AGAINST IDLENESS

Warmer

2012-02-05T12:08:00.000-08:00

It snowed last night, and again today, and the geese, who'd flown north already, turned around and went back again. I heard them on my walk this morning, sounding all sad and agitated on their way. I am on my way, too, going to Richmond tomorrow. It'll be just a little warmer and just a little less lonely, I hear.

Nightmare Walk/Bagel Run

2012-02-03T19:05:00.000-08:00

Well it's not exactly where credit is due, but

it's been another month without a nightmare walk.

I am not sure what to tell you about all of that, except this morning I accidentally retraced my steps (on a bagel run) and nothing really happened.

That has got to count for something.

For Mrs. F.O. Stanley, Again

2012-02-02T05:29:00.000-08:00

Today will be a mud-boots day. Please recall:

"I said in my heart, 'I am sick of four walls

and a ceiling.

I have need of the sky.

I have business with the grass.

I will up and get me away where the hawk

is wheeling,
Lone and high,

And the slow clouds go by."

-From Spring by Richard Hovey, 1907

That's all.

Soon II

2012-02-01T07:46:00.000-08:00

I am craving bricks and sun and Southern cities.

#56: The Secret of the Haunted Silo

2012-01-31T13:03:00.000-08:00

Grandma used to tell us there were hobos living in the abandoned barn to try and scare us out of going. Then again, maybe she believed it herself. Hard telling. Either way, we went inside, and I knocked my head on that silo door almost every time. It's so eerie in here. And then we'd just be quiet, and listen to the whining, whistling wind.

Dressing Up

2012-01-30T05:55:00.000-08:00

All fall it was stripes and sweaters. And that's fine and normal good, but now in the mild muddy winter, with nowhere to go, I finally feel like dressing up.

Houseplants

2012-01-29T10:12:00.000-08:00

Here it is, not even February, not even the made-up holiday that is supposed to sweep us off our feet in a flurry of candy hearts and roses, not even that month that roars, and it is "almost spring". It is "almost spring" and we are not sure if that is a good thing or not, but we can carry our succulents to the car without three layers of plastic, and by the time our amaryllis blooms, it will be an announcement of something, not a reminder. We are okay with that. Our little fig tree, planted last summer and hoping to make it through the season unscathed, is certainly okay with that.

In the conservatories (because we visit them often), we keep winding up in the desert room. They keep them a few degrees cooler than the rest, which are full of orchid blooms this time of year, and generally humid and tropical. They are restorative places. The desert rooms, though, are otherworldly. Maybe that's why we keep buying succulents. It feels like a place for winter, in its own way. It wouldn't feel right to visit the desert room, all cool and strange, in springtime. It's a snow-escape. I suppose the tropical rooms are, too, but their pink and orange blooms suit the warm months just fine. It's winter in the desert room, full of blue and brown and yellow. It's a different winter.

We really haven't made up our minds about the whole thing. There are seed catalogs scattered across the ottoman in the living room. There are trays of soil in the basement under lights, too. We can't plan and wait too long. Spring will be here before we know it. And here it is, still houseplant season. We were just re-potting spoon jade last month. But we know it when we feel it-- it's almost spring.

Mild Winter

2012-01-24T19:19:00.000-08:00

January is almost over, which isn't disappointing or special or anything, really. It was just warm this year, like it was warm this December, which was in Michigan. It felt like melted snow and the day after Christmas, and it was a little strange and a little sad.

Ambush

2012-01-17T14:32:00.000-08:00

I had my very first surprise party yesterday. It was a week early. One of the guests (there were only five) was a stranger not four hours before. I was tired from a long day of looking at art. I cooked my own birthday dinner and I baked my own birthday cake. Still, I do think it was a welcome ambush, when my guests arrived, and I got to shout "Surprise! I'm having my birthday party!"

You are Made of Bronze

2012-01-12T03:50:00.000-08:00

Buck up.

Hiding Spots

2012-01-09T08:24:00.000-08:00

Will I never learn?

These pictures in bamboo groves spit out badly-lit camouflage every time.

Untangling

2012-01-07T08:56:00.000-08:00

Don't worry. I am just right behind you, untangling myself from these pricker-bushes.

Girl Your Future's So Bright You Absorb All Amient Light

2012-01-03T14:33:00.000-08:00

Oh haaay 2012.

December Messes

2011-12-08T16:00:00.001-08:00

My house is full of December messes, Christmas messes, and all those tiny lights made it a little disorienting for a while. I needed, and probably still need, the cold and familiar quiet of January. But I am either in the eye of the storm or the center of the spinning-wheel now, whatever way you want to see it. Or maybe I am neither, and I have come out clear to other side of a frightening wood. Maybe none of those metaphors are quite right at all. It's okay, though. I'm sure you'll muddle through. That's the point.

Soon

2011-11-15T21:00:00.000-08:00

I suppose winter is gonna come all at once, trailing red ribbons and covering all this warm and quiet fall. For once, I wouldn't mind waiting for the snow.

Home Life

2011-11-09T19:34:00.000-08:00

Oh, boy. I hope you know what I mean when I say that I have been trying real hard to be a normal person. And not the kind where you say "Well, nobody is normal...". I mean I know that. I mean that isn't what I'm talking about.

I just keep finding myself in river valleys, howling like a dog and no better off than before I came. I am not sure I will ever learn to stop throwing these fits; it does not get better. Then again, there is already so much wrist-slapping. So much talk about when I am "better".

It has occurred to me, and keeps occurring to me, when I am crumpled on some new surface, that I am in many ways predisposed to fits of all sorts. This time-out that I have been given to punish bad behavior may not be effective in the end. Or then again it might me. It may be too soon to tell. It has been years, though, of putting me back here when things get difficult, and waiting for "progress".

I have been trying real hard. I hope you know what I mean when I say that.

Instinct

2011-11-01T18:08:00.000-07:00

I remembered to look both ways before I crossed the street, which is important, because all I could think about by the side of road was that time when Grandma Lu came in carrying a green pepper and wiping tears from her face and told me, matter-of-factly, that Cookie was dead. It's important because I had never seen her cry before, or even fathomed my grandmother crying, and because I knew before she said a word.

Tricks

2011-10-29T16:56:00.000-07:00

Story of my life.

Viable Alternatives II

2011-10-25T09:57:00.000-07:00

Suddenly all I want is to be riding trains, as though that speed and percussion is the only thing that could possibly calm the nervous compulsions.

Instead I have been walking to the bagel shop.

Homecoming

2011-10-21T11:16:00.000-07:00

Well here's the thing: I am just going to keep going back to the same places until you make me stop. Or I make me stop.

I am going nowhere so slowly. They are always on the way. There is always time.

I am going to sit on the same jungle-y porches and rusty chairs and cold concrete stoops until enough is enough, and even then.

Love Is a Lonely Death Island

2011-10-20T17:22:00.000-07:00

Alone on Death Island

Well, it's been a good day to sit in bed and eat a whole box of Parmesan sourdough twists.

Slim Pickings

2011-10-06T07:30:00.000-07:00

Whoops. Now it's fall. I did not even can any tomatoes. Next year, I guess. Gather up what's left and settle in.

It's for bloggin', too. (Shout out if you're still reading this.)

Priorities

2011-08-23T16:43:00.000-07:00

I heard there was an earthquake here today.

Didn't bother me too much.

Outing

2011-05-06T17:31:00.000-07:00

Zinzi came to the park for a picnic with us today.

We saw some blackbirds fighting in the grass, and Zinzi was awfully frightened.

There were other bird-related mishaps on the picnic.

We still managed to have a nice time.

Sunshine

2011-05-01T07:55:00.000-07:00

Now it's May.

If you aren't excited,

I don't blame you.

But just think, it could be April.

And the soil could stay soggy for another month,

And do I even have to say it? I'll whisper: worms.

They're headed back into the ground now, don't worry.

Happy May Day!

Bogged-Down

2011-04-28T08:53:00.000-07:00

What can I say?

I've been swamped.

Palm Sunday

2011-04-17T11:35:00.000-07:00

Against Idleness is pleased to announced that they are not outside scrubbing and staining a deck today, like they are supposed to be. Instead, they are seriously thinking about dying some Easter eggs. Seriously.

Happy Holy Week!

Maundy Thursday

2011-04-16T17:36:00.000-07:00

I'm going to Cleveland again on Thursday, and even though I haven't exactly been stopping by regularly, maybe you have?

I just thought I'd mention it. Also: how I'm totally not going to the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame no matter how much my mother begs and pleads. The CMA is lovely and free and has a ton of Gauguin, amen.

SURPRISE

2011-04-10T16:47:00.001-07:00

Maybe you've noticed that I don't feel as compelled to write extensive, personal posts here. Maybe it's twitter (probably not). Maybe I've been looking at too many photo-blogs. Maybe I'm just uninspired. I stopped making ladybugs, you know.

I guess I never mentioned those.

Pictured: Brookside Gardens in Wheaton, Maryland

Think Pink (And the World Is Rosey-Red)

2011-04-09T18:29:00.000-07:00

Sure enough, things are turning pink here. It's a big relief. Moreso than green, I think, because people around here will water their lawns all summer to keep them dark and soft. But pink just flares all at once like flush across cheeks. It is the most flattering color. I suppose I don't mind Maryland this time of year.

