Goody Bastos

Francis Bacon

2012-01-26T17:17:00.001-08:00

The artist painted lots of heads, mostly contorted, often screaming. Often the heads of popes, especially after Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X.

I used to hate, hate, hate Francis Bacon, his work so disturbed me; worse than Munch's The Scream which is also very mouth-centric. Now. What? I love Bacon? No. More nuanced. It speaks to me. Chronic facial pain. TMJD. Arthritis in the jaw. The words that are a horror. But just words. It's nice to find a painting because a picture is worth a thousand words.

On Illness

2012-01-24T17:09:00.000-08:00

Women's diseases: arthritis, fibromyalgia, chronic pain, TMJ - did you know women more than men experience pain? Yes. There's research.

Would you care to see a tomogram of my jaw? A year ago I didn't know the word existed. Nor "arthritic changes" and it means pain and discomfort and spasm in non-medical jargon. Even the word spasm. To those who are healthy. I salute you. To those who are healthy, spasm should sound orgasmic, 18th century French description of it, a "petit mort."

Instead a little death is to me a little death, a big gorilla, wearing out the joint. This is supposed to be kind of thing that "makes you stronger," as they say. Illness. Seeing the positive. Suffering. Counting the muscle relaxers, I mean blessings. But as the late cancer patient Christopher Hitchens said, "Bullshit."

The Old World is out of sight. I read Hitchens, nod my head. The New World looks like gorillas on the beach, damp heat, malarial, infested. We're supposed to make camp where?

Universal Mother

2012-01-11T07:54:00.000-08:00

I have been in contemplation recently of kindness, metta.

How can I be less a jerk-like crone, enraged at at every pothole, and porthole that I can't seem to fit through on account of my thighs, more Mother Mary-ish. Mind you, I don't believe.

But I like the idea of Universal Mother, as in a Hindu goddess with multiple arms. Not The Divine Multitaska, making dentist appointments for the kids while perfectly applying the right color foundation.

Can you imagine the embrace of a multi-armed goddess of mercy? I imagine it would be like my Patou's Joy-smelling grandmother plus my 4th grade teacher Mrs. Jenkins plus my college French professor who was quick as a whip.

If you've read Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle In Time you'll not be surprised that my favorite character in the book - and maybe in all of literature - is Aunt Beast.

Strange, yes. A kind, smart, furry, octopus-like creature that is blind. But isn't that the essence of what we want in our mothers?

How Not To Be A Jerk

2012-01-09T10:52:00.000-08:00

I'm in a flight of books about being nice. It's like a flight of beer, tapas, a tasting menu of kindness. I can choose to use my turn signals, help a person with her grocery bags, and hope they won't think I'm going to mug them.

Some of the books say kindness is an inherent trait of humanity. I disagree; I've seen my young kids fighting over the last grape like great apes, teeth chiseled like silverbacks, and as scary. I've seen them succeed in biting each other. My sister bit me once. Horrified, my mom said, "We don't bite each other!"

We're like dogs. Trainable. Therefore I think kindness can be taught. I'm starting a dinner table practice tonight, where instead of demanding the ketchup and grabbing the nits from my children's hair, I ask politely beforehand, "How was your day?" and listen attentively.

My Five C's for The New Year

2012-01-04T17:23:00.000-08:00

1) Connect someone to someone or something they'll get a kick out of.

2) Create something doesn't matter what, just something that wasn't in the universe this morning. Could be fabulous works of art done in gourds you know, for instance.

3) Compliment someone, like, hey nice cardigan, or novel. Whatever.

4) Comment and critique. Add your opinion to the vast ocean of opinionosity.

5) Chill. Make time for time. Check out Tumblr teacup pigs, or do some downward facing dogs or what clears your cobwebs.

The Art Of Giving Is Hard To Master

2012-01-03T05:22:00.001-08:00

My husband's birthday is tomorrow. He expects a gift. Gifts, plural. He loves gifts and who doesn't? They're proof that your friends - and surely your wife - know you. A good gift is specific, like Cupid's arrow.

Here's the thing. I'm gift fail. Candles, linen hand towels, and subscriptions to The New Yorker I think: everyone loves these. Surely everyone loves embossed notecards.

They don't though. People are diverse, and confusing, in their desires for things like potpourri. So I flounder: gift card? Flowers? Cheese of the month club? Will he be satisfied that I at least tried, I chewed on the end of my pencil until I came up with - that's it! - bonsai.

"Arthritis" from Chronic Pain: The Musical

2012-01-02T11:01:00.000-08:00

Tenor: "Your spine looks like a 80 year old's."
Alto: "What? Are you fucking kidding me, Doctor? I'm 36. I have arthritis?"

[The harp plays some glissandos for drama, then is joined by kettle drum, beating, beating beating.]

Tenor: Yes. It's in your jaw bone too. It's degenerative arthritis. Degenerative. Degenerative.

Alto: This is ridiculous... Doctor, can you tap dance?

[Then the music shifts from pathos into a soft-shoe number. The doctor and the woman embrace, laughing.]

Tenor: I know the news I deliver is hard on your liver.
Alto: It is. It is. I have a lot to consider.
Tenor: Delivering news like this is how I ended up upriver, in this city hospital downtown. Downtown.
Alto: If you're up a river, I'm shit's creek.
Tenor: It's true! Your canoe's sprung a leak.
Alto: I'm paddling, paddling, like a trooper. What else can I do?
Tenor: What else can you do, my dear, when life's made such a blooper?

[Curtain falls.]

New Year New You

2011-12-30T07:32:00.000-08:00

More vegetables.

Less bullshit.

More acc' ent' uate the positive.

Less wallow in the glorious oozy sticky negative.

More walk-taking.

Less talking, unless talking is unavoidable.

In that case, see above: Less bullshit. More vegetables.

More opening your heart "like a lotus," though you used to snicker at your yoga teacher for saying it.

BLEEP

2011-12-20T18:49:00.000-08:00

Let me say this: chronic pain &^%$ing sucks $#@! balls, big $#@!* balls that %$&^#* hairs and assclog the *&^!@ing drain.

Treating TMJ With Poetry Proves Ineffective

2011-12-19T18:57:00.000-08:00

Things You'll Need To Treat TMJ, according to the LiveStrong website:

NSAIDs
Bite guard
Muscle relaxant
Tricyclic antidepressants
Corticosteroids and botulinum toxin

Things They Don't Mention You'll Need:

Hope. Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul that blah blah blah.
An Emily Dickinson blow up doll.

Carols for Parents

2011-12-15T12:59:00.000-08:00

Christian's awake.
Again? When will the kid sleep through the night?
We haven't had a Silent Night in six years.
O Holy Night. The power's out.
All over the Little Town of Bethlehem, PA?
Light the torch, Jeanette Isabella!
O Come, O Come, Emmanuel, call it a flashlight. And it's right where you put it last time: in the kitchen drawer under the microwave.

A Four Letter Word

2011-12-13T12:24:00.001-08:00

"The heart knows a hundred thousand ways to speak." - Rumi

Speaking from the heart is a cliche, we all know this.

In fact, it is such a cliche for me that to let my heart talk - the only way I can do this is not to speak. It gets ruined on the way out of my mouth, do you feel this way? My heart speaks when I fold the kids' laundry, it says, "Fuck every laundry TV ad that's ever been made, with the woman, fully-made up, and smiling and pairing socks."

Even hallowed words can be hollow, even the good ones. If I were to tell you that I really really love you - despite all the laundry that we co-create -- that just sounds lame, 7th grade passed-note-ish, not expressive of a deepness that cannot be expressed, am I wrong? So I have stopped.

Instead at the end of the day, with the last dishes put away, and the eye of the washing machine closed, I pat the space on the couch next to me that is empty and I will not talk, and you will not talk, and that way we'll know.

Mushroom or Personality Trait?

2011-12-12T14:28:00.000-08:00

Polypore

Omnivore

Chrome-foot

Lead-foot

Dunce-cap

Wine-cap

Wino

Scaly Fiber Head

Yellow-spored

Yellow-bellied

Hairy-stalked

Beefsteak

Keeping Quiet, Giving Nothing

2011-12-07T09:26:00.000-08:00

for once on the face of the earth,
let's not speak in any language;
let's stop for a second,
and not move our arms so much.

- Pablo Neruda from the poem, "Keeping Quiet"

All is calm, all is bright like the song. Not really. All is chaos, and not enough tape, didn't I tell you to buy more tape? and incendiary sugar cookies; I set the smoke alarm off last night.

I say bah to Christmas, feh. I'm not bah-humbugging in a Dickensian I hate laughter and cheer and fat geese, but with a Eastern European vulgar hand gesture, meaning, what's all this fuss, all this stuff, this messed up meshugas.

On the 26th of December, much what I'm rushing to wrap will be landfill, or gyring in the Pacific Ocean. I think of the whales. I think the Easter Islanders, how they cut down all their trees to erect those giant stone heads.

Since I burned the cookies, I have nothing to give and let me tell you that's freedom, a profound divine absence. I'm still moving my arms a great deal, but it's to clear the smoke from the room.

Haiku of My Middle School Lunches

2011-12-03T18:11:00.000-08:00

Why do I never
have a Ho-Ho, Connie
Miller has a Ho-Ho.

Big expectations,
lunch money. Lunch lady smiles:
Try fish on a bun.

Salad bar bacon.
Rule: Not cool to like bacon.
Years later, it's reversed.

Mom sends in cupcakes
with a sweet note: Dearest Lamb.
Turns my stomach.

Grandma is staying
making meatloaf sandwiches.
I rather she not.

Egg yoke on seeded
rye, made cafeteria
hell, the smell, a joke.

My Short-Lived Career As An Art Critic

2011-11-17T04:49:00.000-08:00

"What's that a picture of? Is it a house? A hugely oversized eyeball? Is it our family on swings at the playground at dusk? What the hell is it?"

