading, whether they meet the criteria or not. And I'm picking five so I have time to tell you about them. Here's what's in my Google Reader:

Laura Mullane of Swimming for Shore. She will probably never know I nominated her because she seems to have turned her comments off, but Laura Mullane is a fabulous writer. Her blog chronicles her journey as a mother, full of the uncertainty that she was ever supposed to mother at all. Her writing is striking both for honesty and for its skill. Twice now the death of her animals have left me sobbing by my PC, unable to go on.
Jane of Jane in her Infinite Wisdom. I believe I've nominated her before. If so, I don't care. Jane deals the straight dope. Her heart is pure and her mind is both complex and aimed at truth. Her title may be in jest, but it is not so to me.
Nicole Amsler of her blog by the same name. Nicole just writes really, really well—vividly, luxuriously. And she writes a lot about food, none of which I can eat. So reading her blog, for me, is like watching soft core porn with Boston cream pies in it. Except much more tasteful. Lately, she has set herself up as a book club host on the web, where I virtually read along with her and virtually eat her delicious gluten and dairy-laden virtual snacks.
Katy Anders of Lesbians in My Soup. I read all of Katy's posts. They are clever, bizarre, and magical—perfect and utterly unbelievable, like Cirque du Soleil in words. I never comment because even the comment threads on her blog are too clever and perfect for me. But I read and I admire. Oh yes, I do.
Jennifer Neil of Diary of an Even Fatter Girl. This blog is not about weight loss. It's about being human. And Jenn is willing to be honest in a way that people rarely are. She's funny and she's likable. She's also my good friend. Go read her. She will make you laugh and see part of yourself that makes you squirm. Then laugh again.

I fully appreciate that lots of high-quality bloggers do not wish to play virtual chain mail games with me, and I fervently hope that they will consider these two awards a compliment bestowed upon them. Flick away the niggling requirements, like a booger from the tip of your fingernails. It will not wound me one bit.

Now for the silliness...Music please!

Eleven Facts About Me (should more than cover both, wouldn't you say?):1. I have double-jointed thumbs.

2. I can't cartwheel. I won't do it even if you ask nicely.

3. I sometimes listen to Eminem with my fifteen year-old son on his iPad. I pretend these are teachable moments.

4. I have not read one single word of David Foster Wallace's. Ever. I think this makes me rather a dangerous person, don't you?

5. I have had pet rats, pet mice, pet guinea pigs, and pet hamsters. Of these, I strongly recommend rats. People grimace when I say this, but rats are intelligent and friendly. Mice stink, guinea pigs pee constantly, and hamsters are vicious jerks. Get a rat, or better yet, a chicken.

6. Two of my favorite words are "gnocchi" and "recidivism."

7. When people talk about grammar, I rarely know what the Hell they mean, particularly once they start parsing verbals. And yet I am a literacy tutor. Thank God for Google and Strunk & White. What's worse: I'm a damn good literacy tutor.

8. I have a tendency to argue with people on Facebook, especially about politics. This irritates me about myself and yet I do it anyway. Because they're wrong.

9. All my life I've had cats and all of these cats have been mentally ill. The one I have now only recently pissed on my son's bed and then left two turds neatly inside a wicker basket I have placed in my hall for the purpose of decoration. Later, my son placed this basket, with accompanying turds, on my front step, where it still sat when his friend's mother arrived to pick him up for soccer. "Welcome to my lovely home," I said.

10. I once had a job knocking on your door to ask you to join the Sierra Club. You were very rude to me and I quit at the end of a week. You're sorry now that we've cooked the planet, aren't you?

11. I love to cook, and I am really excited about the chemistry of cooking, but I don't actually understand chemistry."This works," I say enthusiastically of my recipes, "due to molecules."

Eleven Questions I Have to Answer (from Alicia):
1. What was your favorite book as a child/teenager?

This, of course, depends entirely on what age I was when you might have asked me. I will go with junior year of high school and The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald because it contains these words:

"This is a valley of ashes — a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. "

Fitzgerald made the English language his bitch. I still idolize him.

2. Aside from your parents/grandparents/etc, what adult influenced your life when you were a teenager?

I went to an alternative high school where we had wonderful teachers there who treated us like real humans even though most of us were stoned. One of these was a history teacher who smoked in class and looked like a large toad. He asked in class one day, "How many of you believe that you are ugly?" I raised my hand. He then took a long drag and, after exhaling, said, "I believe I am the most handsome man in the world, and if I can believe that then, sweetheart, so can you."