Springtime

2011-04-07T08:13:00.000-07:00

It sure seems like you should be outside.

Pictured, as cowpokes (L to R): Aunt Linda, Dad, and Aunt Maria

Self Improvement

2011-04-04T17:36:00.000-07:00

I stood in line for a whole hour at a Lowe's Home Improvement center just waiting for them to mix up my deck stain, and that machine just shook and it shook and it shook up other people's paints and stains, and they took them away. I stood in line for a whole hour wearing turquoise tights and tapping my foot and listing to that machine shake, and tapping my foot in time with that paint-mixing machine, walking tight circles around the cart which did not ever seem to inch forward. Not even a little.I also read a book about raising chickens in your very own backyard.

Life and Times

2011-04-02T09:30:00.001-07:00

Well. Today I'm going to tell you about my hair. It used to look like this:

It sure doesn't anymore. I guess I got it into my head that I wanted it to look like this:

It sure doesn't.

Images: (Of myself) Taken by Erin D. (Of Iselin Steiro and Malgosia Bela) Taken by David Sims

Not Yet

2011-04-01T20:19:00.000-07:00

Now it's April. I don't really like April Fool's, and Poisson d' Avril is the same thing, but it makes even less sense, so I'm skipping right to Easter. It's not so far away. Not as far as Christmas. Boy, I sure do wish it was Christmas.

Pictured: My sister, Kylie, circa 1990

Drop Out

2011-03-26T20:31:00.000-07:00

The more time I spend with my mother, the more convinced I become that I am "unconventional" (as she calls it), and that I may never get a college degree, or have any kind of intellectual work ethic. The more time I spend with my sister, sifting through piles of her undergraduate research papers, the more I resent that.

Lately

2011-03-23T19:12:00.000-07:00

I've been real busy trompin' around outside and looking at plants and doing spring things.

Variety

2011-03-11T09:10:00.000-08:00

You know, I am not really sure what you would eat in Ohio if you didn't like sandwiches.

Pie, maybe.

Pictured: Salem, Ohio

Typical Northern Cities

2011-03-07T21:36:00.000-08:00

You know, Cleveland was so much prettier and filled with so many more domes than you'd imagine.

My sister, Kylie, outside the the Cleveland Museum of Art

Dear College Chums

2011-03-06T10:01:00.000-08:00

Trying to have friends is rough.

Maybe it's the season. (Probably not, though.)

Image from HERE

Not PA

2011-03-05T19:27:00.001-08:00

I'm back from a week in Ohio.

I'm scraping the mud off my boots.

In Like a Lion

2011-02-23T20:17:00.000-08:00

Things have been a little disorienting lately.

I think it's the season.

Found Photograph (Scanned)

T.M.T.S.

2011-02-22T15:24:00.000-08:00

I'm going to Ohio this Saturday!

The last time I visited it was summertime, and all my sister and I did was picnic and take long walks along the wayside, and make mimosas and bread pudding. Come to think of it, it was just about the Fourth of July.

I'm trying to adjust my expectations, because it's February, and school's in session, but things were just so lazy and dreamy last time that it's hard to imagine it being anything but.

Nature

2011-02-21T10:20:00.000-08:00

Self-explanatory

My parents went to Florida without me, which I hardly mind, because I'd probably just end up sitting in the hotel watching premium television channels we don't get at home and joining my parents for dinner. The beach in Florida is full of old men with metal detectors, and the restaurants all serve gimmicky seafood (the grouper is a made-up fish), and it's really not so terrible, it's just not my kind of place, and I'd hate to tag along and spoil things for my mother, who plans to rise at dawn and rent a cabana and wear her brand new bathing suit from Lord and Taylor. I hear it's going to be great.

I used to think Florida was great, too. Sanibel Island is pretty okay, I guess, when you're three and when you're five. But perhaps the drawings I've chosen to scan are misleading. Mostly I was enchanted with things like our condominium, and the Wal-Mart (we never shopped there! It was exotic!), and the best part of any vacation, the airport. These are nice pictures, though, and they have perhaps more...enduring appeal. At any rate, I hope you like them. They remind me of the good parts, before I became a cynical twelve-year-old (well, you know, it happens) quietly mocking the sponge-sellers at Tarpon Springs. As much as I believe that there's no accounting for taste, I suppose that there's sometimes no real excuse for having an awful time.

Pictured: Presumably a boardwalk over marshlands

I copied this from my sister because it was SO MAJESTIC. I do not believe in copying, but I was only three so I think we can all just cut me a little bit of a break, right?

Change of Address

2011-02-20T12:43:00.000-08:00

I hope you didn't get lost on your way over here.

I'm still settling in, but hopefully things will be back to normal soon. I can really only apologize, and hope that you found me over here, and say that I got kind of spooked about the wrong people finding my blog, or getting mad at me for having it, and so I packed up and left in a hurry. I realize I left a link, which might seem kind of counter-intuitive, but it had more to do with erasing my tracks on google (ugh cached links freak me out, but that's another story...) than anything else. Mostly, it was paranoia. I'm trying to convince myself it was unwarranted, because I'd like to keep this blog, and keep existing online, but like it usually is when it comes, it's hard for me to accept (although on many levels I understand) that nobody hates me/is coming after me.

At any rate, I'm here now, and if you're reading this post there's no real damage done. The archives are intact (and in case I get too anxious, they're saved to my hard drive). I'm sorry I made such a big show about running off like that. What I'm trying to say is, it was good of you to come.

Catkins

2011-02-17T20:44:00.000-08:00

I was out in the yard today, and out in the park, looking for green things and sinking my boots into snow-melt mud. At the very edge of our lawn there's a contorted pussy-willow with catkins just starting to pop out, and I stood for a minute and thought about snapping off a branch of that fuzzy February sigh of relief to put in a vase like I have for last few years, in Galesburg. For whatever reason, it does not seem so urgent here.

The Clean Plate Club

2011-02-14T22:26:00.000-08:00

It was sixty degrees today, and I made footprint hearts in the melting snow and two friends drove up from the District just to take me out for dessert. We talked about the future, and how it isn't right now.

Public Displays of Affection

2011-02-13T23:00:00.000-08:00

Happy Valentine's Day from Against Idleness.

Dating Advice

2011-02-12T21:27:00.000-08:00

With Valentine's Day fast approaching, surely you are thinking a lot about your relationships (or lack thereof). It can be a stressful time. Don't worry, though. In honor of the holiday, I've got some dating advice, circa 2001/2002, to help you out-- it's the least I can do.

Well, you didn't think I was going to give away names, did you? That would make me a BAD FRIEND.

Pity

2011-02-04T14:38:00.000-08:00

I guess it's too cold for the hoodlums.

Project

2011-02-02T21:25:00.000-08:00

I'm real busy making something. Come back later.

Photograph: My sister and father c. 1990

I Think Your Great Big City's Very Pretty, Nevertheless--

2011-01-31T21:00:00.000-08:00

It's the snow again. My mother said some parts of The Enchanted Forest haven't had power for two days, and I can't help feeling jealous. Oh, that's not right. I can help it. I can help it if I bake a lopsided lemon tart and eat it with a cup of tea and some homemade raspberry jam. By now, you ought to know how I feel about homemade raspberry jam. My mother also told me that up in Michigan, where Patty C. pouts because she never gets a proper antique oil-lamp power-outage (what with all the back-up generators), they're expecting another storm. All that snow is hardly news, but I'm green-eyed and restless upon hearing that Grandma Patty is digging out some cross-country skis to do a little old-fashioned trespassing.

Oh, it's just like the song. I want to go back to Michigan.

The Trustees Are Watching

2011-01-30T22:30:00.000-08:00

"[Katharine Anne] Porter's irony is sometimes simply verbal and at other times tragic and cosmic."

-Darlene Harbour Unrue

Piety

2011-01-29T21:00:00.000-08:00

At that Christmas service in December,

I talked you into driving down

so I could sit for awhile

and not feel bad about feeling small.

All photographs taken by my mother

Departures

2011-01-28T21:25:00.000-08:00

You were probably wondering what I did at the Southwest Airlines terminal during my six-hour layover in Chicago. I read a few magazines. I ate a salad. I worked on some letters. Mostly, though, I sat at a tiny table with red vinyl toadstools planted around it in the "Kid's Corner" and watched Pink Panther episode after Pink Panther episode. It was a departure, I think, from the frenzy and noise and three screens' worth of CNN in the rest of the terminal.

Insulation

2011-01-28T18:52:00.000-08:00

I shivered in Galesburg for a week, and I shivered so much that on the my last day, Wednesday, I stepped out of a leaky shower and got to dripping and shaking so hard that I convinced myself that I was frozen in place. I suppose I feel that way about a lot of things, like making phone calls and sending emails, and a January vacation to Western Illinois had little in the way of coaxing to do in order for those tendencies to surface. After seven days of poor insulation, I was certain I had to stay.

I did. I made some kind of scene to my mother over the phone, and I stayed in bed and cried, and I shook and I shivered and it was all too dramatic for my liking, really. Then again, it was just about dramatic enough. The Farmer's Almanac had only two words to describe the dates of my visit: "bitter cold". I stayed a day more and tried to thaw a little.