"Mom," they say, "why does it always have to be something?"

Sandalwood

2011-11-16T10:52:00.000-08:00

When my father was a graduate student he became friends with Denanjay from Bombay, now Mumbai, and a fellow graduate student. When my sister was born, Jay became her godfather, and when Jay returned to India, he took being her godfather in the correct manner: that he should avoid spiritual prattle, and instead provide exotic presents.

I was green with envy. My godmother lived in France, or so my parents told me, as a way of explaining her hands-off approach.

One of the presents Jay sent was a garland of exquisitely crafted sandalwood roses. Each rose so paper thin you could hardly believe it. I marveled. It was a thing so fragrant that it perfumed the linen in the linen closet where my mother hung it, for safekeeping. As in, away from Elizabeth.

Because it did not belong to me, and because my sister didn't seem to see the extreme value of it, the more I wanted it. I would go into the linen closet and think of elephants, and dream that my godmother was from India, too. Claude, whom I met years later, was extremely stylish, and warm, and scented with Paris, and that made up for a lot. But still, sandalwood.

Etiquette, EtiKIDette

2011-11-14T08:28:00.000-08:00

My mother tells the story of when my sister and I went for the first time to the University Club, my grandparents' formal supper club in Pittsburgh, when we were five and eight.

We didn't know what forks to use for our salads of endive and walnut, and, worse, we skirmished around the potted palms, in our patent leather shoes, giving each other sparks. Little barbarians. I remember it being fun. I remember the ladies' "powder room" that had what my grandmother called "a divan." "Funny bone" was another word my grandmother used.

My mother, burning with embarrassment, leashed and took us home, and coached us for the next twenty years in fish forks and water goblets. A viscountess couldn't more politely spear an asparagus. But when it is necessary?

We don't "dine," we snarf, inhale, snorffle, vacuum, and in ten minutes whatever was on the table is in our cells, fueling.

Pagan. Period.

2011-11-08T04:53:00.000-08:00

I'm a lapsed high-church Episcopalian of Russian Polish German Jewish heritage, on my mother's side, back when that land changed hands, and on my father's side, Scots-Irish, raised on the moors to eat porridge, related to the "Sinners in the Hands of An Angry God" Puritan Jonathan Edwards.

As a child in Costa Rica, my husband was born Catholic, but this mother thought that through, found it lacking, and became Jehovah's Witness. His religion now is soccer. With a side of French bread. The man really loves his baguette. The staff of life, I say. But he finds that too Biblical; he is rather crunchy.

What on earth to raise the kids? I say Earth worshipping, foragers, with a streak of literacy, and a love of kindness like the Dali Lama, and like the Sufi mystics, an urge to whirl.

I'll light some incense for that, get a pet sacred cow, put a fire on the hearth, like Hestia, Greek goddess of the hearth for whom I have a special fondness. She sat apart from her brothers and sister Olympians, and focused on the rotating spit, and made mean S'mores.

Sugar: The Opiate Of My People

2011-11-04T07:15:00.000-07:00

The scientific research is in: sugar has the same effect on brain chemistry as cocaine. It is as addictive as heroin. We're a nation of fat addicts. So what am I doing laying out a plate of cookies for my after-school children? I should be putting out a syringe.

I was overweight as a child. My mother as a child was overweight. My mother's mother was overweight. We were all called chunky or chubby or soft or plump; these words were semi-kind. In high school I worked in a bakery called Waldorf's, making cheese danish. Those halcyon days! Before anyone knew better about black and white frosted cookies, how they are, basically, death.

What should one eat? Michael Pollan's pithy "Not too much. Mostly plants," is not helpful. What I need is a shopping list and a rigid Victorian nanny.

I know there is such a thing called "food" but where is that in my pantry? "Food" requires making it, requires thinking, and time, in a way that a Snickers bar does not. I don't even like Snickers. But that's what I mean: Big Sugar is as effective at brand creation as is Big Pharma, and their products are easier to say and more delicious. Zyrtec is hard. A candy company would kick Cymbalta to the curb. Mallomar. Doesn't that sound better, mellow?

I can rattle off the names of candy bars but I cannot rattle off the names of heirloom beets and I don't mean to make Alice Waters weep. I'm just an average American mom who wants her kids to eat, to "Ess!" as my grandmother would say, pressing another serving of strudel on us all.

Lord of The Bee Dance

2011-11-03T06:59:00.000-07:00

I want to talk about dancing.

How at parties I've put on music, danceable, and people continue to talk. I've turned the music up, and people respond by talking louder and then I turn the music up louder still and people begin to shout as if they are at a 20-something bar. It occurs to nobody to begin to move, but to yell.

When I was in Venezuela years ago, visiting a then boyfriend, at every single party everybody danced. Therefore, I danced, because there was no one to talk to, or shout at. They were all on the dance floor, even the very old, and the seemingly frail, even my boyfriend's very pregnant cousin, wearing, si, a leopard print catsuit.

I've started to dance more now that I have children. Because they don't know what's impossible. (Por ejemplo: Leopard print catsuits.)

Children can respond to music however they like. My son has a dance that is uniquely his and he's been doing it since he could stand. It is a waggle bee dance, I think. He sticks out his butt, waggles it as if a bee signifying where the pollen is, three miles away, in the cornflower. Then he makes little circles and flaps his arms.

Is it art? I don't know. But it is a response to life: wail in, dance out.

Storytelling

2011-11-02T17:11:00.000-07:00

When I am writing and my son comes over and asks, "What are you doing Mommy?" I say, "I am writing a story."

And, incredulous, he asks,"You have a story?" as if he is saying, "Mommy is good only for pouring my milk, and occasionally for helping me get going on my bike."

As if it's a lie.

Invocation of The Muses

2011-11-01T18:07:00.000-07:00

Sing Muses

of the anxious suburban mom would be your servant for NaNoWriMo. Let her words and her chipped fingernail polish be meet and right in thy sight.

Let her herniated cervical disc be as a 20-year-old, plump, nourished and bouncy and not painful as she writes, hunched over late at night after the children have gone to bed, and her husband too.

The disc, it has been painful. For the pain she has received several spinal blocks. There appears to be no god of herniated cervical discs though one thinks of Shiva, destroyer of worlds, Muses, could you introduce her? Like if you know Shiva, like if you know if he wants a sacrifice of 19th century British novels to make the pain go away and to restore her to health so that she may continue to read 19th-century British novels in bed without her hands going numb?

That would be a great. And not such a sacrifice.

She is your humble servant, but no so humble that she doesn't have aspirations to write 50,000 words in one month. Laugh not Muses. You extend your favors to heros with chutzpah and she would rather than the laundry, the dishes, and the six-year-old's homework, do this.

The Chinese Poet Li Po On Halloween

2011-10-30T17:16:00.000-07:00

The birds have vanished into the sky,
and now the last cloud drains away.

We sit together, the mountains and me,
until only the mountain remains.

- Li Po

The costumes have vanished into the attic
and now the last face paint drains away.

We sit together, the leftover candy and me,
until only the Bit o' Honeys remain.

- Suburban Mother of Two

Candy Is Dandy, But Hypocritical

2011-10-27T05:30:00.000-07:00

With trickle of Kit Kats from Target it started, like rain drops on a tin roof in the tropics. Then, monsooning, candy passed by kids on the playground, at the Halloween bake sales, in orange felt pumpkin-shaped bags, like heroin.

And they act like it. Like pee-wee addicts, my kids, they hoarde, cajole, walk the sidewalks asking huskily, "Got any Skittles? I've got the shakes, man, can't ride my bike right."

Amid all the talk of childhood obesity we still have: Big Candy. It's caramel covered, chocolate enrobed pecan turtles kind of nuts. Like Big Pharma. Like Big Tobacco. Business pushing candy cloaked in the charm of children going house to house begging.

"Be The Cool House," the sign at Target says. That's the trick. Buy the full-sized Butterfingers. No one wants to be the one on the block that passes out pencils. But you can't have it both ways, Ken Burns "Prohibition" taught me that, Epidemic of Diabetes, and Candy Freak.

But I try. Amid the nausea coming down from bag of Twix, I can't do the laundry right, man, I can't carpool. I am a candy corn. It is an affliction, I blame my mother, I might try to snort one one up my nostril, snort it, but not in front of the children.

He Leaves The Gold Hidden In The Mountains

2011-10-17T08:27:00.000-07:00

Not that I understood the first Book of The Tao, but I'm reading Stephen Mitchell's The Second Book of The Tao now.

"How fine life becomes when what you want is exactly what you have" is Mitchell's exegesis on Chuang-tzu's line, "The Master leaves the gold hidden in the mountains, and the pearl at the bottom of the sea."

But if there's gold in them thar' mountains you better believe I'm hefting a pickax. Ditto a submersible and an oxygen tank to get at that pearl. I clamor! I shimmy! Exactly what I want is what I don't have.

If the Tao is like a river, I'm no river otter, dipping in, all sleek. I'm nearby though, like an elephant at one of those depressing nature show's dwindling water holes, trunk-deep in the mud, nearby and thirsty.

Soloing

2011-10-15T05:56:00.003-07:00

A cat left alone for too long gets mad and pees on all the furniture. I don't do that. I tend to drift, like a raft. I'm soloing around the world called our living room, with the kids, husband away, again.

I might end up in Azores.

We might have a great time.

I also might cry into my pillow: Please don't ask me to pour another glass of milk, please don't ask me. Also, stop quibbling about who is taller! Who cares who is taller? Who cares? Stop fighting! You are not the boss of me.

Except they are. My responsibilities. Beauties. Albatrosses and professors. The next generation.

I get out the crayons, and hope that no one bites.

