Lingue Lounge

We haven't been everywhere so we can't say for sure, but hotel breakfast lounges must be universal in their sleepy feel. In our hotel, the beds are French (no snuggling allowed), the breakfast fare is decidedly German (fliesch und kase), and the radio station plays tinny 1980's pop in English. The walls in the hallways and the breakfast lounge are decorated with fuzzy murals that feature swans, domed buildings, and green scenes. Resin knick-knacks of squirrels and mice sit at each table. Our table this morning hosted a mouse sitting on top of a pinecone and the poor chap was missing an ear. People perform their sleepy ballets around the food stations and barely talk to one another. This seems true everywhere. It is strange for us to not strike up a conversation with the person next to us. We're used to that, but since our vocabulary is limited to the very basics, we're quiet. (This morning we think we said "you're welcome" when we should have said "sorry." Oops. We got our coffee anyway. Stupid, dream-hazed American.) English is a Germanic language. German should not be so difficult to figure out, but we find ourselves feeling like our tongue and brain are wrapped in rubberbands. In the morning it is an exciting challenge, and by evening even the simplest social transaction is frustrating.

Inconceivable - Bum Genius 3.0

It’s inconceivable. Young parents now look like kids to us. We are speaking about the thirty-somethings you see in the park, pushing prams that look like Transformers (Optimus Primary Years!), sipping their soy lattes, carrying diaper bags full of eco-friendly Bum Genius 3.0 cloths*, and gathering in Mommy/Baby cliques by the swingsets. We’re envious, we admit it. Our baby-making years are over (we decided after one child we were done), but we sometimes wish for the child who still snuggles, coos, writes little misspelled notes, hugs our knees and says “I love you Mommy.” These days, we’re lucky if we get a grunt of acknowledgment from our “baby” as she emerges from the bathroom after one of her marathon makeup application sessions.

Lots of young parents are stay-at-home moms and dads who blog about their experiences in parenting like a guided adventure tour. Like the aging mother we are, we sometimes browse these sites to be reminded of what it’s like to have a small child, to be new at parenting, to have a sense of wonder and amazement at that gas-induced first smile. There are plenty of blogs out there to read, and each one reveals the personality of the blogger-parent. There’s the advice-giver who tags posts by topic “Discipline,” or “Making Your Own Baby Foods” to the funny dad who chronicles his life with twin daughters. Some parents start with the first positive pregnancy test and write about everything from morning sickness to ultrasounds. One young mother wrote all about her struggle to become pregnant, her miscarriages, a heartbreaking stillbirth, and then finally the joy of having a perfectly normal daughter. There’s a lot of honesty out there.

When we were pregnant, we wrote notes and bad poems to our daughter in one of those black and white composition notebooks, and continued to write in it off and on for about four years, tucking photographs and notes to the tooth fairy in-between the lined pages. An entry from December 31st 1994 recounts the amount of words she was able to say (over 100! wow!) , notes that she called caterpillars “nonnies,” and ends with a promise for a “really great” second birthday. It’s an entry resplendent with the lame fatigue of a new mother. The next entry is the day of her second birthday, which was described as a “toddler whirlwind.”

Maybe it’s the honesty and specificity of these parenting blogs that we’re envious of instead of the new parenthood. There is something to be said for being able to get in the car without all the Graco trappings, for engaging our 17 year old daughter in a philosophical conversation, and making the connections between who she was a child and who she is as a young adult. It’s cool, actually. We try not to dwell any poor parenting techniques we might have employed in the past (Did you know the “time out” is now frowned upon?). However, we sure do wonder about some of the benign phrasings being used these days. “You don’t have the freedom to ___________” is used to discourage negative behaviors. We can’t help but fill in the blank with "You don’t have the freedom to wear mommy’s bra as an aviator cap, put a saddle on the cat, and play ‘Pilot on the Prairie.’”

For now, we’re content with maybe getting a dachshund, visiting with our friend’s new babies (we like being an aunt!), and reading about the most elaborate, Star Wars themed first birthday party ever. It's delicious, vicarious living where we don’t have to clean the blobs of Bobba Fett cake off the floor.


* Since when do diapers have version numbers?