In the Mid-Atlantic, there are heaps of snow outside. The air is dry and quiet, which winter ought to be. Indoors, though, the heat is trapped behind thick glass and humidifiers whir upstairs and down, and there are overflowing bowls of citrus and kiwi on the kitchen counter. I took a long bath, and then wrapped myself up in a thin cotton robe and walked around the house collecting my plants, returning them from their vacation sills to the Little Room's window. My miniature rose is in full bloom now, and with any luck it'll last here until spring.

Lap Dog

2011-01-14T18:00:00.000-08:00

One of these days,

I am gonna sniff you out.

I know you're in there.

For now, though,

I am gonna go back home,

because I haven't decided what I'm gonna do with you yet.

Calendar

2011-01-13T21:57:00.000-08:00

I like my week where I can keep an eye on it. When the days just start slipping by, even toward something I've been desperately looking forward to, I just get this feeling like I'm going to wake up tomorrow and all the snow will be gone and it was barely even here to begin with, and something really important-- like an orchid bloom or my only friend being in town-- is going to slip through my fingers. I'm afraid I'm going to wake up tomorrow and realize it's too late to wear winter-white, or tweed, or I needed to submit another form. I'm afraid it's going to thaw.

If You Insist

2011-01-12T17:38:00.000-08:00

I guess I am not too surprised that the only time the Dean wants to meet with me to discuss my calamitous college career is the morning after my twenty-first birthday, when I have breezed into town to visit friends.

Transplants

2011-01-08T21:25:00.000-08:00

My mother and I went out today, and we each bought ourselves a little plant. She, an African Violet, and I, a white potted rose. I paid for them, and had them wrapped up tightly in plastic while she ran out to get the car heated up and pulled around. They are such sensitive creatures.

At home, we pulled the bags and the tacky plastic wrappings off them and set about finding them little pots. It was to the basement, to my mother's makeshift potting bench: a long, laminate bookshelf filled with vases and vessels and topped with sprouts and seedlings all tangled up together. It is the best sort of mess.

There with the starts of heirloom plants all jumbled in purgatory,waiting for bigger pots, I felt such overwhelming sadness. The jade plants have all caught some awful disease, and at the very same moment, drooped and shriveled in their separate pots. They are all relatives, of course, cut from the same ancient plant, and in the basement, on top of the potting bench they were all dying.

I found a blue ceramic pot and went upstairs to my little rose. After wiping its leaves dry,I carried it to where it sits in my bedroom window, alongside a bell-jar terrarium and the last healthy jade cutting, which has no pot. I am afraid that our old, happy jades do not like it here in Maryland. They grew for years in Illinois. But I know what it means for a place itself to make you ill. There is only one small branch left. For now, while it's just a baby, I am rooting it in a bud vase. Sooner or later, it is going to need some soil. Maybe then my thumb will turn very green, and it will take root.

Anniversary

2011-01-07T21:26:00.000-08:00

Five years ago, it has occurred to me, I moved to Maryland with my parents and spent a year homebound. What a long time ago that was. How funny, though, that I am in my room in Maryland again, or still-- I am not sure which I should call it-- and biding my time until I go back to Illinois. How nerve-wracking, too, because I know how these things go. Everyone will have changed just enough. Not nearly enough to spoil a visit, or anything like that. It will just be enough.

Photograph: Visit to Chicago, November 2006

Coincidence

2011-01-06T22:03:00.000-08:00

It JUST SO HAPPENS that I have this picture my friend Aly took of me at the Nordstrom Rack on State Street, trying on real ugly coats, looking sour, and it JUST SO HAPPENS that today I have been defeated by Nordstrom's, like I was defeated by Neiman Marcus "Off the Rack", like I was defeated by Saks "Off Fifth", like I was defeated by Lord and Taylor.

I just want a nice grey overcoat. I shouldn't have to blog about this.

About the Cats

2011-01-03T11:28:00.000-08:00

I won't be going to school for the next few months. You can be envious or sympathetic or whatever you'd like to be, but as for myself, I'm feeling sort of underwhelmed. Over lunch today my mother asked me what I planned on doing, aside from my trips. "Keeping to myself, mostly." I replied. "Maybe you should become an author, Krissy. You know, I was reading this book the other day about this woman whose dog died, and I just couldn't believe how sad I got over this imaginary dog. I mean, I know this dog isn't real, and the author just made it up, but I even started tearing up a little! I don't even like sentimental things! I don't know, maybe you could write a book about the cats." "Uh, good idea, Mom."

CHAPTER ONE

By the Great Moons of MeepZorp

I can tell you're not from around here. Me neither. Sometimes people have trouble placing my accent, or assume my hats are a dead giveaway for somewhere in Europe, but they can never quite get it right. I don't blame them. They probably don't run into many folks from Planet MeepZorp.

Planet MeepZorp was apparently part of some seventies sketch on "Saturday Night Live". I never saw it. Go figure, I wasn't even alive. Neither was Meeps, a high-strung seal-point Siamese who would eventually receive the official name of "MeepZorp" from my science-fiction fanboy father. Meeps was the first of the Carpenter kitty-cats, and she was the meanest. She was the sort of cat that people who don't like animals picture when they think about cats. Maybe it's just because I was small, and chased her under the bed, and prodded when I should have left well enough alone, but as far as I can recall, Meeps earned the bad name she was given ("Broccoli-Breath", to be specific). None of this would be very significant at all if it wasn't for one thing: Despite being the sort of cat it was impossible to like, I liked her anyway. That's the difference between you and I. It's like I'm from a totally different planet.

CHAPTER TWO

Z-Boy for President

If you really wanted to, I guess you could say Meeps taught me to love for the sake of loving. You could also say she taught me to just plain take abuse. Whatever you're going to call it, I couldn't get enough. Meeps was furry, she was alive, and if I managed to catch her I could drag her around the house-- for a little while, anyway. Far more satisfying to catnap and cuddle, though, was our gargantuan adopted alley cat, Z-boy. Like every little girl, I was a toddler and a menace, and Z-boy was not only built to withstand most every childhood pasttime imaginable-- roughhousing and dress-up and nap-time (with kitty as a cushion)-- he couldn't get enough of it. He loved nothing more than to roll in sidewalk chalk, purring.

The sidewalk chalk turned his fur all sorts of pastel pinks and purples; it convinced me that he was a magic cat. Z-boy turned lavender under the lilac bushes. Z-boy disappeared. We never worried, though, because Z-boy was a cat who came back. Reliably, he would be returned by a neighbor-boy who found the magic cat sunning himself on a next-door stoop. The point was, he was gone and he was home again to a happy reunion, every time. He was not a moral lesson. He was a funny story. He purred too loudly. In my elementary school mock-election I wrote in "Z-Boy" as my candidate, and when the ballots were read and nobody had heard of my house-cat or thought it was as hilarious as I did, I lied to my friends and my mother about the whole thing. On the record, I voted for Clinton in 1996.

CHAPTER THREE

Heavens to Mercatroid

I won't bore you with the details of cat-overlap, because on top of being impossibly dull, I frankly don't trust myself to recall correctly the details of various cat-funerals and their timing in relation to various cat-adoptions. Suffice it to say that at its worst, there were six cats altogether, including the bathtub kittens. Now, I'm getting quite a bit ahead of myself here, but I think it would be appropriate to utter, in the words of Snagglepuss: "Heavens to Mergatroyd!" That's kind of like exclaiming "Heavens to Betsy!", and since that's still a bit American and antiquated, that's sort of like just saying "Heavens!". Maybe that's what somebody was thinking when we brought home another Siamese and called him Mercatroid. Three is still a lot of cats.

CHAPTER FOUR

Sorta Kinda

You think I'm nuts? You should meet Kinda. And that's not kinda as in sorta, that's Kinda, as in "next of kin", and "like totally duh". This was, according to my eleven year old sister, the most fitting name for the majestic,beautiful, longhair tabby we'd adopted. We brought Kinda home one day from the South-Suburban Animal Shelter hoping she'd keep Mercatroid company better than old alley cat Z-boy, but it turns out Kinda was just a bundle of neuroses wrapped up in grey fluff. Kinda was soon given her own basement apartment. And, despite fairly spacious accommodations, Kinda opted to spend most days in a small plastic bin we'd cut a door in, pulling out her own fur. Appropriately, my elementary-school sister elevated Kinda to a sort of tragic heroine. In those days, there were a lot of colored-pencil drawings of regal long-haired cats on tufted cushions floating around. I could say something about Don Qixote, but it would be unfair, kinda.

CHAPTER FIVE

Xena, Warrior Princess

I know what you're thinking. We didn't really need another cat. Heavens, things sure hadn't worked out so well with the last one! The only thing you really have to understand is that Xena was a Siamese. What you also have to understand is that she was living off smashed berries in Great-Grandpa Daniels's raspberry patch. You just don't say no to a kitten like that, me-owing in the brambles. It's just too whimsical.