Animalia

2011-10-14T06:08:00.001-07:00

I like to be around pigs, horses and cows. I'm allergic to cats. The dogs that I am not allergic to I like to be around. If I had the opportunity to be around a friendly lion that would not bite my arm off I would.

Goldfish are not that interesting. We tried geckos, but failed. Feeding them all those poor live crickets, struggling to find safe corners in the tank turned my stomach. So we're trying 4-H.

We can "share" the raising of a pig with another family, the lady told me. Time sharing pigs, this is the motto of my family.

I want to go to the state fair with our Clover and bring back a prize and be so proud. And then eat her, isn't that the way of the world? but not my world. In my world, she comes home, writes "My Mom Is Terrific" with her snout in our sandbox.

Great Works of Art. Done in Gourds.

2011-10-11T05:55:00.000-07:00

Michelangelo's Pieta

Gustav Klimt's The Kiss

Grant Wood's American Gothic

Traditional. Candy.

2011-10-10T08:24:00.000-07:00

Smoke 'em if you've got 'em, but we have a dearth of customs and traditions in my family.

We're not religious, well I am but I hide it from my husband who needs not know about my subscription to On Being the podcast for "meaning, religion, ethics and ideas."

When holidays come I think, gosh, other people seem to have so many colorful, flavorful romps, and all I have come up with so far is Chicken Friday. (Waaaay back, on my mother's side I may be Jewish, so I light some candles. I like this, but, as a gong, it's meh.)

In my family our big whoop, when we sound our barbaric yawp and feel the membrane between us and our ancestors shudder, and reality and spirituality cleave...is when we snarf down candy at Halloween.

Snarfing Down Candy at Halloween is communion with the makers of candy, with sweetness, with life at its finest. Like a sacred Druidical rite.

Each piece of Kit Kat is a fingerbone of a saint that was gluttonous and still, the Lord adored him. The flattened fruit roll-ups Torah scrolls. Amein. Let's trade.

Crafty

2011-10-06T05:48:00.000-07:00

When, as a mother, I don't know what to do (as is frequent) or it's a rainy day, or it's both a rainy day and I don't know what to do (as is frequent) I get out the craft basket.

Glue, scraps of felt, sequins, whatnots. There is an embroidery needle that is purposefully very blunt, and a hoop of canvas.

The kids encircle me, I imagine it is a hearth scene by a Flemish master. There is a single candle in the painting, which illuminates our gentle and open faces with it's warm maternal glow. Look how content the dog is! (We don't have a dog.) Look at the grapes! As if lit from within by individual purple lanterns! (We don't have grapes. We unartfully have snack crackers, of peanut butter.) How we dream!

How we craft, as in the olden days, before television, before the Wii, before hot water, before electricity, when families bowed their heads together over a common purpose, for instance, making out of different shapes of pasta, a Halloween skeleton, following the directions of the Martha Stewart website.

More Mindfulness

2011-09-27T06:00:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I focused on my breath. Got a anatomy book out and located my lungs.

Then I forgot my focus, as usual. But once or twice caught it and was surprised as an old dog might be by the successful catch of a squirrel. Got it by the tail, Master! Look, here it is, my breath, hanging upside down in my teeth! Master! Look! Woof!

Woof! was the sound of my breath leaving my body. Gone. On to the next doggish task.

Gnawing on things. Licking. Barking at things.

Do You Know Where Your Lungs Are?

2011-09-26T08:33:00.001-07:00

I didn't. And was breathing into the wrong place. Dummy.

They begin a bit above your collarbone, and are small. They end at your bra-closure if you wear a bra. If you don't wear a bra, they end where, if you did wear one, you would hook and eye it.

They don't hang way down on either side of your torso like Dali clocks, like I thought they did.

Turns out there ain't no lung in your belly. So all that talk about "belly breathing?" in yoga and meditation. It's a metaphor. It's so confusing. Turns out I've been breathing in to and out of -- my small intestine. Dummy.

No wonder I breathe little puffs, and sometimes not at all.

Better to choose yet another metaphor and breathe, into your armpits. There might actually be lung there.

Joy of Cooking recipes, Or, A Life

2011-09-23T08:32:00.000-07:00

"Galantine of Fowl," taken from The Joy of Cooking, the 2006 edition, defines the rush of early love: "it is an extravagant production that begins with the boning process."

Ten years into marriage I can say that our boning process is short.

Married life is more often like "Crispy Roast Duck:"

"pull out the pieces of fat from the openings of the body and neck cavities, then place duck down on a V-rack and prick the skin all over in 20 to 30 places." But why limit the merciless pricking?

Add children. From "About Rolled, Molded and Shaped Cookies."

"Shaping cookies is such fun that children should be encouraged to learn to make them for themselves." I very much agree. Let them make bread too, and raise themselves, with their own yeast, I say.

Over time, with age, you become "A Preserve." "If pulp in the bag is still flavorful and does not contain seeds or tough bits of peel. Then simmer down to fruit-butter thickness, adding a few sweet spices, if desired."

But do not go so gentle in that good night of "Jellies and Preserves", a few tough bits are good, for texture, and chew.

The Obstacle and The Path

2011-09-21T07:20:00.001-07:00

"The obstacle is the path." - Zen proverb

Let that sink in and make your brain sizzle and hurt.

Hurt in a good way, in the way that Zen proverbs are supposed to make your brain burn, and your mind confused, so that you bypass your consciousness, so that you "live the layers, not in the litter," as poet Stanley Kunitz wrote.

That line, he said, came to him in a dream.

The obstacle is the path and the dream becomes the line.

A List of The Common Adjectives Describing Chocolate

2011-09-20T05:34:00.000-07:00

The mouthfeel is lush, like a mid-century nude.
The texture is a Renaissance fox-brown velvet worn by a countess who also that evening at the opera seria was wearing Venetian gold and her lover.

The color is rich.

The flavor of chocolate is intense, chocolatey, sometimes even green with high notes of Spice Road, and base notes of forbidden temples crawling with lianas and big-leafed, heart-shaped addictive plants in the tropics.

Handwritten

2011-09-16T10:03:00.000-07:00

I wrote in a legal notebook for the first time in awhile and later picked it up. What are those cuniforms and pictographs, I wondered, what is that -- is that English? It could be Aramaic.

I didn't have to read what I'd written, and I wouldn't have been able to. I was simply writing as a hand/brain/pen exercise, as one might try to draw a basket of paper bags, as I was instructed to do once in an art class, and failed to.

Oh, I thought, so that's my handwriting. I write like I'm a big shot pharmacist in a hurry to have an affair, and a drink.

Basket of Figs

2011-09-13T05:40:00.000-07:00

My mother is is philosophical about figs, looks at a basket of them and sighs.

It's fall, she says, with the weltschmerz available to those who are German. It's really, truly fall. Gone is spring, she says, taking a bite. At least these, in their perfect ripeness, at lease these, right before their ultimate decay, they're perfect. I had a melancholic childhood, obviously.

However, there were figs, and plenty of them: big fat California ones that when the juice ran down your chin hinted of another way of life, a hedonistic, embodied Mediterranean way, where for fun people talked loud, and danced, and at weddings they shot fireworks into the air, and didn't read Goethe.

A big fig tree grew by the farmhouse and my mother would be thrilled as only the German can be thrilled to forage in its branches. I was instructed to hold the colander, and I loved it's various heavinesses as my mother worked. First, a puppy in my arms, then it would be so full of purple figs, it'd feel like Newfoundland.

The Zen Master Goes Back-To-School Shopping

2011-09-12T07:44:00.000-07:00

When the back to school shopper shops, the furrow is smooth, as when the plough driver drives the plough, and the oxen pull. It is not hard to understand!

When breathing, breathe!

When finding three ring binders and ball point pens, just find them. Go to isle 7 and find them!

Here is a koan. Customer Service, how does one translate this? Mu, in Japanese, or Wu, in Chinese. Or, in English, nothingness.

Have a goal and simultaneously have no goal, like the good archer, or, the harried mother in the sutra of The All-White Sneakers, With A No-mark Sole.

Like a river that stays within it's banks, this is our way, joriki, the power of concentration on kelly green polo shirts that are suitable for uniforms.

How the swans land on the lake is how you want to approach the checkout line.

But that comes with practice.

Left Over

2011-09-08T07:46:00.000-07:00

My husband accuses me of putting whatever into a pot and adding what's on hand and calling it dinner. But that's my magic, I remind him.

In a half-lemon, I see a challenge, in a wilting bunch of beets. Quinoa. Perhaps one could make a gallette? A potage? Top the thing with feta and call it Greek-style. I've found sunchokes, clamoring in the crisper for something to do, some larger purpose.

Occasionally the melange is sublime, like great art, and like great art, unrepeatable. No one asked Van Gogh to paint another starry night or sunflowers, likewise no one has ever asked for a repeat of Potato In Phyllo. However, as Churchill said about life, but could have said about cooking for a family with young children: "success is going from failure to failure without any loss of enthusiasm."

Alone At Last

2011-09-07T08:34:00.000-07:00

I smell the wet earth smell of #2 pencils and know apples are ripening. On the squat, perfectly round pumpkins, the farmers are setting their price.

For the first time in two months, the sounds of my own breathing, and the endless dryer, are the only sounds in the house. Shiva be praised! Ho! Four directions! No one is demanding my attention. The sheets are folded and in the closet, not purple-crayoned and bunched up down the hallway, a course for the river of running, shouting kids.

No one is hooting things I don't understand like, "She touched my penguin!" so I don't have to know what it all means. All I have to make is my own lunch, and write. Godamnit.

I consider this. I wanted this. Just me and the dryer and in the orchard, the apples, with the kids back at school; aloneness, but it is like the door a dog is always on the wrong side of.