3. When you were in high school, what did you want to do/be when you grew up?

A psychologist. I had some theory about treating addiction through the use of collage images based on Jung's archetypes. I made a tarot deck for this purpose. It certainly didn't work on me.

4. Of all the "roads not taken" in your life, which one would you like to peek down, just to see what would have happened?

If I had gotten my college degree, I often think, I would be rich and famous now. I would like to peek down there and check so I could see that I'd still be in my kitchen making pot roast and teaching grammar to my kids, but I could pretend to be overqualified. My sense of inferiority, as evidenced by my lack of a diploma, is so integral to my identity, I'm curious to see what I would be like without it.

5. If you went to college, what was your major? Would you choose the same field if you went back today?

I majored (undeclared except in my own mind) in art, psych, sociology, English and humanities while I was attending junior college. If I went back today, I would pursue a degree in English and professional writing or creative writing so that I could be a writer and mother—just like I am now.

6. Do you have any siblings?

I plead the fifth on this.

7. What's the most beautiful place you've ever been to?

Narnia. Loth Lorien. Elysium. Or maybe Ocean Point, Maine.

8. How do you indulge yourself when you need a pick-me-up?

I put orange peels and a cinnamon stick on the stove and cover them with water, boil and then simmer them until I feel cheered up. The house smells like optimism.

9. When was the last time someone else cooked a meal for you?

I think it was my mom, back in August, when my wisdom teeth were all pulled out. I couldn't eat it until weeks later, but it was excellent. Kitchere.

10. What do you wish more people knew about you?

I wish more people knew that my name is pronounced with an r-controlled a, not a long a.

11. Why did you start blogging (which may not be why you blog today)?

I simply wanted a forum for my writing. I figured my parents and my husband might read it—maybe a few friends. Now I blog for the same reasons Catholics go to mass. And to refine my practice of ambiguity.

12. What movie do you always have to watch when it's on television?

This is a trick question because I don't have cable TV. If I did, I might hazard that I'd want to watch The Princess Bride if it came on. All the other movies I like would be bleeped beyond recognition.

"You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means."

Eleven Questions I Am Asking:


1. Would you ever dissect a cat—if no one was using it and it was already dead? If so, why?
2. Are you a writer or a blogger? Does your answer affect what you do?
3. Sushi—yes or no?
4. What sorts of things really offend you, not just on an abstract level, but in day-to-day life?
5. What's the one secret ingredient that brings life to your cooking (or, you know, your re-heated Lean Cuisines)?
6. Santa Claus: magical childhood delight or insult to children everywhere?
7. Name the best piece of short fiction you've ever read.
8. Name a novel that changed your life.
9. What is the thing that everyone likes but you, and even so, you know you're right?
10. If you're on the right path, will you be happy? Or are some people called to walk a harder path?
11. Name a really good soup that can be bought in a can.


You did it! You should get an award just for reading. And, in fact, if you—loyal reader—want one, simply follow the requirements and go for it. You bloggers know who you are. My non-blogging readers, uh....I owe you a fruitcake, OK?

The Only Self I Have

Photo Credit: Morguefile by Flutterby

Some days, when you are a parent, just suck.

Yesterday was one of those. It was not without its pleasant moments. A flash of brilliance in my older son's writing and a smile exchanged afterward. A hug from my littlest. A moment cuddling the chicken, whose feathers are now growing back.* Most of it, though, felt like slowly being bludgeoned with the hard surface of a pair of fuzzy dice.** I couldn't teach anything. We were learning a new step in adding: two digits each addend with neither a multiple of ten. Carrying. All mental. No quick-pencil algorithm in this math. Numbers lay in disorder on the floor—their teeth bloody and broken; they refused to stay in columns, refused to join one another into sums. Nothing I did would work. It was the second day with the same small problem set. My anxiety was starting to rise. My child was stubborn, belligerent, spacey, despondent and disinterested by turns.

This is where my large decisions come back to bite me in the ass. Last year, at public school, he refused to work in his first grade class. He dawdled, dropped pencils and languished in his chair. At the end of the year, he knew less math than he'd come in knowing at the start. We kept waiting, waiting—and his teacher kept waiting, too. We waited for him to decide to try. We encouraged, gave consequences, gave love, sent him to therapy. We didn't know what to do. None of us.

"What can he do in Math?" I asked his teacher. "What does he know?"

"I don't really know," she told me. "He won't do anything."

And so went the entire year.