CHAPTER SIX

Her Imperial Majesty Michiko, The Empress of Japan

Now, it's going to start sounding like we just didn't say "No" to anything right around this part of the story. My parents didn't say no to me when I got too sick to go to school and begged for a kitten for company, and my mother and I couldn't say to no to the very first kitten we saw, sitting in a cage in the laundry room of some nonprofit shelter outside of Baltimore. It was an ugly little thing. And, more significantly, a fluffy little thing. Ever since Kinda, it had been a requirement of all cats under consideration that if they were not Siamese they should at least not be not be fluffy. I took home a tortoiseshell with a bottlebrush tail.

My father named her Michiko, which aside from being the name of the empress of Japan, means something like "daughter of a thousand beauties". I guess we thought it was kind of ironic. Michiko was hardly a pretty cat. She was tiny, though, and she was mine, and with nothing to fill my days I set out to raise her to be a darling, lovable lap-kitty. She was my project. She promptly pierced my nose.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Grey Gardens

I realize that after all of that, the kittens in the bathtub aren't really going to make us look too good, in terms of being rational, self-possessed people. So I named them Big Edie, Little Edie, and G.G., just to remind my mother what might happen to us if things kept going how they'd been going. The whole mess was her fault, see. She's the one that filled the bathtub with kittens. Wasn't I saying something about things being just too whimsical? Well, maybe we learned our lesson this fall when we raised a litter of foster-kittens in the basement bathroom because they were just so very darling and helpless. Although, if the past is any indication, I'm sure we didn't.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Vice-Admiral William Fitzwilliam Owen

The same day The Edies and little G.G. showed up, I found a tiger-striped, shoulder-riding, little tom-kitten kitten running around the screen porch. With all of the kitten-abundance, and cuteness cups-running-over, I decided that for a wide-eyed, big-eared, curious cat, only a very long, very serious, very official name would do. For the first time in my life, I was allowed to name the cat, a responsibility that generally fell to my father without question. Or, in the case of Kinda, one that somehow fell to my sister. You probably wouldn't understand how significant this was unless you grew up with a battered orange copy of Old Possum's Book of Curious Cats by T.S. Eliot (with Edward Gorey illustrations). I'll just say this: "The naming of cats is is difficult matter. It isn't just one of your holiday games. You may think at first I'm as mad as a hatter, when I tell you a cat must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES."

Stamina

2011-01-01T11:09:00.000-08:00

Oh, did you think I was finished with Christmas?

Let's not be hasty.

Maybe you've heard of the twelve days?

We've got four more to go, and

there are plenty of treats to go around.

Occasion

2010-12-31T17:21:00.000-08:00

My darling kittens! It will be 2011 soon! That means Against Idleness has been keeping busy for just over six months! Six months isn't very long depending on how you think about it, but any excuse for a party, right? And frankly, what timing! It's just the perfect time for getting festive. I guess that's really why I brought the whole thing up. I just wanted to say this: I think it's alright to get a little dressed up even if you don't have a real occasion, per se. I think it's alright to stretch a little. In fact, I think you ought to.

Tonight, I happen to be be staying home for New Year's. I don't really have anywhere to go. Not in Maryland, anyway. Nevertheless, I cooked up some Persian lamb stew and poured cheap pink "Champagne" for my parents, and got tipsy and sober again all before eight o'clock. I wore my grandmother's floor-grazing black dress that she sent me as a present this November: a notorious 1970s country-club standby that she "had a a lot of fun in". I affixed a large, sequined flower to my ballerina-bun and slipped on purple velvet pumps.

I hope that if you happen to read this before midnight you dash to your closet and put something sparkly on.For goodness' sake, what would Patty C. think about you sitting in front of the computer on New Year's Eve in your pajamas? Dust off your rhinestones. Eat something decadent. Drink something fizzy. As if you even needed a reason.

The Gospel

2010-12-30T16:29:00.000-08:00

There was a kind of accident in the registrar's office back in August, and I ended up taking a creative writing class this past semester. It was all fine, of course, and mostly just a chore (and a bore) dealing with the usual community college lineup, but there was this one instance of real hand-wringing on my part, and of course it was over a few poems, but it was also about fox-dens and baby bears and hibernation. I guess you could say it was about being cozy.

Coziness is about the only gospel I feel personally compelled to spread. I just think it's an important thing, is all. I'm not suggesting that we only ever curl up in cashmere, only that the joy of the mud-puddle is diminished if our feet stay cold and wet all day. It's the coming in, drying off, and being handed a steaming mug that's really crucial. I think in one way or another, we all sort of know this. I think children do especially.

I suppose that's why I was so nervous when my writing professor announced we'd be going to a preschool to teach tiny children how to write poems. Apparently, the tiny children were learning about autumn, and about forest animals, and their poems were to reflect these topics. What was also apparent was that despite my general reservations about dealing with poetry and dealing with children, I was the only one of my classmates that had heard the gospel. "Try and brainstorm some things to talk about with the preschoolers to get them thinking about fall, and about animals that live in the forest." my professor said to our class (this would, incidentally, be the only instruction we received in "How to teach Babies, Practically, Poetry" ). The girls I was assigned to work with blinked several times, mouths slightly agape, before suggesting "We should probably ask them if they know what animals live in the forest. And like, what they eat. And stuff." Stuff! "Well, I'm no expert on poetry or children, but it seems like we should, um, get them on a longer train of thought where we can talk about slightly more...vivid images instead of one-word answers. I was just thinking, since the topics are autumn and forest animals, wouldn't it be great to talk about hibernation? Like, we could talk about the squirrels gathering nuts for winter, or the fox and her cubs in their den, or big bears sleeping under the snow...do preschoolers know what hibernation is? Is that a good thing to talk about? Wouldn't it be fun to write a little poem about the busy animals in fall getting ready for sleeping all winter? I think they'd like to imagine how cozy the animals are in their dens..." I was interrupted. "Um, you can't use big words like that with kids." "Yeah," another girl said. "You have to like, simplify your language or else they can't understand you. Trust me, I worked in a daycare. They won't know what you're talking about." "Oh," I said. "So, no hibernation? Sure. We can just ask them where the animals live and oh! Let's talk about beaver dams! That's fun to imagine!" "Well, there's just one thing-- you probably shouldn't say 'dam' in a preschool."

On teaching day, there was another kind of accident. And, like the one back in the registrar's office, I think you could say it turned out fine. See, I showed up to the building the preschool was supposed to be in, per my professor's instructions, but according to every map and direction, no such preschool existed. In a bit of a frenzy, I trekked all over campus, asking at every security desk I could find. Still, after twenty minutes of scurrying about (like a field mouse at Harvest-Moon), I was no better off than when I'd started. I decided that even if I found the dratted brats (who were probably not all wearing cable-knit knee-socks and sweaters), rushing in half an hour late just wouldn't do. I curled up on a bench with some coffee and watched it drizzle outside. I supposed it was just as well. I didn't know a thing about children, anyhow.

I was a bit sore about the whole thing for a while, but forgot about it soon enough-- Community College (reliably) presented me with far more pressing annoyances. It wasn't until Christmas Eve, when I encountered a real live preschooler, that I happened to give it any thought, and a passing one at that. My cousin's four-year-old daughter was running about, more wound-up and bouncy than usual (or so I was told), anxious for presents and sticky with icing. Despite my disappointment that she was dressed in neither taffeta nor plaid, I was charmed by her miniature bob, and so when she crawled under the table and began creating a ruckus near my lap, I was willing to have a go at entertaining her for a bit. She screeched! She howled! She attempted to crawl atop the piano! I was very quickly reminded why I choose not to deal with children, and about to "refer" her to dear Uncle Peter when she began tossing teddy-bears at me. I could have written a poem. I think you could say I was inspired.

"Oh, M.! Hurry! Gather up the bears! They have to hibernate for the winter in their den under the piano! Quickly, before it snows! Under the piano!" It was this astounding thing. The tiny child listened. Not only that, but she emitted this little screech of delight. Then, bear noises. "You've got to sleep all winter in your den! It will be nice and warm, don't you think?" She gathered the scattered teddy-bears, curling up in with them and hugging one to her chest. M. nodded. "Are you sure you're going to stay in your piano-den all winter?" I asked, crouching on the floor and adjusting the stole around my neck (perhaps I looked like a bear, myself). "YES!" M. shouted.

Eventually, the tiny bear-cub decided to emerge, and maul my leg, and received a subsequent scolding from her father. Head hung, she retreated to her den. It couldn't last-- there were more cookies to be eaten and packages that demanded attention. Still, it seems that even in the presence of Christmas trees and doting grandmothers and candy canes, to hibernate in a little bear's den is appealing after all. Of course, deep down you already knew.

Frost

2010-12-29T20:49:00.000-08:00

See,

the thing about these woods is that

we aren't just stopping here.

And Lord knows they'll see us because

there's satellite surveillance on that fuel pump.

But if there is one thing I know,

it is whose woods these are.

Patty C.'s Rules to Live By, Number Twenty-Five: Today Is Christmas. Here's to the Present.

2010-12-20T14:53:00.000-08:00

Try to unwrap things slowly.