Too Darn Hot

2011-07-22T06:02:00.000-07:00

Extreme heat makes for good Taoists. Non-doing is all one can do.

My method is under a tree, in the shade, wearing a humongous hat, sipping from a straw something icy, and looking like the eccentric, the one every neighborhood has, and every kid remembers as that lady.

Are We Fiction?

2011-07-21T06:22:00.001-07:00

My son, 6, and I have spend the summer working through his school's recommended reading readiness workbook. Yesterday's lesson was the letter "V." Piece of cake, the letter "V." Compared it to today's lesson: fiction vs. non-fiction.

The workbook states: non-fiction is things that could happen, fiction is things that could not happen, things that are pretend. I explain that non-fiction is a lion attacking a gazelle (we saw this mess on PBS), fiction is a mouse in a tutu. My daughter, who is four, puts her chisel against this wall, and chinks out the first brick. "Mice do wear tutus," she says. "Haven't you seen Angelina Ballerina?"

My son brings out the jackhammer. "But what about us, Mom? Are we fiction or non-fiction?" I say, we're non-fiction with conviction but, truly, I'm not sure.

Blackberrying

2011-07-19T09:24:00.000-07:00

You lean forward into not away from brambles like a normal person, shinny your unprotected forearm into narrow thorn-thronged passages when blackberrying. It is a state of mind as much as it is an activity of the body.

You must forget the goal, and simultaneously have only the goal in mind. It's like Zen archery. You must intuit the nothingness that is the fat ripe delicious warm globe. You must know that already you and the blackberry are one in this phenomenal universe.

Be Like The Frog

2011-07-15T07:11:00.000-07:00

I'm reading about Zen. "Reading Zen" is a koan, since one cannot read meditation into the bones. But I'm book-centric, and word-needy, and I have to start somewhere. I'm reading Suzuki's Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind.

Some nuggets:

"We should appreciate what we are doing. There is no preparation for something else."

"If we are like a frog we are always ourselves."

So I practiced not preparing for something else, for a second. It was a freeing, terrible second, and awesome in the original sense of awe.

Then I tried to be a frog. My pyramid shape, the weight of me, my goggle eyes. I sat like a frog while I watched So You Think You Can Dance, eyeing the contestants, my tongue licking out occasionally at a bowl of vanilla ice cream. That's the closest I've been to Nirvana.

Working the Edges

2011-07-14T07:27:00.000-07:00

I'm a rhombus, shaped like a diamond. I have four equal sides and four corners; they are where I am pointy, flinty, and where I am most ill at ease, at the edges. Wish I was smooth as a circle, serene as the moon. A moon never, as we say, "works at the edge."

Working at the edge is one foot on the scaffolding, one foot in the mist.

Growing Out

2011-06-29T10:12:00.000-07:00

Growing one's hair out is a state of mind. For the last three years I've been growing my hair out from a scalp-close pixie, waiting like a fool for the ship called Long Luxuriant Mane to come in, hoping against the odds. I have fine thin hair, the kind ads on tv ask about in voice-overs that are always melancholy: Do you have fine thin hair?

Would bobby pins make it bearable? Handband? No. What about a rhinestone clip? Finally, this morning, I said fuck it.

The wan, mouse-brown inches fell to the floor and with them the months. That hair must hold the evidence the pain clinic, the ice packs, the medicines, and the life that I once imagined would be mine. It feels good to be rid of it. I'm not a pixie anymore, I'll never be a Godiva; what's real right now is, as the gurus say, "being present, being vulnerable." So I've got a bob that bares the neck.

Beginner's Mind

2011-06-27T06:12:00.000-07:00

I've started meditating. Hold the snickers, friends, I know that I've started many things only to give them up. (See: knitting, the no sugar diet, daily exercise, and making adorable flowers out of felt.)

My mother asks, "Notice anything different yet, honey?"
I say, "Mom, I'm trying to divorce myself from outcomes."
"Oh."

So far, the only thing I've noticed is that meditation is to be looking in on one's mind as if peering over a wall to watch the neighbors who are always fighting. Look at them fighting! What an bunch of assholes! You think to yourself: She ought to leave him, except you're experiencing yourself. This is all going on in your mind.

You're instructed to let these thoughts pass like clouds. Well I friggin' can't. I'm lassoing clouds, attached to every memory, anticipating the future, planning, plotting, rubbing my hands together, mwahahaha, and completely out of touch with what I am supposed to be in touch: the present moment.

Breathing. Oh, yeah. That.

Nutritive Poetry

2011-06-23T07:46:00.001-07:00

Reading poetry seems like the practice of goofballs and the overly literary until you need it. There will be a time when you need it.

I sipped occasionally at the cup of poetry, spilling at will when I would find someone eating a piece of fruit. I would say, "Do I dare to eat a peach?" And I would laugh inwardly, knowingly, smugly.

Poetry isn't a tea biscuit to me anymore. It's meat. It's the point. Where else to find the words for the emotions you did not know you had? I get in there, climb into poems, with my ladder propped against the apple tree. Yehuda Amichai wrote "You mustn't show weakness and you've got to have a tan" and I think, oh my god. Exactly. This is looking for parking in the parking lot in the NW Baltimore suburbs. How did Amichai know?

Salmon Stream of Consciousness

2011-06-14T06:50:00.000-07:00

Salmon, the color, is awesome, it's shaka, which is Hawaiian slang for awesome. If I were to decide these things, chakra colors, it'd be the color for the belly or hara, the Japanese martial art term for the seat of the gut.

My gut will later on be filled with cake. Today is my birthday.

Cake is one of those things that is great to anticipate. Like getting together with old friends. You anticipate what you might talk about, the ground you might cover, the connection. I think about the quality of the icing. Whipped cream is so rich yet so light. There's physics here, as there is with friends who have known you a long time, and still.

The gut is trust. When my gut said "this endodontist is not a good endodontist" I should not have overridden that with my grey matter and stayed in the chair for the root canal. Now I have TMJ. You learn these things as you go. When your gut says "get up out of that chair," you should get up. The gut takes in the Elvis sculpture in the endodontist's waiting room and makes the necessary connections.

Salmon also is my favorite fish, lightly grilled, with lemon.

One day we all will return to the stream, I think. The sun will set like in a poem, glowing orange, all belly. Like in the poem Lycidas, and we will have new pasture. Until then, cake.

Hot Mindfulness

2011-05-31T10:57:00.001-07:00

There's hot, and then there's hot like my grandfathers remember. They were pre-A.C.

One of my grandfathers told me stories of working in Pittsburgh in the heat of the summer, in a three piece suit, in a building had only fans. He was a patent lawyer. My other grandfather, he'd say, "You don't know from hot. Summers it was so hot, my family slept out on the fire escape it was so hot."

Compared to these sweating men, my ancestors, I've got no homeostasis. I'm a post A.C., Generation X weakling, mewling when the thermometer goes way up. I would never wear a three piece suit in August, it's an absurdity, like British cream tea in India, with caravan of saucers. "Why did you do that?" I asked my grandfather.

Why ever be uncomfortable, if you don't have to be? Because sometimes you will be uncomfortable and there will be no choice: call it aging, or illness or something tiny, like grit in your shoe. To be a little uncomfortable, to work with an edge, is the way to learn about edges, and there are many of them.

Mantra

2011-05-24T07:43:00.000-07:00

I'm not a pray-er or a meditator, but I'm thinking the time is ripe for me to become one or the other, and to have a mantra. Not just any old one: "lotus" or "peace" or "love thy neighbor." Those are good. But I need something new, something jazzy and effervescent like "bubble machine" or "clandestine."

Horse Racing

2011-05-19T07:30:00.000-07:00

My grandmother got me in to Triple Crown horse racing. I remember eating popcorn with her on that first Saturday in May, watching the Kentucky Derby. And she and I knew it was the most exciting two minutes in sports.

Then comes the Preakness. Long gone were the hats and Southern grace of the Kentucky Derby and far in the future was the Belmont Stakes' faint air of aristocracy. Here at the Preakness we have we have the manimal, Kegasus. It's less about the horses and more about the...fillies.

It's supposed to edify us, Baltimore, to host the second leg of the Triple Crown.
Horse racing is the definition of "sprezzatura," seeming ease, feigned artlessness, making the terribly difficult look like a breeze. It has an ugly underbelly, with drugs, inbreeding, and mistreatment, but when it comes to watching from the rail, all you see is a pure rare form of manimal beauty.

We watch and learn from the pounding horses running the homestretch and the jockeys hanging on for the trip of their life, what it means, despite all the odds, to have heart.

The Science of Description

2011-04-28T09:40:00.000-07:00

Description is a science. There are rules.

Example: you have to get the details, which is as difficult as embroidering a bee on to lace. You have to get "beeness" across even though you are using thread, and a needle, and the base is lace, and bees are made of flesh.

Its an impossible task, really.

And so easy to make the bee look more like a polka dot.

Perfume Review: Flowerbomb

2011-04-14T17:47:00.000-07:00

Like the bloodhound, like the male moth, I have a powerful schnozzle.

So I figured I'd perfume review, starting today, starting right now with a scent strip from the inside of InStyle Magazine that I smelled from a distance of the length of a football field.

Most reviewers identify top, middle, and bottom notes and evoke sensual comparisons, but like the male moth I have not a clue if Flowerbomb is a floral chypre mossy oak with hints of schist that reminds me of a child's yellow marble or an Oriental wet orchid hybrid that brings to mind an evening dancing at low tide in the market with someone I've just met.

Friends, all I know is that wearing it was, for me, like being in a hot delivery truck of cheese and cherry Danish.

Bum Ice

2011-04-12T09:01:00.000-07:00

My vertebral column is not what it once was as you, dear reader, know well. I have DDD (degenerative disk disease), a herniated disk in my neck, and (but wait...there's more!!!) an ill-healed coccyx and sacral cysts.