Convalesce

About two or three times a year someone in the household is sick, and the pace of our day slows. Our interests change from to-do list items like “wash all the laundry” to spontaneous rug squaring (we’ve noted our mild obsession with the 90 degree angle). The cats have stapled themselves to the bed of the sick one, there’s a candle burning in the kitchen, soup has been administered. The morning light feels like afternoon light washed through a dirty coffee filter. There isn’t much to enjoy on a day when someone you love is running a fever. We just want them to be well, to eat and laugh, and possibly help with the laundry. But there’s a hint of the past in a house that has nothing to offer other than broth and a gentle hug, which seems like enough for now.

Poem at Work

Impermanence

for Brian

"I have seen a substance excellently adapted to the purpose of wiping from paper the mark of black lead pencil."

- Joseph Priestley


The man who founded Unitarian Universalism,
a religion based on the art of listening and thought,
also discovered the eraser.

I often wonder
how much a soul weighs
and whether or not rocks
have them. Also, who
discovered invisible ink?

Even the seasons
give us a few months
of rubbed out landscape,
music rests for sustained
moments of contemplation,
poems swim in white space
like misunderstood kids
on the playground.

There is a thrill
in found notes in the margins
of a stranger’s book, some erased,
but the hand so heavy
that the words “allegory
sucks,” have embossed
the page. The writer wished
them to be impermanent.
So much for that.

I have a hard time with allegory too,
ever since a few weeks before my dad died
when he shared the first sentence
of the last book he ever read:
One day you wake up and realize
you know more dead than living.
Then he saw herons
all over his hospital room.

If you press hard enough
with a Pink Pearl you can erase
the ink from a hundred dollar bill
and encourage it to abandon
its life of currency for one
of art.

When I was eight
and philosophical
with a Hello Kitty pencil,
I wrote my name
over and over
just to erase it.
Pages and pages
of little births
and deaths to see
what it felt like
to be real
and then disappear.

I suggest to a friend
who has lost his mother
that he type all his feelings out
and then hit the delete key,
as if it is just that easy.

I still think every heron I see
is my father.

There is no way
to erase thought.

The Power of Scent - a List

Inspired by my friend Mark's article "Scents My Sister Loved" in Sniffapalooza Magazine, I've made a list of my own evocative scents. For me, scent equals memory. I've always had a very strong sense of smell, which in some ways is a detriment, but mostly it's a gift. I get mocked for my descriptions of tastes because I correlate them to scent. The most recent instance of this was at a dinner with friends where I described the risotto as having a flavor "that reminds me of the smell of 1970's basement bar." No, this was not a good risotto, but I got to the heart of the flavor.

So here are some of the scents that resonate with me on many levels - some are universal in nature (like astrological "predictions" in StarScrolls at the supermarket), others are personal. This is the scent-stuff that tells my stories. I'll come back to this and add as I remember more. It's hard to make a finished, definitive list!

acid eaten paper of old books
pencil shavings
Country Cottage puffball curtains
lemon juice
Arpege
driveway sealer
cat fur
a pile of fall leaves
chimney soot
pine tree sap
firewood
coffee
lychee fruit
olives and feta
basement mold
mint tea mist
toasty scent of a Carhart shirt
stuffed animals
warm baby skin, not baby powder
humid bathroom with hairspray
chestnuts
city street sewage sigh
wet sand
vanilla
triple-layer college apartment carpet
first heat kicking in
rose oil
melting candle wax
acidic tomato vine
sawdust
Sunday dinner Salisbury
birthday cake candle wish
snowman mittens
Grandmom & Pampal's attic warmth
onions frying in olive oil
Thanksgiving celery and onion
turpentine and oil paint
air right after rain
air right before snow
marigolds
summer dusk air
envelope mint
dill
the yellow center of a daisy
honeysuckle
inside of a piano (felt, wood)

Crank

It's a good thing I make a decent soup, because my writing sure isn't satisfying lately. With soup, you can toss in all sorts of ingredients from the fridge - spinach, carrot, onion, tiny meatballs. In writing, I over-think every choice until all I have is broth, and then I wonder if I should have just stuck with the water. One drop of it.

It's Not Me It's You

Yesterday we took a trip to Philadelphia to see some live art at the Philly Fringe Festival. A lot of the shows we wanted to see had high ticket prices ($30), but we were able to find something on the schedule that looked interesting and was friendly to our wallets (free). It's Not Me It's You, by Mayumi Ishino was scheduled for 5 p.m. and was located "on the sidewalk of 3rd Street between Arch and Market," according to the website. So, after an afternoon of touring the Magic Gardens and buying too many pairs of shoes on South Street at Dude's, we found our way to the aforementioned sidewalk. It was one of those bright blue days that shoot through your veins, the air was cool, the bass was turned up in the music of passing cars, and our spirits were high.