If you can't, and you rip through all the packages too quickly and find yourself in the middle of a big mess, and it's all over-- don't worry. That wasn't "it". It's going to be Christmas all day. We're going to keep sipping things and eating shrimp cocktail and tying bows on ourselves and the dogs down here at the bar for a few more hours before that mid-afternoon turkey dinner, After that, things will sort of die down until an evening Christmas party at Aunt Linda's. Just relax. There's more. You can take a nap if you need to. It'll still be Christmas when you wake up. Just sleep in your cocktail dress. If it's rumpled when you wake up, you can go back downstairs and root around the tree where everybody's opened presents are arranged in piles. Pull out something new, and go try it on. Chances are, it fits perfectly.

Lucia

2010-12-18T20:06:00.000-08:00

Sometimes, I am not really sure if I am just full of the Christmas Spirit or if I actually am a Christmas Spirit. Name an island (or your grandmother) after me if you must. I will be busy baking cookies and lighting candles on the darkest night of the year.

jkdslfjkjhgjkdfhhjb (That the Soul Discharges Her Passions Upon False Objects, Where the True Are Wanting)

2010-12-17T22:20:00.000-08:00

THIS

and

THIS

That's really all.

OH. OH.

There is one more thing.

I also might have begun an independent study on similar topics at my very small liberal arts college last year, and I might have taken an incomplete.

jkdslfjkjhgjkdfhhjb

Finals

2010-12-08T21:11:00.000-08:00

I'm sort of in the middle of something. Come back later.

My sister, circa 1990

Le Maroc

2010-12-06T07:48:00.000-08:00

This morning, I am supposed to be assembling a poster about Morocco for my very silly community college French class, where we play little games and sing nursery rhymes and use flashcards and if we are very lucky, might be awarded a Tolberone at the end of the week. Despite having devised a very charming theme for my poster that fills both the assignment criteria and the limitations of a black-and-white printer (Bienvenue au Maroc! Des Cartes Postales du Mahgreb), I am distracted. Quelle suprise.

I'm still thinking about snow, and Fake Christmas, and how last year we all went to that Moroccan place in Silver Spring to see Peter off, and how of course everything was delicious, but that wasn't even the point anymore. The point was that halfway through our final Fake Christmas dinner, the lights were dimmed, and a disco ball spun, and a crackly, boot-legged Moroccan-pop version of what we could only assume to be "Happy Birthday" began to play. The point was that it was for us. It was for Peter. The point was that it wasn't his birthday.

It was pure Fake Christmas magic. Though at first we were all convinced somebody must have told our waiter (bearing free dessert) that it was my dear cousin's birthday, it soon became clear that nobody had said a word, and everyone was just as baffled as the next, but the disco ball was spinning and the song was playing, and there was this charming Moroccan man standing next to the table holding pastry with a candle in it-- who were we to deny him? We all split the generous, honeyed, baklava-y thing and called it a Fake Christmas miracle. That's the only kind I believe in, you know.

Maybe that's why, a week or so ago in my very silly French class, when we were asked to choose African countries to make posters about, I immediately selected "le Maroc". Aside from excellent poster design prospects-- what with all that lovely tile-- I just happen to like the place. Well, as much as I can. I have never been to Morocco, per se, but it could happen. I've got an unshakable faith in the Fake Christmas miracle.

Snow Bunnies, Stopping By Woods [on a Snowy Evening], and Winter Wonderlands: What We Talk About When We Talk About Snow Glow

2010-12-04T12:45:00.000-08:00

"The wind may blow the snow about,

For all I care, says Jack,

And I don't mind how cold it grows,

For then the ice won't crack.

Old folks may shiver all day long,

But I shall never freeze;

What cares a jolly boy like me

For Winter days like these?"

-from A Country Boy in Winter by Sarah Orne Jewett

I half feel like apologizing for posting so many snow pictures all of the sudden, but it's really just because I feel so desperately like I've got to make you understand why I am so enamored with this time of year, and the snow, and everything that comes with it. I suppose I could try to write a little something, but since I happen to have all these photographs, it really just seems like (for the time being) I ought to try and show you. Maybe I'll tell you about it later, when I run out of images, or have little more time. For now, I think this will do. I hope so. Winter is the best, you know. It'd be a shame if you couldn't appreciate it.

Photographs taken by the inimitable Patty C., my grandmother and the finest leader of woodland/swamp-bottom expeditions I have ever met.

Early Frost

2010-12-03T17:10:00.000-08:00

I flipped my pillow around to the other side of the bed like I said I would, and now every morning when I wake up I see a thick line of evergreens. For about half a minute, when I am still bleary-eyed and just slightly disoriented, all I see is bright grey sky and dark green tree. My heart races. I think it has snowed.

In this way, I trick myself into getting out of bed every morning.

Fake Christmas, 2009

2010-12-02T12:42:00.000-08:00

Can we please just

agree to keep this thing alive?

If there's enough,

they'll close the roads.

They'll be covered with ice,

like our boots.

If it keeps coming,

they'll just bury our tracks--

and us.

(Amen)

Digital Photographs of Fake Christmas 2009 by my sister, Kylie (Manual taken myself)

Out-of-Place

2010-11-30T16:01:00.000-08:00

I stayed home for Thanksgiving, which I never ever do. It was, for the most part, this barely believable suburban blur, and there were these very characteristic long car rides and these very uncharacteristic long strolls, and long lunches, and long glances. Not that they were out-of-character, necessarily, just out-of-place.

This is how I feel, generally, about good things happening in The Enchanted Forest, in Valley Mede, and in Maryland as a whole. I feel that they do not belong. I have always felt this way. I have been vocal about this, at some times more than others. But I will never reject good things because of it. There will simply be an accompanying otherness to the goodness that happens here; it is in but not of.

It was the strangest and most delightful Thanksgiving weekend. I was in Maryland.

The Vet

2010-11-20T15:22:00.000-08:00

Today my cat didn't die, and neither did I and neither did you, so I am pretty happy overall I'd say.

Pictured is Tasha, a long-dead cat who exemplifies the Cutcher penchant for seal-points (which spans generations), who belonged to my grandfather, and who looks like Mercatroid, (who lives to meow another day).

Little House

2010-11-17T11:57:00.000-08:00

"When the fiddle had stopped singing Laura called out softly, 'What are the days of auld lang syne, Pa?'

'They are the days of a long time ago, Laura,'

Pa said. 'Go to sleep now.'

But Laura lay awake a little while, listening to Pa's fiddle softly playing and to the lonely sound of the wind in the Big Woods. She looked at Pa sitting on the bench by the hearth, the fire-light gleaming on his brown hair and beard and glistening on the honey-brown fiddle. She looked at Ma, gently rocking and knitting.

She thought to herself, 'This is now.'

She was glad that the cosy house, and Pa and Ma and the firelight and music, were now. They could not be forgotten, she thought, because now is now. It can never be a long time ago."

-from Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder

Photograph: Two dear friends on my old street in Flossmoor, a long time ago

Viable Alternatives

2010-11-14T20:50:00.000-08:00

I am impatient today, and lonely, and I can't help feeling as though maybe I am just spoiled, and have a taste for country drives, coffees, and postcard-buying. Maybe I am just restless, and have been curled up too long in the very same spot.

I am moving my pillow to the opposite end of the bed tonight, and maybe it will feel foreign. If it doesn't, I will tape up every one of my photographs tomorrow, and cover a whole wall, and maybe it will feel familiar.

Photograph by my sister, Kylie, taken in "historic" Mt. Airy, on an adventure in North/Central/Western Maryland (NOT Pennsylvania)

Mo' Kittens, Mo' Problems: On Getting What You Want

2010-11-11T15:55:00.000-08:00

Photographs from a long-ago outing to the Hirshorn, where for a moment I thought my mother was having a nice time, when she said "You know, this is interesting". This inspired a little spiel on the merits of modern and contemporary art for the museum-averse, and its ability to provoke reaction, and thus conversation, versus the old-guard institution and its halls of hallowed oil paintings. Her reaction is visible below.

Genus Malus

2010-11-09T21:15:00.000-08:00

It's the season.

Digital Photographs courtesy of my sister, Kylie

What Should Johnny Do?

2010-11-04T13:37:00.000-07:00

Today, I just wanted to curl up and watch "Really Rosie" (based on a book by Maurice Sendak, and featuring little songs by Carol King), which I have been watching my whole my life, on VHS, more times than I can count, and which does not cease to make things a bit better. Wathcing it on VHS is important, too, because of this:

Of course, as is obvious now, you can find it all on the internet, but I went down in the basement and dug it out, and came to the conclusion that at present things were just about like this:

Seasonal Produce

2010-10-30T08:05:00.000-07:00

"'You've heard of the fury of a woman scorned, haven't you?'

'Yeah, I guess I have.'

'Well, that's nothing compared to the fury of a woman who has been cheated out of trick-or-treats. "

-from It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, 1966

Oh boy. Halloween is coming. Folks are hollowing out their turnips as we speak. There is going to be a parade. A carnival. A thousand people are going to come, dripping caramel. The wind is whisking the leaves in little spirals in anticipation. As for me, I am going to hide until the revelers have come and gone, and the shrieks quiet, and the neighborhood wakes to find pumpkin guts strewn up and down the streets.

The Cytokine Hypothesis

2010-10-19T21:18:00.000-07:00

It's been a few months full of tiny holes slowly leaking air.