It's the subject of sacral cysts I turn to today. They are literally a pain in the ass and therefore, since I want to have a life despite the pain, and live with a shred of dignity, I have become a bum icer.

Like other (the few, the proud) bum icers I use what I can: frozen peas, fancy ice packs from the chiropractor, frozen shredded coconut, you know, whatever. I'm omnivorous.

Wouldn't you know, I chose frozen shredded coconut as my bum ice of choice for my son's recent school picnic. The cool rectangle was perfect: so thin, so unobtrusive 'neath my mom jeans, it was almost like I was wearing nothing, no assistive devices whatsoever.

But lo, I was soon sitting in a pool of sweet, delicious, coconut milk, with a lot of explaining to do. Bum ice.

Pink Out

2011-04-07T06:05:00.001-07:00

I've been dressing my daughter in pink since she was newborn, on cultural autopilot, without thinking. And here I thought I was a discerning adult woman, a skeptic of all things labeled "girl."

I went to Smith in the 90s, when Riot Grrrl was rampant and we were all daughters of mothers who at macrame consciousness raisers in the 70s checked out their own cervixes (cervixi?) and marched for a better, more egalitarian Eden.

At that time, when we were 19, we thought we could punk rock in an apron. Some of my friends quilted ferociously. I made Barbara Kruger-esque collages and font-nerded out making bold and sans serif the word DENTATA.

The womanhood that was waiting for us seemed rigorous, raw and lionine. Dare I name the band Hole?

Little girls today wear sparkle-plastic heels and ballet-pink nails and twirl. Pink! Pink back when I was coming of age was fuschia, gnarly, chipped.

What have I been spoon-feeding my daughter? Princesses, fairies, "prettyness" and a distinct lack of body-knowledge, I think. Without Peggy Orenstein's great book Cinderella Are My Daughter I would still have my head in the soft pink sand of modern girlhood. It's just so soft, and pink.

What happened to the righteousness and momentum of the 70s, to the 3rd wave of feminism on which I surfed? My daughter is too young to make a purchase, so why am I purchasing for her heels? Pink boas? Why are any of us? Let's stop before we slap down another dollar for Disney, and save it instead for the future which is we want our daughters to be able to think for themselves.

Art, Work, Children

2011-04-02T13:28:00.000-07:00

Children's imaginations are expansively outside the box, where green can be the color of sky and hair. Maybe the sky has hair. It's perpetually groovy where they live.

Before I knew better I'd say, "That's our house!" And my son would look at me as if a better place for me might be the zoo. I would reconsider, remember the advice of parenting books and say, "Is that a house?"
He would continue to stare at me, dumfounded that I didn't get what he'd drawn was The Batmobile. "That red square is the bat elevator." Then he added, "That's where the inventing happens."
"What inventing?"
"You know."
"I don't know. Do bats invent?"

He'd look at me as one considers a fence post, and then he'd run off to his friends who plainly got The Batmobile, leaving me to muse on Picasso: "Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up."

Obeying Pain

2011-03-30T05:44:00.000-07:00

To goodness and wisdom we only make promises; pain we obey. - Marcel Proust

In my life until now, physical pain was something philosophical, something that happened to other people, the old, the infirm, the people in TV documentaries about disasters who cried on camera. Poor them, the poor dears, I would say, holding a tissue to my eyes while I watched, sympathetic to them, but removed from them by my radiant health. I flagrantly used action verbs: run, jump, gambol, dance, walk, skip. I used the word embodied to mean the joy I had in myself.

Now that sit is an action verb, and every movement has a consequence, "embodied" has a different meaning to me. Inside these misfiring nerve fibers I am trapped, I am embodied.

In his play No Exit Sartre famously wrote hell is other people, but I disagree, hell is yourself in your body in pain, the kind of pain that has no topography, it's a pure straight white line endlessly moving forward like an arrow. Without choice, you obey.

ImpostaMom

2011-03-24T11:30:00.000-07:00

The selfless calm voice of modern parenting, the one that pretends to be a video recording device, "When I came into the room I saw a begonia on the floor and two children biting each other on the forearm in what appears to be a very angry way" really irritates me.

I caught myself recently, playing to the audience of other "good moms" when my son took someone else's son's train. This is what I said: "Now honey," I said, "that other little boy was playing with it first. I know you really want that train and right now that train has captured your attention so completely that no other toy seems desirable, and it is hard to part with a toy of such awesomeness and quality, but you don't like it when someone grabs a train from you. How we play with our friends is that we share trains. Remember when we talked about sharing and compromise during Family Share Time yesterday?"

I was playing ImpostaMom! Why didn't I simply say: Give the toy back, son, and be done with it?

ImpostaMom is walking, talking fakery. Well meaning fakery of course, designed to make ourselves feel superior about our care of our children compared to those "bad moms" (that we are not like) that yell and demand fealty "just because we said so," but it is still fake, fake, fake as store-bought cupcakes.

The most honest I've been with my kids was after the episode described above of the forearm biting and the begonia. I said I needed to take a time out in a hot bath because I was feeling extremely irritated. They asked what's "irritated." And we all learned something.

My Collection

2011-03-23T06:10:00.000-07:00

I'm not a collector, I lack the gene. If there is a group of anything in my house, it is an accident, and the group is usually of spatulas and boring.

I have an uncle who collects masks, another who collects books, my mother is a careful curator of amethyst jewelry, my father would like another piano or three, and my husband collects vintage Star Trek ornaments that is, he did, until I shamed him out of it. (I'm so sorry, honey, I didn't understand.)

Why four or five of the same thing, when the one suffices? Then I found a bowl at a flea market that spoke to me. It called out to me. It was 1930s yellow-ware with a thick lip and deep concavity, enough to raise three loaves of bread dough in. It transfixed me with its old fashioned femininity. All those bread-baking and biscuit-making women! My people!

I like what bowls mean. Plates don't embrace, but bowls do. They're open, giving, and yet also receptive. They make it look easy, but an excellent life's work would be trying to be like a bowl.

Ha Ha

2011-03-09T16:34:00.000-08:00

According to various online dictionaries, a haha (n.) approximates sound of laughter. The definition I prefer these days is that a haha is an unseen ditch.

In a peerless country landscape you are walking as I have been walking, with not a care in the world save the usual suburban maternal American cares, and then. That damn unseen ditch.

It is different for everyone. The landscape that at one point felt like it could go on to the horizon at least, and maybe forever, does not. For one thing, there's this ditch. And who is as witty as Oscar Wilde who said, "We're all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." Nice thought old buddy, old pal, but the dimensions of this ditch are broad and the walls steep, Oscar.

Pain that goes on for more than three months is called chronic. I am now living a definition as are hundreds of thousands of other people. Make that all of us gutter-dwellers, such as we are. We're trying our damndest, whatever way we can, to focus on points of light that flicker far away. Hold my hand. Haha.

Sick Funny

2011-03-02T16:57:00.001-08:00

Goody Bastos has been a passion project of unserious frippery. But recently, life circumstances have taken an uncertain turn, and now, if I had gills I would let humor flow over them, thereby oxygenating. I've found no solace in my MRI reports of degenerated disks, insurance forms, and pamphlets on chronic pain clinics. My doctors are as serious as the carpets in their waiting rooms.

We sick don't need serious. We're overdosed on overhead lighting and chrome. We need humor. Sick humor. I know this because in the last few weeks I have been drawn as if by true love to Mr. Noodle. He is the clown on Sesame Street who has trouble putting his pants on. He puts them on his head and can't see. The kids on the show laugh and say, "Mr. Noodle, don't you know how to put pants on?"

Being ill is like having pants on your head. How the world was, it isn't anymore, and you travel in it differently, darkly, with films, reports, nerve conduction studies, and bottles of pills. What I want to do is laugh until it hurts less.

My Oscar Fashion

2011-02-28T09:01:00.000-08:00

Dress: Drawstring-waist sweatpants, in periwinkle, with a zipped hoodie in what some might fashionably call fawn and others might more realistically call beige.

Handbag: Brown paper bag, by Trader Joe's, full of cheese doodles.

Hair: Semi-up do (concept by the actress herself)

Accessories: I once memorably used a paper clip to secure my semi-up do when there were no bobby pins; the kids had put them all one by one down the drain, because, quote "it might be interesting."

Makeup: Lip balm by Chapstick, in "original."

Kids' Homemade Valentine Cards

2011-02-10T10:42:00.000-08:00

Front: (blank)
Inside: Dear Momy.

Front: (glitter glue abstract art of a goat. It could be.)
Inside: I lve u. From: Me!

Front: (crayoned heart side by side with a crayoned cat)
Inside: (blank)

Front: Surprize Vlntne!
Inside: (a gargantuan heap of glitter)

Front: Lve u Mama do u like?
Inside: (half eaten Tootsieroll pop)

If Mafiosos Were Plant Biologists

2011-02-08T06:16:00.000-08:00

Stomata you?

Godfather, forgive me. Lately because of, you know, a little this, a little that I feel deciduous.

You worry too much. Don't worry so much, Johnny. You're gonna make Order of Coiniferales.

You mean the order of mostly evergreen trees and shrubs having usually needle-shaped or scalelike leaves and including forms (as pines) with true cones and others (as yews) with an arillate fruit? I'm honored, Godfather.

Don't be such a pistil, Johnny. Just kiss the ring.

Love Two Weeks

2011-02-01T05:28:00.001-08:00

Suffer yourself to learn many words for one thing. - Srikanth Reddy

For fourteen days in February I get in to love, head-over-assedly, decadently, as into an expensive sports car I've had the audacity to rent. After that I forget again for 50 weeks.