When I decided to home school my son, I did it knowing that, when he doesn't know how to do a task, he will go to war with anyone, rather than having to try and fail. He will show you he is choosing not to learn, so that you can't see he has no choice. It's the strategy of a learning disabled child. I felt that my job would be to love him, to show him that it was always OK to try and fail. And to never let him win by refusing to do his work.

Yesterday, my patience went bankrupt. It wasn't OK for him to fail. He needed to do it right. I needed him not to struggle to add together eight and two. And I was stuck with myself. There was no one else to do the job.

"I would just give up for the day," said my husband, reasonably.

It sounded so right, so obviously the perfect thing to do. And maybe it was. But I couldn't do it. Tomorrow was coming after me, already the same way as this day and the one before. I can't get away from my learning disabled child. He is brilliant and confounded, all in the same breath. He is epic in his thinking; he is stuck on basics; he is mine. He is mine. And I am his.

This is the only self I have. This self I have is the sort that will become impatient when it takes ninety seconds for a child to recall a math fact that we both have filed as "known." I will try to conceal it. I will stifle my sigh. I will scrunch up the frustration on my face. But I will be frustrated. I will be that way today and tomorrow and Friday and next week and next month and forever. My son will notice. He's sensitive. And he will always be the sort of person who answers slowly, who doesn't hear what I said, who has the slipcover over his ears and is refusing to do his work. He will be that way today and tomorrow and Friday and next week and next month and forever, too. His is the only self he has.

I can give this unpaid teaching gig to someone else. I really can. It's a valid thing to do. That's why we have public schools with fine teachers and administrators and speech language pathologists to help him. It makes all the sense in the world, especially on days like this. But...he has gone there and...I have worked there. And so I know that they are just trying their best with all their knowledge and commitment to teach the children, same as me. Sometimes they succeed and sometimes they fail.

In the end, no one is more committed to this one child than I am.

My art as his mother and teacher, then, becomes one of avoiding false choices, getting past do it or leave it alone. I have to know that there is always another option, always another way. He can learn and I can teach. The problem is with neither of us. It is the method that is wrong. And then, back to the drawing board, over and over—how will we learn this thing? The art I speak of is of never giving up.

The child in psychic pain rushes at me like an angry bull, teased by crowds, poked and prodded, bullied into a fight. You're telling me I have to learn this, woman? OK, the fight is on! The child has no choice but to fight me or must give up being a bull. To sit there, passive, when provoked with education beyond him, is too much. He's heated, angry, petulant. He's coming after me. When I'm tired, when I'm foolish, I will stand there. I will argue with the bull. Holding back its horns until my arms are aching, wrestling with its nature, yelling curses about crazy cows, I'll drain myself of everything I need to win the fight. Some days are like that. Other times, I remember what to do.

The bull charges, tears toward me, ripping up the earth. I stand still; my heart is pounding. Still, I remain there; I can feel its musky breath fill the air just near my face. And then, as the horns lower to gore me, seconds from my end, I make one movement: I slowly step aside. The bull expends his energy in the run. My own is preserved to face him another time.

So it is with children. My job is to be that matador—to let them have the power and anger of their run and to keep from getting impaled on the process of their growing up.

1 PM.

"You did it!" I tell him. "You really did it. You finished that whole sheet. You got all of it correct. I am so proud of your hard work."

He beams.

"I learned it."

"Yes," I tell him. "Yes, you did."




*Yes, I got her a diaper. She has only worn it once since it came two days ago. Her feathers are regrowing on their own. We are all very happy she is doing so much better now.

** This is what I say it feels like being worn down by adorable little people—kind of like being tied up by Ewoks.

Alice and the Cat

Photo Credit: Morgufile by Duggan Arts

By 10 am, the coffee tasted like ashes and spent purpose. Also, it was cold. Ever hopeful, Alice emptied the carafe into a mug and stuck it into the microwave. Reheated, it had the effect of a re-gifted fruitcake, wrapped up in a wrinkled bag. Wrinkling her nose, she tried it. Now, it tasted like the color brown. She placed the mug on the counter and moved on to other things.

She had spent the morning in service of tasks that nobody wanted to do, tasks that she hated, and which would all soon be undone. Sinks were scrubbed clean with the cleanser that felt like toothpaste and ground porcelain under her gloves. Floors were mopped at with mops that probably spread more germs than they took up. Everything lying on the ground was swept into a dustpan and tossed out. In the small house, bodies bumped into one another, let out deep, violent sighs and passed in anger on their way to straighten something else.

It was Saturday.