I Hate to Be a Cynic

2010-10-12T16:37:00.000-07:00

But if I am very, very honest with myself,

I find the company of Zinzi more therapeutic than the company of friends.

When it comes to breaking bread, though,

there is just no substitute for a familiar table.

Aim High in Steering

2010-10-10T08:51:00.000-07:00

You are probably one of those people who likes to say "Look up! You might miss something!" when you see somebody walking with their head tilted downward. When things are good, they are glorious! The sun is radiant; the darkness is vast! I can just tell. You are one of those sorts.

I took your advice, you know. It wasn't just because of the scolicephobia, either. If anything, those worms are a reason to look down. No, I stopped staring at the sidewalk because you convinced me I was missing something. The sky. You convinced me that I must be sad, walking around like that, and that I was bound to bump into somebody. The implications were that it would be the wrong somebody, too. You pointed at the most shriveled, lonely people, hunched over and closed off. You told me I'd turn out just like them.

It wasn't just you, though. It was everybody. In Driver's Ed., which was mandatory for graduation even though I wasn't learning to drive, they made a point of telling me, every day for three months, everywhere I should be looking instead of the ground in front of me. Mostly I looked at a copy of The Brothers Karamazov, but sometimes I looked at the chalkboard, at dotted lines of sight and bold letters that said "AIM HIGH IN STEERING", and I listened to a man who I suspected was illiterate list off ten thousand mirrors and dials a driver was supposed to be looking at when they were driving down the highway, maintaing a speed of sixty-five miles per hour, aiming high, pointing their vehicle towards far-off horizons.

You probably like road trip stories, because people are always aiming high and steering for the West Coast, where there is Sky with a capitol "S" and giant sequoias reaching up to it. I cannot drive, of course, and I went to California when I was seven years old, and mostly I remember watching college students draw pictures in the sand after dark at Santa Cruz and watching Elena's Barbie Jeep almost drift to sea at Treasure Island. I remember sand in our Oreos. I do not recall, though there are photographs depicting it, the dim sequoia forest and my smallness in the face of its immensity. I did not have your taste for grand juxtapositions.

You told me that I was remembering it wrong, and that there were impressive, jagged stretches of coast that I once stood overlooking, and all the while I was preoccupied with little sea anemone in tide pools. You shamed me. You convinced me that detachment was only acceptable when it looked dreamy and faced upward and sunned its face. I think somebody once told you to get your own head out of the clouds, and you refused to listen, and it made this very charming story. I must have liked it, or I wouldn't have started looking up.

The problem was just that I kept stubbing my toes, and tripping over uneven pavement, and once last year I was hurrying through the rain to a lecture and stepped on a little worm. I felt it. Under my shoe, in that split-second, I felt it. I glanced to the ground, where I hadn't been looking, and at the sight of what I'd done I was immediately sick all over the muddy ground. With shaking hands and a churning stomach, I watched the flooded sidewalk and felt the consequences of your crummy advice until arriving, soaking wet, at the lecture hall.

I wonder if you remember the last time your shadow kept you company, and followed you around on a sunny day. It was probably a long time ago. You've probably been busy basking in the glorious warmth of that great celestial sphere. I'm sure that is a nice way to spend the afternoon. So is looking at moss, if you're interested. So is dipping your foot in a cool river on a hot day, and watching your footprints evaporate on the dusty, practically sizzling granite slabs of the shore. So is watching minnows in the reedy lake shallows, where they dart between ancient, twisted tree roots. So is wearing down a piece of sidewalk chalk until one section of driveway, pebbles and all, is vivid pink. Of course, you are right. I am probably missing something. For the life of me, I cannot find Orion's belt.

Photographs taken by my sister, who knows a thing or two about a thing or two.

Spiders

2010-10-09T13:15:00.000-07:00

Jungian Psychology

2010-10-05T18:39:00.000-07:00

"It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards."

from Through the Looking-Glass By Lewis Carroll

I am in some kind of frenzy right now. My grandmother's class ring, gold and onyx-- not a thing like those blood diamonds they sell in catalogs nowadays-- slipped off my finger last night. It's because of the change in weather, probably. My fingers shrunk just the slightest bit, and it landed softly in the grass somewhere, without any small metallic clink to indicate its disappearance. Now I comb the lawn. The rug. The backseat of my mother's car. I look in every pocket.

It occurs to me that there is a very slight chance that it is some kind of magic ring. Now, because it slipped off in the change-of-seasons, I am searching every pocket in every fall jacket I have ever worn. Maybe it is there. There are bobby-pins. A hospital bracelet. A bicycle charm from a cheap bracelet that snapped on the tile floor of the choir room, sending beads and metal bits bouncing everywhere. I am starting to buy into this magic ring hypothesis more and more, though, because I just learned how to ride a bike last week, and I just went to the emergency room today. These long-lost bits and bobs are very persuasive, when I am sifting though piles of seldom-worn coats. When I am frenzied.

Once, I wore this brown vest (that does not have a ring in its pocket) to Fell's Point, where I sat over the Bay and thought I was going to lose my little velvet shoe. I thought it was just going to slip right off, and land with a small watery plop below, and I'd watch it sink slowly to the bottom until I could see it no more. I took off my shoes and held them while I sat, feet dangling over the water. Should one have dropped into the Chesapeake, it would not have turned up later under the bed. What a ridiculous thought. They were no magic shoes.

This ring, though-- I am unconvinced. It slipped off my middle finger into the unknown, and there is room in that space for magic. There is room especially when significant folk-objects and the Qunicy High School Class of 1955's legacy are involved. The ring is on a soft spot somewhere, where no one heard it fall. There is no cement or cold, hard facts; no chilly bay or tiled floor. It could be anywhere. I look in every pocket.

Photographs presumably taken by my cousin Peter, at Fell's Point, some years ago

On the Inevitable

2010-09-30T17:25:00.000-07:00

I thought I'd taught myself to roll my tongue. It was probably on the playground, even, because that's where those things happen, and where those things matter, and where those little, taunting clumps of children form. I was told, like the rest of them, that club membership was determined by genetics. Either you were predestined to be a Tongue-Roller or you'd just never be one. That's why, after initial exclusion and disappointment, I was convinced I'd made some breakthrough when one day I got the hang of it. I was a Tongue-Roller. I had, and there was no convincing me otherwise, "broken my genetic code". I made sure my parents knew about it, too. It was evidence against the inevitable. I would not be like them. "You laugh now," my father always said, "but someday you'll be just like your mother". I rolled my tongue, and declared it impossible.

I have since figured out, or maybe admitted, that I was a Tongue-Roller all along, and was just clumsy at first, and hadn't mastered the technique. No genetic codes were re-written. "It's inevitable," people say, "you're going to turn into your parents." I try to bite my tongue now, not roll it. It seems like denying it makes me a fool, and only sets me up for some "I told you so" in twenty years, when I am somehow just like my mother. Still, I am convinced that it skips a generation.

My cousin Peter told me he thought I wasn't so different from Grandma Patty. Her elaborately-carved watermelon baskets, in terms of small-town 1960s Michigan, aren't so different from my Bstilla, served with the same self-deprecation and cocktail apron. I mentioned this theory to my father over dinner last night. "Well, Peter might be onto something, but I don't know. The thing I'll say about your Grandma Patty is that she's never been afraid of what she wants. You know, afraid to try anything." The implications, naturally, were that I was in this way dissimilar. "You'll never figure anything out if you don't try anything. You can't just sit up in that room of yours all day and expect to get anywhere. You've got to actually go after something." I bit my tongue.

Man v. Nature

2010-09-26T11:43:00.000-07:00

"Arise, winds of autumn, arise; blow along the heath! Streams of the mountains, roar; roar, tempests in the groves of my oaks!"

-from The Sorrows of Werther By J.W. von Goethe

When things were pink last spring, and I do mean really pink-- the kind that bursts forth into bloom all at once with great exuberance one morning, and reassures folks of the earth's playfulness, and gentleness, and beauty (and perhaps more importantly, of their own)-- I went to Wooster to walk around outside. At the arboretum on the grounds of the Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center (which is a mouthful and so nobody says it), there were ponds thawing and fish beginning to swim, and it seemed there were no bugs, just buds. Of course it all felt significant in its own way, for being pink and for being the wrong place and the right place all at once, and for being new. Still, it was mostly just lovely. I asked my mother about plant names.

Early this fall, a tornado came to Wooster. The storm hit the OARDC, and knocked down a bunch of big, old trees, shattered a few greenhouses, and toppled some other things. Nature heard I was reading into seasonal themes, and took things a little too far: You wanted cycles of destruction and renewal? Well, here you go. Because, of course, things will eventually come alive again. It's really just autumn on a grand and tragic scale, and it won't be pink for years again, and you'll have plenty of time to think about how, gee, your life is really just like this tree here, come to think of it. That's what you wanted, wasn't it?

What a disaster. What a fall. I cannot wait for a nice white winter. And then, I cannot wait for everything to be pink again.

Three, Too, Is an Auspicious Number

2010-09-24T20:06:00.000-07:00

"Somewhere in that lace lies luck,

though I may never swoop down

to find it. Three, too, is
an auspicious number. And this seeing

a reminder to avoid too much taming
of what, even here, wants to be wild."