What was that speed and precision-tuning like? That supple interior? That Italian stitching? What mad pursuit? I don't drive like that all year so why try? To keep gunning the engine? Why? After Valentine's nothing for a sweet nothing is what I've got in my pocket. I'm happy to see you, sure, but I won't be caught with a heart-shaped card.

This year, it's going to be different; I am determined to keep the driving gloves on. I plan to keep them on past the 15th, when all the hearts go stale. I might make it even into spring, being loving.

Nothing That Is Not There

2011-01-28T04:34:00.000-08:00

Wallace Stevens' poem The Snow Man, Bastosed.

Pillow Talk

2011-01-24T08:07:00.000-08:00

You've been married awhile when stay-up-late, work-be-damned, tell-me-again-about-band-camp pillow talk turns into talk about pillows. You lie among the assortment and chat about their heft, softness, thread count, down count. Yes or no to memory foam.

Improvements could be made. There are now pillows made specifically for side sleepers. A satin-covered full-size body pillow could be invited in, to share in a very vanilla threesome. Small round pillows are available. But no.

Endurance. Making do. Loving what is. Old shoe. The marriage itself is that flat old pillow that must be folded several times, orgami-like, to lift the nape just perfectly so from the mattress. It stays.

On Finding My Nana’s Diary From 1927, When She Was Twelve, and Comparing It To My Diary from 1985, When I Was Twelve

2011-01-20T06:03:00.000-08:00

Nana’s Diary: Served tea with mother after church. How I admire how graceful she is! I want to be just like her.

My Diary: SUPER annoying. Like I have to go to church? I, like, fucking don’t.

Nana’s Diary: Continued work on embroidering the scarf for our neighbor, who has pneumonia. So wish she’d get well! I made a cherry pie with leftover pastry scraps.

Nana’s Diary: Dear Diary, I promised you complete honesty, and I gave you my word, and father says that is the most important thing: one's word. I made that sound like I made the cherry pie all by myself. Mother showed me and Sissy how to roll out the dough; I did do the filling on my own but I won’t let that go to my head!

Nana’s Diary: Sissy has such grace! If only I could be half as pretty when I grow up. She’ll be a darling bride! I am embroidering linens for her. I hope it brings her lots of happiness. I want to bring people lots of happiness!

My Diary: Does anyone care what makes me happy? Did Mom drive me to school? Nooo. But she drove Lucy to school. What the FUCK???

Nana’s Diary: Papa says there is going to be another war. I feel absolutely ill and am praying for peace. Knitting scarves so I feel I am doing something.

Nana's Diary: What's important, I think, is to participate in the lives of others, to have compassion, to be a helpmate, don't you think so too, Diary?

My Diary: Here's a list of things I want: I want the new Cure album, a Benetton sweatshirt, in teal, my mom to FUCKING get over herself with the constant SUPER ANNOYINGNESS!!!!!

My Diary: Cont. Not to have to go to piano lessons again, ever. Assaf Gordon in my homeroom hahahahaha! PSYCH! Diary! You know me so well! The only person I really love is all of the girls in Bananarama.

The Freshwater Men of the Mid-Atlantic: A Guide

2011-01-13T08:14:00.000-08:00

Yellow Bullhead

Up to eighteen inches!

Chain Pickerel

Also known as Jack, it is by far the easiest of the pikes.

Hickory Shad

Often smoked but more frequently pickled.

White Sucker

A common bottom-forager, frequently found in bars.

Freshwater Drum

Like a contented husband, makes a grunting sound when near the surface on calm days

Tweeting From The Birdfeeder

2011-01-10T05:26:00.000-08:00

Blue jay! Everyone scatter!

Fletch, the neighbor's lumbering fat Labrador! Quick, everyone scatter!

Nevermind. Friggin' titmice. They're easily confused with the Labrador if you have a resting heartbeat of 200 like I do.

Scatter!

Why?

Because in the birdfeeder is a seed I haven't seen before. It's an unknown seed. Unfamiliar to me. It's freaking me out.

Scatter, everyone! Squirrel!

Okay, okay. It's not a squirrel.

Regroup. Breathe.

Bring your heart rates back down to 200 by thinking about the seeds that are familiar.

It was just the friggin' titmice.

But you never know.

Meteorology For Toddlers

2011-01-06T07:11:00.000-08:00

Weather is all around us.

The weather can be hot. When the weather is hot, the right choice is to run around fast wearing nothing. This cools a body off and simultaneously heats a body up and that's called science.

It can be warm. In this case, maybe just underpants and a tantrum.

Some days the weather is clear. There are no clouds. On these days, it is good to dig in the dirt with a spoon, as it is good to dig in the dirt with a spoon after a rainstorm in the season called spring. See also: mud season A whole season devoted to mud!

Wind is moving air. Wind brings us the weather.

A fart is also air. It brings us hilarity. But not to the big thunderheads known as parents who experience the weather differently due to their great height. Mostly what they experience are high pressure systems day after day.

Romance As A Series of Yoga Poses

2011-01-04T10:08:00.000-08:00

Upward-facing dog.

Triangle Pose.

Confusing.

Pose of I'm Not Dating Anyone, Anymore. It's Just Too Difficult.

Oh, But Look!

Tying The Slip-Knot.

Untying.

Dog.

Snake.

Cow.

Taking A Few Months Off For Self-Exploration at Kripalu.

Le Fond or, A Riff on The New Year

2011-01-03T05:19:00.000-08:00

The caramelized food bits left at the bottom of the pan.

The culinary food term, French for "base" or "foundation."

But you would not say "my fond hurts," even if you were French.

Or, "you're being a real pain in my fond."

Is it an expression of endearment? Yes. Ex: M. Arbuthnot was very fond of dogs.

He once was not fond of dogs because he'd been bitten by a terrier as a child, but now he is. He owns terriers. It's the kind of a transformation that happens sometimes in the best fiction, but rarely in real life.

It's a pan sauce made with the dried up caramelized dark bits of the past. Yet it is the beginning of something new.

And so what are you cooking?

I Hearby Resolve in 2011

2010-12-31T12:15:00.000-08:00

To finish what I start.
To offer up praise.
To say thanks much much more.
To stay in touch.
To do good work.
To dance a little more and spread terrific juicy sexual gossip a little less.
To meditate, yogaify, exercise, and vegetable-eat with greater regularity.

Have Yourself a Dirty Nasty Naughty Little Christmas

2010-12-23T07:41:00.000-08:00

Taken out of context, Christmas is full o'porn.

Egg nog. Just the words. Soooo nasty.

Ditto Yule Log. Is that a position?

Also, someone is coming down your chimney tonight.

It's an overweight German elf.

He comes from The North Pole.

He knows when you've been baaad.

He can throw his sack over his shoulder.

He stuffs your stocking. With toys.

If it is too big to stuff into in your stocking, he puts it out under your tree.

He whips reindeer.

Had St. Francis Been A Foodie: Christmas Version

2010-12-22T06:41:00.000-08:00

Lard,

make me a cooking utensil, perhaps a spatula, of your peace
where there is hatred, let me sow langoustines
where there is injury, poi
where there is doubt in the freshness of cheese, faith;
where there is despair, hope
where there is darkness, light golden brown caramel with fleur de sel,
and where there is thin plonk, joy, and a bottle of 1982 Chateau Margaux.

O divine Konditor Meister,
grant that I may not so much seek to be served risotto
as to serve others risotto;
to be understood as having great palate,
as to understand that not everyone does,
to be loved, as to love the maitre d’;
for it is in giving wicker baskets of seasonal organic microgreens
that we receive,
it is in pardoning those who eat protein shakes, we are pardoned,
and it is by "Death by Chocolate" cake
that we are born to the masthead at Saveur.

Almond.

Anxious Mom, Cool Babysitter: An Accidentally Recorded Conversation

2010-12-17T04:15:00.001-08:00

My father transcribed verbatim this conversation that I accidentally recorded onto his answering machine. He immediately recognized it's potential.

Me: How are the kiddoes?

Sitter: They’re good. They’re just finished watching Monsters, Inc.

Me: Oh, they did? OK, do they seem kind of hepped up or do they seem kind of tired?

Sitter: They seem kind of tired now.

Me: OK. So we’re gonna be home probably within like a half hour or 40 minutes.

Sitter: OK. That sounds good.

Me: OK. If they, if they get really sleepy, hmm, yeah, it’s OK if you wanna, wanna hold them, rock them, or if they, you know, they seem like they’re headed in that direction.

Sitter: OK

Me: Yeah. Because sometimes they get so tired they get riled up.

Sitter: Nervous laughter.

Brief silence

Me: But . . . We’ll be home soon.

Sitter: OK

Me: OK. I’m glad things are going well.

Sitter: All right, well, we get to see you, too.

Me: OK. Take care.

Sitter: Bye

Me: Bye

My Manifesto or, A Few of My Favorite Things

2010-12-15T17:01:00.000-08:00

Things that are good. And make me believe in a benevolent universe:

Brown paper packages tied up with string. Totally get it.

Hot towels.

Funny women.

Fred Astaire.

Sea otters.

Hospitality.

The milk and long dry grass scent of love.

How flowers droop inside, in vases, and need slender plastic collars, but never do outside, in the wild.

Wide smile. Irresistable.

When first you do the wrong thing, but then you go back and do the right thing. That capacity.

What To Do With Your Hands At Cocktail Parties

2010-12-14T11:12:00.000-08:00

There is overstimulation with the flickering candle-simulation, the canapes, especially the shrimp bowl, the burbling jazz and the people asking you what you do in a really insinuating and uncomfortable way like what you do -- poetry writing-- is somehow less than, inferior to whatever it is that they do: skydiving corporate mergers. What do you do with your sad clown hands?

5) Pull hands into sleeves, make an elephant trunk. Lumber around the shrimp bowl, bellowing.