It was done now. It had reached the starting point again. Now the destruction of the house could begin from a fresh place. Alice's husband Bill had fled, disappeared into the bathroom or his office, some place where no one could ask him to do anything else. Her teenage sons wore headphones somewhere, unavailable and detached from the world of endless chores. If there was to be no coffee, she supposed she could make some tea. Or try to start her writing—her long-neglected fantasy novel. That got moved off the list every weekend. Nothing had been written on it for months. Alice picked a tea cup from the cupboard and looked out the window hopefully, as if for the presence of a distraction to save her from boredom of her house. It was then that she saw the cat.

What was unusual was that the cat was standing upright. She shook her head, closed her eyes tight, blinked hard and opened them again. When she opened them, the cat was still there. It stood on its hind legs, not awkwardly, but with perfect comfort, as if leaning casually on the post of a wooden fence. It was a tabby—ginger, ordinary-looking except for being large. It had shortish hair and an unkempt look about it, not neglected, but as if it had been busy doing very absorbing things. It turned then and looked at her. She dropped her cup.

The cat looked directly at her, the way she imagined Nixon might have looked at Kennedy. It met her gaze. Assessing her, it found her somewhat wanting but did not look away. You're the one to deal with here, its eyes seemed to say. It approached the door. Standing in her kitchen, surrounded by the three triangular wedges that had been her china cup, she tried to process what she was looking at. The cat walked casually, almost swaggered. Their legs, she thought, should not allow for upright movement. That should be impossible. Several old factual books on cats she'd once possessed traveled through her head. The cat, still walking, disappeared into the blind spot of her doorstep. She waited for a sign, a bell, unsure what to do, but no sound came. Finally, overcome by curiosity, she took a deep breath and walked toward her door.

Opening it, she wondered—should I say hello? And in what tone? Conversational? Inquiring? Hostile? As if talking to a child? As soon as the door was opened, though, the cat, without comment, sauntered past her into the house. It came in and entered the kitchen. How odd, she thought. How very odd. What next? Should I offer it some food? Will it like milk?

The cat wanted something. He stood there and stared at her. For half a moment, a chill came over Alice. Was she in a horror movie? What was this cat about to do? What could it do? It was a cat. What did it weigh—ten pounds? Twelve? She dismissed the thought.

"Do you want—would you like—some milk, perhaps?" she finally ventured, unsure what to do.

The cat's brow wrinkled—an expression of amusement perhaps, or assent? She wasn't sure. She walked the few steps to the open cabinet where bowls were carefully displayed and selected a green  bowl for the cat. She opened the refrigerator and found a bit of milk. Would it have preferred the half-and-half, she wondered, as she poured a little in the bowl. This is two percent. I know they can get diarrhea. Is that from the fat, or simply from the lactose in the milk? Turning, she considered the problem of presenting the bowl to this cat. Should she offer a bowl on the floor to an animal who walked upright and entered her house with the self-confidence of a long-lost cousin come back home? No, she decided to set the bowl at the counter where there was a bar stool.

The cat accepted this. He strolled to the bar stool and climbed on up, then sat casually, lapping the milk with his curved pink sandpaper tongue with his front paw resting on the counter top  What on earth shall I talk about, Alice began to fret.

"What brings you here?" she asked the cat nervously, as he finished up his bowl. No reply came immediately so she added, "Bill is allergic to cats." That was rude, she realized and reddened just a bit.

Still there was no reply. The cat looked at her. His gaze was penetrating. He looked right into her heart and soul. For a full minute, their eyes met in an exchange. At first, Alice was filled with anxiety. What meaning was she supposed to derive from this speechless stare? What was to be the nature of her reply? Then, all of a sudden, with full understanding, she knew.

She heard stirring upstairs. The bathroom door opened. Eminem could be heard blaring from a bedroom door. She looked away and back at the cat.

"There's very little time," she said. It nodded its assent.

She stood up, quickly, and grabbed her purse, then took her laptop and her writer's notebook, already in their case.

"I'm ready," she said to the cat.

The cat nodded again and waited while she opened the front door. The street was empty as the two  of them got in her car. The cat did not buckle up.

"Show me where I'm going," she told the cat.

He nodded. They pulled out of the drive.

Inside the house, it was lunch time before Alice's absence was noted by her husband and the kids.

"Aaaaaalllliiiiice!" called Bill from up the stairs. "Where aaaare you?" But there was no reply.

"I want Mom to make macaroni," said one of the teenage boys, kicking the broken cup out of his way.

"Well, you do it, Paul," said the other. "I have no idea how."

Paul opened the refrigerator.

"Well, I can't. Somebody drank all the damn milk."