-from Against Lawn by Grace Bauer

Photographs: The foster-kittens (Big Edie, Little Edie, and G.G.) out for a picnic, taken and suggested by my mother

Fear of Heights

2010-09-23T19:26:00.000-07:00

Photographs taken by my sister, Kylie, the real tree-climber between the two of us

Same as It Ever Was

2010-09-21T21:35:00.000-07:00

That He Who Would Be Well Taken Care of Must Take Care of Himself

Chapter VI of William Graham Sumner's What Social Classes Owe Each Other, 1883

I am so small when I stand next to buildings, and so scared of just the silliest things, and Community College is a place full of people who say things like: "Now, at a four-year college they're not going to do this kind of hand-holding", but I have looked around, and fallen on the ground a few times, and I do not think there is anybody here to hold my hand. This is probably a good thing, because as stern professors remind me daily, hand-holding is a terrible, awful, undesirable thing, and I ought to avoid it if I can, and if I can't, I'd better cut that out as soon as possible. It's much better to go it alone, and pretend you know what you're doing, and just be terrified. That's what real people do.

I get dropped off at school everyday by my mother where there isn't room for me to sit inside any of the college buildings, so I crouch outside next to a low stone wall, in its pitiful shade, under a two-story steel pergola without vines. It casts enormous, dark shadows on the quad, which is covered with people I do not know, and will never know. They leave me alone, in my smallness; in the bigness. I do not call home, and tell my mother to come pick me up. I do not even, while sitting on that lawn, call a friend to whimper over the phone about sobbing in a bathroom stall, or fainting in class, or just plain sitting all alone for fifteen hours of the goddamn day, most every day. I am tempted. I try to remember that I am propped up by a low stone wall. I am already leaning. Hand-holding would be different.

Counterculture

2010-09-19T12:30:00.000-07:00

Turn On

When you hit fifteen, your blood vessels know. They know that mysteriously and suddenly, your mother seems to resent you. They have been holding onto something for fifteen years, tightly, pumping it through your veins, mixed with your blood, but when you hit fifteen, they know. They let go. They loosen their grip. They flip a switch. There will be a dull thud when your head hits the floor for the first time, and a glass might break. After that, you will start to figure out the same thing that your blood vessels know, and you will loosen up, and learn somehow how to slide from chairs, onto carpets, onto people, and your mother will resent you for it.

Tune In

When you turn sixteen, your hematologist won't know it. You will know, although you won't know much about your metabolic panel and complete blood count. Those things will mean something very important, and if you listen very carefully, you will start to discern patterns between your poor cerebral circulation and your loose blood vessels, but chances are you will be sixteen, and you will not be listening most of the time. Chances are although you know things, about how tired you are despite the pills and about how you still keep hitting the floor (gently), you will end up telling yourself to ignore them, and that your hematologist must know something you don't.

Drop Out

When you are seventeen, most everybody will know it. At this point, it will be hard to ignore. You will have a reputation. You will make jokes. You will make peace. You will get by, and your blood vessels will manage, with their weak grip, to get ahold of something just often enough. You will keep slumping over. Then, you will go somewhere else. You will keep slumping over. Just like before, everybody will know it. Unlike before, nobody will make jokes. Nobody will make peace. You will notice, here, that the thuds become more frequent. You will become tense; your blood vessels won't. You will make a reputation, and you will leave.

All photographs taken at my "High School Dropout Party", August 2007

ARRT-108: The Leisure Class

2010-09-13T19:58:00.000-07:00

"Thy patience give! And with unruffled face,

Stern critic furrows banished from thy brow,

Attend her flight through regions sacred

To domestic use; where she, guided by truth,

In search of that fair nymph Economy,

must now explore-- and quit for these, the more

inviting paths of fiction..."

-from The Housewife; Or, The Muse Learning to Ride the Great Horse Heroic Addressed to Lysander By Elizabeth Moody

Some people, like my father, know how to build things. Those people grew up on farms, and then became engineers, and can build airplane swings for little girls if they need to, and it probably won't be too much trouble, until the teen-aged neighbor girl comes and sits on it with a few of her friends, and the wood splits down the center. Hopefully by then the airplane swing will have been mostly outgrown, anyway. Still, if you needed another, somebody like my father could probably build it.

There are also some people, who benefitted from airplane swings, who despite being very good at holding flashlights under cupboards and in crawl-spaces, are just lucky they know a Phillips from a flathead. Those people can't build much of anything, except maybe a better summer wardrobe, if we are being generous. They can also usually build little, symmetrical stacks of dominoes and a few durable friendships.

It seems these things do not translate onto graph paper, or at least not easily. In ARRT 108: Introduction to the Built Environment, I do not know how to draw things, or how to build things, and the whole class seems perfectly capable of building airplane swings, and I just wear shift dresses and sip San Pellegrino and try not to ruin my cross-hatching again.

Ode

2010-09-11T17:13:00.000-07:00

When my parents announced that we were moving to Maryland four years ago, every anxiety about leaving manifested itself in a crusade against vinyl siding and faux-brick façades that didn't wrap all the way around the house. It was somehow inevitable that I ended up living in a house with both. On moving day, upon finally seeing the house, and demanding an explanation of my parents, I received only: "What? We thought you wanted a brick house..." I burst into tears. They knew full well what masonry was and what it wasn't. The house on Vardon had been as brick as they come: Red, covering concrete and steel (and marble and glass and crystal), solid, and probably bomb-proof-- just the way its neurotic, pyrophobic 1940s commissioner intended. But this? This was cardboard.

I'd never had a problem with siding before. I'd never really thought too much about it, or declared a preference when it came to building materials. Actually, if you'd asked me about it prior to coming to Maryland I might have told you I liked stone. Just, you know, because of the natural variations. I was suddenly transfixed with bricks. In other towns in Maryland, more historic, architecturally consistent ones, things were solid and red on all four sides. I was simultaneously relieved to have found proper masonry in Maryland and crushed that it was forty minutes too far away (by car) to exist for me in any sort of day-to-day context. I remained bitter. I waited two years. Then, I left for school in Illinois.

In East Galesburg, the Purington Paving Brick Company made red pavers from 1890 to 1974, and under the streets of Galesburg there are over sixty miles of brick roads, exposed in a few places. Even the shoddier houses in Galesburg, of a certain age, even the ones with wooden siding and peeling paint, have brick basements. And then there is my college itself, which my parents thought was the ugliest of the schools I visited (and it probably was) and ask with exasperation and disgust why it had to be that school. There is Knox, for the most part red and solid.

Things are strictly concrete, steel, and glass at present. It makes me feel like writing an ode to bricks again, which I'll never do, and I'll always want to do, because "An Ode to Bricks" is a hypothetical poem that tells you everything I've ever felt about home, and not-home, and distance and resolution, and dissonance again. It can never ever exist, of course, because I just don't write things like that. Still, bricks are important. Sometime, somebody ought to write them an ode.

Photographs taken in Frederick, MD

Postural Tachycardia Syndrome

2010-09-10T09:12:00.000-07:00

Four or five schools ago, before I really learned how to benefit from change and how to be destroyed by it (and how sometimes, they're the same thing), I thought my posture was going to save me. If I just sat up straight enough, I thought, some kind of order was going follow. Maybe the kind that comes from seven years practicing on the edge of a folding-chair in the choir room: Pretend there is a mouse-trap on the back of the seat, put your feet flat on the floor. In unfamiliar and uncomfortable classrooms I led by example; no one followed. In those rare friendless lecture halls I sat alone, in the front, so everyone could see how they ought to be sitting, until T.A. Terry B. told me I was a little bitch and that I had better follow him right that minute to go make copies of scripts in the library. Or else. Or else what? Or else I was a little bitch.

I followed Terry B. around most classes. Ms. Bonovia never seemed to mind my slipping out for the first half of class to wander around, "making copies". We walked to the library, but more importantly to the radio station, where we sat in for half an hour on some terrible psychedelic rock show produced by a friend of Terry's. He told me that I needed to fucking relax. We came back a few times, and I learned to slouch. When in Rome, they say.

We also wandered up to the the light box of the theatre, just because Terry felt like it, and was a senior technician, and could do these things. I suppose that got old, though, so we went to the greenroom, where I hesitated, because although I spent most of my after-school hours in rehearsal, I wasn't supposed to be there at two o'clock in the afternoon. We were out of Terry's jurisdiction, too. We needed to sneak. We needed to slink. Terry told me this was nonsense. We were supposed to be wherever we wanted to be, I'd see. Just act casual. It was then that Mr. Wall, the technical director appeared-- a test. What were doing in greenroom? Looking for you, of course. Don't be a little bitch. Relax, just fucking relax. Just act casual. Kevin Wall, certified in movement from the Jacques LeCoq School in Paris, told me I was a weight-shifter, had I ever noticed that? He gave me a small demonstration of my standing posture, followed by a few pointers on how to improve my motion and carriage on stage. Thanks so much, we really should get back to class, though. Of course. In fact, scram.

It was funny, because at some point I stopped sitting in the front of the class every time. Though every impulse pulled towards the safety of the front row, somehow I found myself perched near the back of the lecture hall. I realized that was the problem. I was perching. I slid to the back of my chair. I imagined there was glue on the back of my seat. Terry B. glared at me during group-work, when my classmates seemed to configure themselves in piles. I had not attained mastery. I chose to sit on the floor.