4) Carry two glasses of wine at all times. Every time someone takes the secondary glass that you've so kindly offered, go get a tertiary glass, and so on.

3) There is no word relating to the number eleven, but there is one that relates to the number twelve: duodenary.

2) Converse like this and no one will care what you do with your hands.

1) The shrimp bowl is yours.

Holiday Still Lifes

2010-12-08T05:23:00.001-08:00

Under the tree, a Dutch porcelain mug, containing rum, that Mommy forgot.

A milk chocolate Adventskalender, ripped apart and strewn across the floor. Nearby, a dog is sick.

A landscape of a frilly woman's apron, flour, and sugar, and butter and cookie cutters in the shapes of elves is lit from the left, with 1930s Midwestern nostalgia.

A platter of red grapes. For now.

Hanging like Flemish grandmaster van Eyck rabbits in the dim hall closet, several pairs of flesh-red wool mittens, drying.

A silver ball on the tree, reflecting Daddy, in the other room.

In 3/4 view, the ham, is resplendent, burnt sienna, ochre and vermillion.

After Bruegels' Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, Mommy, who found her mug of rum.

Thanksgiving Poetry Mashup

2010-11-24T07:29:00.000-08:00

"The art of trussing isn't hard to master."
- Elizabeth Bishop

"The ladies come and go talking of the pros and cons of cornbread, as stuffing."
- T.S. Eliot

"She wandered lonely as a cloud over to the pies."
- William Wordsworth

"I have miles to eat before I sleep."
- Robert Frost

"Quoth the turkey, nevermore."
- Edgar Allan Poe

Mommy’s Holiday Survival Checklist

2010-11-22T11:23:00.000-08:00

Belgian chocolates, assorted
Antique, claw-foot bathtub
Champagne
The mind of a reincarnated Buddha

For It Is In Giving That We Receive

2010-11-16T12:25:00.000-08:00

For me the holidays present uncomfortable present-giving situations,
when, for example, your banker and genius flautist cardiologist cousin's family surprises
your family with the gift of a trip down the Loire Valley, on a canal boat, plus excursions to local villages to sample their handcrafted cheese on rented bikes and you're smiling really tight because your
return gift, deep down it's decorative bag, is not tickets to Rome
just in time for the spring Festival of Artichokes and Vibrant Good
Health, but a homemade sno-globe. Your son, 5, glued octopusses inside a jam jar and you filled it with blue water and glitter, and, God Almighty, it seemed right at the time.

Who are you seeing?

2010-11-11T08:32:00.000-08:00

I'm seeing a chiropractor. I'm seeing an Alexander technique teacher.
I'm seeing a rock star. No, I am seeing an orthopedic surgeon: same
thing. Of course I am reading Dr. John Sarno, guru to the stars' back
pain.

This pain I have, what is it? Depends on who you ask. A herniation in the cervical spine. Spinal degeneration. Incorrect thinking, a childhood
accident, the obesity epidemic, that I sit keyboarding too much, that I
don't eat enough greens. That I have negative energy and engage in unhelpful self-talk.

What I want is to be without pain. But it's not simple, for
first I must identify with a school of thought, a philosophy, a world
view of disease and healing be it traditional or alternative or
crystal angel therapy (there is such a thing and it has zealots). Like
religion, medicine has sects, and cults. No one buys what the
others are selling. My neurologist laughed at yoga! My chiropractor
said, cortisone injections are hooey! My surgeons say, schedule
surgery already. Dr. Sarno's New York appointments are thousands of
dollars my HMO says oh, hell no. It's mud pit wrestling.

I am an interfaith and an interdenominational medical pragmatist, please don't judge me, as I wear the veil and eat pork, keep the Sabbath, but mindfully, while sipping anti-inflammatory tea, I just want to get well.

Le Brain to Le Page

2010-11-06T16:42:00.000-07:00

This is my first voice-dictated blog. I didn't think it would be so
hard to write sin manos. But it is hard, infuriating, even.

It would seem that cutting out the middleman, the hands, would
streamline the work, enabling a direct conversation: Le Brain to Le
Page. Trala! Viola! But no. My brain-to-page conversational ability
is that of a clingy three-year-old who has been unceremoniously dropped into a new daycare.
Sayonara Mom. Adieu middleman. There will be tears.

For I miss my middleman, I should say middleladies, plural, for there are ten of them. For 38 years writing has been a handcraft, writing implement to paper, phalanges all articulated, hunched over, something akin to knitting.

Voice recognition feels like it removes me from the process. Look at me, I'm standing up writing! Walking around! Making a sandwich! I feel I'm Sci-Fi and should be wearing a tight silver space suit. I feel like a denim overalls-wearing farmgirl in space, and unable to find the words to describe how far away is Kansas.

The Holiday Letter Or, Little White Lies

2010-11-06T16:41:00.000-07:00

My policy is extremely strict truthfulness. Until October. Then it is
open season, goose season, a.k.a. The Holidays, the most wonderful time of the year...for cookies, yes, and for the little white lies, vague details, and baldfaced subterfuge that are designed to bring more comfort and joy to the world.

Will my holiday letter detail a year's worth inconsequences, disturbing medical unknowns, and parental prat falls? No! My letter, embossed on thick card stock that I can't afford (tell no one) will outline a year of success: personal and professional and, most important, parental. I am afterall a SAHM.

Therefore I must showcase that I have balanced the household budget, kept the bathrooms spotless, taken well-lighted video of important occasions, scrap-booked, every birthday-remembered, provided the necessary stimulation via age-appropriate crafts and games for my children, while in heels effortlessly sauteeing gourmet vegetables and squiring the van from practice to playgroup with a smile.

I will not tell the truth which is I wrote this holiday letter from the floor of the
crafts closet where I was for a week, covered in Martha Stewart knockoff glitter. It was best week of my life.

NaNoWriMo Pep Talk

2010-11-04T09:12:00.000-07:00

It's National Novel Writing Month. "So what's that like?" Friends and family asked last year, when I did it. Like a marathon of knitting is how I think of it, except with no thread, no needles.

Writing is handicraft. It should be offered on Etsy. Whether longhand on parchment with a goose feather quill, or keyboarding, you are crocheting my friends. Purling with verbs. Looming. Tapestry-making like ladies in waiting who sat around the castle needlepointing and gossiping their way to making the Unicorn Tapestries. They had an endpoint in mind, of course: unicorn, walled garden, pot-bellied, serious-faced naked virgin. But along the way they were heads-down, needles-raised.

Were they alone? No. Well, sometimes. Like if they had some extra knitting to do on a hoof or pot-belly or something.

So my advice? Heed the looming Renaissance ladies in waiting and the stich-n-bitches, WriMoers, and go to the write-ins. Share the mirth of anemic word counts, place your laptops intimately back to back, weave together the threads of your writing lives. Few people do this and we need each other. Who else understands the strange call of 4 a.m. to resolve a love triangle between Mavis and Ebeneezer or to cast the jewel of Entemann's into the firey pit of Melchior?

Soup, It's What's For Happy

2010-10-07T05:55:00.001-07:00

The sounds my husband makes when he eats my soup (absolutely no euphemism) are contented sounds. Slurping. Belly-patting. Feet-kicking like a happy infant's.

Don't bother comforting anyone with apples. The way to comfort is with broth. Why is this so? Soup is the anti-information highway, speedster, sous-vide, molecular gastronomy. It's made in one pot, for God's sake, with ingredients even a toddler can identify: onions, garlic, chickens. Or bread and tomato. You do not need a kitchen torch or a kitchen scale. What you need is willingness to have the whole place smell like chicken schmaltz, meaning terrific, and that takes time. The flavors must build slowly, brick by brick a great pyramid of flavor. Can't believe I said that. Worse: I'm earnest.

Cheesy as it is, (and cheese certainly has its place in soups, I'm talking minestrone here and French onion) soup is a time-gift. What is more precious than time? Okay, saffron, the saffron you put in bouillabaisse.
The point is, what are you ladles waiting for? Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, the time to make Mediterranean seafood soup is now.

Pair of Leopard Geckos, We're Through

2010-10-05T10:03:00.000-07:00

We didn't expect that you would change your evolutionary adaptation of nocturnality, as you have been nocturnal in the Afghan desert for thousands of years, but we hoped at least you'd watch sitcoms with us, sitting at our feet as our neighbor's dog does, and letting us pet you, thereby lowering our blood pressure.

Of course, you are not a dog, you are a reptile, or an amphibian, the book from the library wasn't altogether clear. Still, we expected a blink of recognition, some kind of cameraderie as we we share the same planet at this space/time, but you never once registered that it was I, and again I the following week, who changed the water in your bowl.

Being with you is like being in a nature show you don't want to be in. You eat only live crickets. And, if you attacked one and jawed off only it's forelimb or it's head, who would be the one to scoop the remains from the sand? Again, I. With a spoon.

Geckos, we're through. O, do not cry (as if you could) I...I! have found a new home and new names for you. From now on you will be called Olivia and Rufus for you are Kindergarten Classroom Pets. I hope you know that at last you have made me very happy. My blood pressure is returned to low.

Medical Conditions That Are Also Great Speed Metal Band Names

2010-10-04T11:59:00.000-07:00

Arteriosclerotic

This Is Spinal Stenosis (Lars Uldisc fronting)

Magnetic Resonance Imagining (aka "M period R period I period" or more simply, "The Tube")

Degenerative Disc Disease (known to their fans as "Triple D")

Herniation

Osteoarthritic Metatarsal

Deviated Septum

The Obesity Epidemic

The Thwarted Romance Writer's Guide To The Best Haircuts for Your Face Shape

2010-09-28T09:39:00.000-07:00

Round: A bowl-cut will frame your round face. If you do not like your bowl-cut, the bowl will additionally serve as a device to catch the many tears you will shed over your haircut and onto your creamy heaving porcelain bosom.