Every year or two it seems I attempt to join some different swarm, and am surrounded by confounding new rooms full of people. Jacques LeCoq is never there when you really need him, let me tell you. I've managed, though. It seems like I have, anyway. I sit with strange ease in rooms that have terrified me, and that I thought would still terrify me, filled with strangers three years ago and still filled with strangers today. I sit near the center, so I can see everyone that I don't know. I do not perch, nor do I slouch. I shift my weight, steadily, from one hip to the other.

A Note on the Photos: These were taken during Ms. Bonovia's class, but do not depict Terry B.. Perhaps they are misleading.

Swamp-Bottom Brown and the Muck-Buckets Present: An AGAINST IDLENESS Tribute to Seasonal Appropriateness

2010-09-09T18:46:00.000-07:00

This summer, I hope you found rocks to hop on, and somebody to hop with. I hope there was a great clear pool, full of tiny bubbles to dip your toes in-- but only to dip, because for all you knew it could have been bottomless. I do hope you found some natural mystery, and left it that way, even if you could've solved it, if you engineered something clever enough.

I hope you found a nice place to sit this summer. That's important, too. I hope it was warm, and if it was too warm, I hope you remembered to appreciate it. I hope you soaked in something, like some sunshine or muddy river or weedy lake. For goodness' sakes, I hope you at least did that.

If you were lucky, your hair might have started turning gold again for the first time in years, and I hope that it did, and that your sister once referred to the color as "Swamp-Bottom Brown". I hope you remembered to take a picture of what you look like now, at the end of the summer, as tan and gold-flecked as you get, so that I can see it sometime in the wintertime, when the sand you kicked up these past few months has settled.

Seed-Savers

2010-09-05T17:26:00.000-07:00

Did you know that it's a sin to eat store-bought jam? That, and downright un-American. There's victory in the garden, you know-- in the raspberry patch, and on the labels of the gold-lidded glass jars in the cupboard. If you lie to me, and take the summer-fruit's name in vain, and offer me "Smucker's" one day for my english muffin, don't expect to get away with it. Not without a proper talking-to, anyhow. Did you know I could tell a ripe berry at two years old? What do you mean? Of course I'm not exaggerating! I was practically raised in a raspberry patch! Practically born in the brambles! There were heirloom patches on both sides of the family! Once, we found a kitten in Great-Grandpa Daniels's raspberry bushes and took her home, and fattened her up, and we might have named her "Raspberry", too, if we were the sort of family that did things like that.

Did you know that it's a sin to plant Bradford pears? That, and downright un-American. If I catch you cultivating a cultivar that's invasive to the Mid-Atlantic, I'm afraid there's going to be trouble. My mother is a Master Gardener, you know. Did you know that she thought it would be an nice outing for us to go pull garlic mustard from Whipp's Cemetery when Grandma Lu came to visit us in Maryland one spring? You'd better hope nobody planted a Bradford pear over my favorite little plot in the back with the miniature gate, because next ice storm that hits, you can be sure those limbs will crack, and will drop like twigs, and those beautiful old stones and I will just be crushed.

Did you know that it's a sin to buy a pound of ripe figs and let them go to waste? That, and downright un-American. They're the favored fruit of still-life painters, if we forget about pomegranates for a minute, and that's got to count for something. What? You can't eat eat them just because we're out of chèvre? You can't pretend it just came from a tree? What do you mean, am I going to roast some potatoes to have with the steaks tonight? Of course I'm not! You're going to eat figs with your steaks tonight! You're going to like it! What? You don't like it? Every time we went to Florida when I was small, we could go in the grocery store and pick out a treat we weren't allowed to have, because it was vacation, and somebody would pick out frosted pop-tarts, and somebody would pick out fruit-snacks, and my father picked out "Fig Newtons" every time. I don't know why we bought all this beautiful fruit if nobody is going to finish it. "This isn't how we eat them in Kuwait" you say. "But, I guess a fig is a fig."

Irony/History/Cookery/Anniversary

2010-09-04T07:48:00.000-07:00

"The clustered spires of Frederick stand

Green-walled by the wills of Maryland.

Round about them orchards sweep,

Apple- and peach-tree fruited deep,

Fair as a garden of the Lord

To the eyes of the famished rebel horde..."

-from Barbara Frietchie By John Greenleaf Whittier

For your fifty-first birthday, may we suggest that you reenact the Battle of Antietam, and march your daughters along Bloody Lane Trail until things get literal? May we suggest a late lunch in Frederick, another Civil War town, another cemetery town, also a college town and a church-spire town? How about a kitten left on the porch for you to find later? May we suggest you name the kitten after Vice-Admiral William Fitzwilliam Owen, charter of Great Lakes, explorer of African coasts? We frequently recommend, and wonder how you'd feel about: a boozey espresso gâteau de crêpes with chocolate ganache, homemade, improvised, because your daughter meant to make a chiffon cake but the eggs just wouldn't beat, no matter what she did? May we suggest you eat the cake cold the next morning, when it will probably taste better, because it is still as hot outside it was on the battlefield yesterday? May we suggest you bring some water next time? Some gauze?

The Orient

2010-08-25T21:31:00.000-07:00

Even if you have lived in Howard county for five years, you had better take an atlas out driving. You know, just in case. I say this because I happen to have lived in Howard county for about that long, and tucked between the driver's seat and the center console of my mother's car, there is always an assortment of complimentary AAA Mid-Atlantic road atlases and handwritten directions to the airport. My mother likes to tell people that we just moved to Maryland, and that it's a big adjustment, that fall is pretty here but gosh it's just so different. Different, but we're all getting used to it, she is quick to add. What she means by that is that it’s been five years and she still needs a goddamned map to get anywhere, and no, she doesn't want one of those “GPS” things in her car. She shouldn't need one, or it's just one more thing you're asking her to change, or why does everyone out here think they need to spend so much money all the time-- did you know those things cost something like one hundred dollars and people just assume she's going to run out and buy one like it's a loaf of bread? That's what she means when she says things are different here. Maybe you had better just take the atlas

I guess it probably seems like some version of pathetic, which isn't so terribly inaccurate, but it's got nothing to do with a hereditary dysfunction in whatever part of the brain is responsible for developing mental maps, or spatial memory or whatever that's called. Although, thinking about it, I should probably just speak for myself. My mother was never really known for her stellar sense of direction. And I would really like to be fair. I've really tried to be fair. What I'm really saying is I understand that we're all human. But, the most human of us all is James Wilson Rouse.

Jim Rouse feared God and built shopping malls. He was good at it, too. The historians say he never missed church on Sunday, and the suburbs of the Mid-Century Mid-Atlantic say, well, they say that Delaware Township, New Jersey changed its name to Cherry Hill in 1961-- the name of the brand-new shopping mall Jim built there. One thing about a shopping mall is that even when it still sparkles, and is covered in polished, gleaming terrazzo tile (all the better for echoing fountains and clicking high-heels), every shopping mall has got to say: "YOU ARE HERE". The shopping mall is, if nothing else, self-aware. It understands itself, the physical space it inhabits. There are no landmarks; there is no way to intuit its layout. Jim Rouse, urban visionary, bought 14,000 acres of Howard County farmland and built a city like a shopping mall. That was the idea, anyway. Forty years later, I scratched and I bit and I clawed, but a whole chorus of voices told me over and over again: "YOU ARE HERE".

II.

Once, Robert Johnson met the devil at a crossroads; sometimes I half expect to meet him on an exit ramp. Now, I don't want you to think I'm saying that because I'm still sore about moving to Maryland or something. I'm not. Saying it because of that, I mean. It's just, sometimes I get trapped here, like this year, and most days there is only the Little Room, a magic box of my own creation, and the quick-merging four-lane expressways, surrounded by the U-turning 3-lane highways, surrounded by the speed-bumping subdivision streets to exist within.

Howard County is not strictly for the banished, though. It summons. Over mountains and bean fields white envelopes will arrive, and they will slide quietly under your door, and they will sit on a table in your front hall, and they will lurk on your bookshelf until they tell you that your car, the way you got the hell out of dodge, is due for mandatory emissions testing at the Columbia VEIP. Welcome home, sister. We missed you, Kylie. How long are you staying, Kylie?

I had accompanied my sister to the VEIP before, when my parents first gave her the car, during her junior year of college. I guess she thought we’d pretty much remember how to get there. I should have known that nobody "pretty much" remembers how to get anywhere here. I can "pretty much" get you to the very center of town, but from there you'd be lucky if you didn't accidentally end up getting on beltway, hurtling towards D.C., or wind up driving laps around Great Drum Circle and Gay Topaz Court, or somehow making your way though the endless parking lot for Columbia Crossing Shopping Center, or worse: Columbia Crossing Shopping Center II. Did you want Snowden River Parkway or 175 North? Did you mean to exit at Columbia Town Center? Or wait, no, Dobben Centre? No, Center. Centre? Wait, Town Center is just what they call the mall. That isn't right. Pull over there. You can't pull over there. Make a U-turn and pull over there. Park the car. Flagellate. Good. Now, get out the atlas.