Diamond: You must be the only person in the world with a diamond face. I'm sorry I can't help you. I couldn't help Valentina, either, when she and Jerome had that misunderstanding that led to her being in the dark woods, in a red satin cloak that did nothing to hide her generous curves.

Ovoid: Better than a getting a haircut, you should lounge upon a divan, your loose raven tresses cascading over the brocade until it is time to pick up the kids from school.

Square: I am this, apparently, or at least my manuscript was, according to my agent. But I implore you, is the title, "Conquest and Triumph" so done?

Peanut Butter and Jelly As Interviewed By Esquire Magazine

2010-09-21T06:52:00.000-07:00

The jar sits there. In the cupboard. What matters is not the jar but what's inside it. Peanut butter. The ground nut butter is the color of a light wool Italian tailored suit in fawn. The jelly, on the countertop like a starlet, it's blackberryness all backlit and seductive, acts like it doesn't know the peanut butter, as if they don't have some history.

Like Elizabeth Taylor playing Cleopatra and Richard Burton playing Anthony in Anthony and Cleopatra, they have often been slathered together between sheets of white bread with the crusts cut off. Like that. Like slathering. Thick, too. Maybe one of them wore driving shoes. Tod's. Or Tom Ford's jawline. Historic.

Epic. Secrets. What we're talking about is kid's lunchbox food. But more than that. We're talking about culture, the culture of the business class. Enterprise. Gumption. Zing. Ground nut and rich berry. Uptown girl. It's American not American't, it's slather two good things together and say, son, this was the public school lunch of your daddy, but your daddy made it and wears no-pleat gabardine in cerise, golfs St. Andrews with a Gucci caddy, this, was his sandwich. Remember, when you're a man, a man leaves the crusts on.

The Name Cerise is Way Better Than Cherry

2010-09-16T07:11:00.000-07:00

Several years ago I was in the position of picking out colors for the closet in our apartment in Cambridge that we were calling "our nursery." My son, now 5, was about to be born. It was at the Home Depot that I started thinking: with a good color name (Midnight Meadow) you can get away with anything, even a terrible color (Midnight Meadow is a wasting grey blue, it would have been more aptly named Death).

The opposite is also true. For instance, Nacho. Nacho is the color I chose for the closet, "our nursery." It was a heartwarming yellow, but when friends and family asked "What color is that?" and I said, beaming, "why I'm tickled you asked, it's Nacho!" they were like, ewww, who would put their firstborn in a nacho colored closet? Couldn't the geniuses at Behr have named it Sunnyside Of The Street?

Color, like everything, is marketing. Vermillion is superior to plain Jane red, chartreuse to spring green, even a child knows this. When my children are bellydown, crayoning furiously in their coloring books, they try to outdo the Crayola marketing department and each other. "Pass me Poop," my daughter, 3, says, asking for brown. "It's not Poop, it's Diarrhea, get it right," says my son, who has superior knowledge of these bathroom matters. "Or maybe it's Throw Up."

I tell him his first experiences with Nacho. "I like Nachos, good job, Mom," he says, "but a better name is Puked Egg Yolk." If you're five, maybe. I much prefer Sunnyside of The Street.

The Names in Suburbia

2010-09-14T07:03:00.001-07:00

Nearby there is a place called The Festival at Woodholme. Is there a festival there? No. No May pole. No flutes and drums. There is a Pier One, the cinnamon spice scent of its candles wafting out into the blistering treeless parking lot. There is also a Starbucks, but of course there’s a Starbucks, and a wrap place, and a place to purchase a phone.

These suburban shopping developments are so ill named! Festival at Woodholme. Sweet View of the Mountain Glen. That mountain glen is a Denny’s; who names these places? I’m herewith providing some real names, more honest names, better reflective of the true condition and psychology of these places.

Man-Made Hill
You Never See Anyone Playing On That Grass, Not Even Kids
Ringing A Parking Lot, Lots of Shrubs In Pots
The Gigantic Oversized Muffin at Lost Hope
Sulfurous Ditch
Exacerbates My Pre-Existing Condition

ALGERNON

2010-09-09T17:27:00.000-07:00

(For this post the delightful @salamicat aka Molly Campbell http://tiny.cc/mollyc took up the writer's challenge with the prompt words: "Algernon" and "Bejeweled" to write this story of puppy love. Anyone who has ever known a dog knows the joy of listening to Mozart together.)

She saw him out of the corner of her eye, trotting down the street. He ducked behind a building. Over the next few days, she saw him a number of times. He was gray, or maybe just filthy. He seemed to have a slight limp. His ears were floppy. He was very, very thin.

She started carrying dog biscuits in her purse. At first, she had to throw them to him so that he wouldn’t flee. But after awhile, she could hold one in her hand, and he would approach skittishly, and take it from her. By this time, she had named him “Algernon,” and she was in love. It took a few weeks, but she could finally pet him.

In the meantime, she had been saving her money, and bit by bit, she bought some dog food, a little bed, a toy or two, and most importantly, a collar and leash. Algernon seemed to trust her, and each day, as she spoke softly to him, she petted him a bit longer. On a Friday, she put on the collar and leash, and she took him with her.

The vet told her that he was around two years old. He guessed that there was maybe some poodle and perhaps a bit of terrier in Algernon. He gave the dog shots, worming medicine, and a bath. As it turned out, Algernon was as white as snow.

She and Algernon became bosom buddies. They watched the neighborhood children play ball. They took lots of walks. Algernon seemed to enjoy donuts, and so they shared one every Friday, to celebrate the day they met. At home, they liked to read books, listen to Mozart, and look out the window.

Time went by, as it has the habit of doing, and Algernon slowed down a bit. He still liked to chase the occasional ball, but grew a bit stiff in the back end. She sometimes had to assist him up the steps. But he still sashayed with style, and she still thought he was the most beautiful dog in the world.

The day came as it always does. They had told her that Algernon would let her know when it was time to let go, and with one look into her eyes, he did. He went quietly and with his usual dignity, as she held him in her arms. She cried.

On her bureau is a framed picture of the dirty gray dog she befriended in the street. In it, he looks warily at the camera, the dog biscuit she has thrown at him at his feet. But there is a gleam in his eyes. Hanging over the corner of the frame is a blue leather dog collar. Embedded in the collar are the five remaining “jewels” that were on the collar when she bought it for him, that day that she decided she would take him home.

Fairy Tales For Grandparents

2010-08-03T07:02:00.000-07:00

Goldilocks and The Three Bears

Once there was a girl named Goldilocks who -- it doesn't really matter, because she would go to Harvard and become a cardiologist and everyone would be so proud.

The Three Little Pigs

Don't you know it? Every single one of those three little pigs became successful.

The Little Mermaid

So what about the prince. He wasn't good enough for her. Tell those tattlers, that Maude and that Denise to stick to pinochle and stop spreading lies. Like they should talk! Between them they have 16 grandchildren and not a one of them a tenured professor.

Hansel and Gretel

Hansel and Gretel visit all the time, and when they can't visit they call.

That Critical Eye

2010-07-22T09:31:00.000-07:00

I don't consider myself a writer. I'm a critic, meaning I do not make things, I make comments and pass judgments on the things that others have worked hard to make such as brownies and novels. What right do I have to disparagingly describe a brownie as "chalky" or to say that a novel had too early a denouement - I have no right at all! I'm completely unqualified! Ain't this the tops?

No. And it ain't a bowl of cherries either. This is perhaps why I am critical: I want a big bowl of cherries. I want to leap around in it. And a toothsome, moist brownie that is reasonably priced, and a novel that captures me even unto the epilogue. I'm always looking for them. Sometimes I find them and then isn't life grand for that hour!

It's human nature, I think, to be critical, or we'd have no need for movie reviews, or to use a fine toothed comb to comb the "about me" sections of online dating services. Every guy would be as good as every other guy, every movie a series of car crashes that would be indistinguishable from every other car crash made in the long history of car crashes and flaming motorcycle pileups.

We want the best damn flaming motorcycle pileup. The job of the critic is to watch all of them and determine the best one, read a lot of novels so you don't have to, so you can just sit back, and eat the most delicious brownie.

Hip Pouch: The New Old Fanny Pack

2010-07-20T09:18:00.000-07:00

Recently I received the diagnosis of cervical arthritis (that's arthritis of the neck spine, people). The doctor raised his eyebrow at my gigantic backpack: "By the way," he said, "that's is not helping you. I said, "You are referring to Gargantua?"

How to carry my writerly implements? My Moleskine journal and fancy pens, books and magazines, changes of clothes for the kids, swim trunks in case of water or sprinkler park, and the environmentally conscious yet very heavy aluminum water bottles for continuous hydration? Not to mention the laptop.

The doctor said, "How about a fanny pack?" Then, noticing my face was now on the waxed and disinfected floor, he leveled the karate chop to chic, "They're available at Leather World in fashion colors, and in leather."

Leather World: a place when I was young I swore I would grow up never to be, and in front of a mirror assessing the damage to my figure of a large red fanny pack. The young European salesgirl had first pointed me to the fancy handbags, when I said, "No, no handbags. Encircling purses, please."
"What?" she said.
"Encircling purses, please?"
"You mean fanny pack?"
"Can we just agree to call them encircling purses, please? Or how about hip pouches?"
"Are you traveling abroad?" She asked.
"No," I said. But she seemed to need an explanation. "Cervical arthritis," I said.
She looked at me. "My neck," I said.

We exchanged blinks, and in them fleeting recognition: that one day she would be older, possibly with neck stiffness and that once I was once young and had a neck that swiveled smoothly as an office chair. That was nice. In a moment it was over. "Well, we in fact do have an array of hip pouches," she said.