At the end of 3rd Street near Arch, in a gated alcove was an installation titled "Emergence," by a potter named Dennis Ritter. A coil of white birds suspended on strings flew up from the ground and into the afternoon patches of light. We stopped to take some photos.



People were milling around to find the performance. Since the performance was described as fluxus and it was free, we thought out loud that maybe the performance was all of us showing up between Arch and Market on 3rd Street. We sat down our bags and were letting the mosquitoes feast on our ankles when we overheard someone with a Blackberry mention that the performance was closer to Church street. We walked up a block or so to find the performers getting ready and a small crowd forming.

Mayumi helped her darkly-clad partner on with his black hat and face covering, and then she placed a mirror in his hands and took out a bouquet of colored Sharpie markers. She started a drawing of a self-portrait on the mirror. Soul music poured from a nearby shop. A truck turning into the alley where the crowd stood, paused so the driver could have a peek and wonder. By the time the first drawing was complete, the woman with the banana in the audience had worked her way down to the empty peel. A man turning down the alley stopped his car, got out, and stood for a few moments to catch the scene before returning to his confused passenger.



Mayumi finished the drawing, tucked the Sharpies back into her fabric bag, and took out a hammer. The entire crowd took a couple of steps back. She swung the hammer back and thwacked the mirror while her partner still held it. The resulting crack in her careful portrait made a perfect web.







The two performers walked down the sidewalk and we followed, and they repeated the same performance - studied portraiture in Sharpie, sudden hammering, packing up and heading to a new destination on the sidewalk. Passerby stopped with their Chinese food containers. A murder of meatheads in football jerseys stopped farther down the sidewalk to say "just a bunch of magic markers." My brother made his presence known to them by saluting a subtle finger and they hulked away. A little girl and boy, breathless from a chase down 3rd Street, stopped near the alley where Mayumi had set up for her latest drawing, panted and watched, then continued their play.

The resulting broken portraits were as haunting as the crowds that formed to see them created. I saw in it the American fracture of self.

Nine Equilateral Triangles, You Think

Jury duty. The little card arrives in the mail stamped in red, its official dates and directions printed with what looks like an old dot matrix. Your partially planned vacation is now on hold, you dread the date, but off you go on the clear bright morning when the calendar matches the card. Of course the weather is bright and cheerful, because you will be spending the day indoors bathed under institutional lighting.

Over a hundred people are called with you, and you all sit in metal folding chairs in the little room with clipboards and forms, and a grey stack of magazines on the windowsill. The cross-section of humanity reminds you of the library; a truly democratic place. Everyone was called to served their civic duty, and here they all share in the joy -- the retired grandmother, the unemployed skater, the over-employed and inconvenienced banker with his fat briefcase, the guy you swear you know from somewhere but can’t place, the woman with four kids who works from home stuffing envelopes. After filling out a form, you are thanked by the judge, and given instructions on what will happen next. When he exits, the room settles into a collective anxiousness. A man in front of you seals envelopes and completes his correspondence. The banker taps at his electronic organizer. Everyone is without their cellphones, and seems adrift in a sea of what-to-do without them. The mother cracks open a romance novel. A few people who recognize each other form conversational cliques. You read. The man in front of you takes out a knitting project, and you watch as each stitch is perfectly executed. You decide he must be a Virgo. His t-shirt looks ironed. The morning passes from quiet anxiousness to lethargy. The grey magazines are perused. Windows are propped open with clipboards.

You are one of the first to be drawn in the random lottery that is the first judge’s panel, and are trooped upstairs into a lustrous courtroom, filled with polished hardwood and an energy you can’t place. The plaintiff and defendant sit in silence as the plaintiff’s lawyer takes two hours to ask questions of the numbered potential jurors. It reminds you of the worst parts of school. A sunny day when your mind wandered, the teacher called on you and your brain fell into a “fight or flight” response. You answer when called. You listen to others respond, and like them less and less. You like the defendant and plaintiff less and less even though they haven’t said a word. You like yourself less for not liking anyone. Where has your kindness gone? You spend the rest of the time figuring out the armature behind the giant painting of Justice on the wall behind the judge’s desk. It has nine equilateral triangles in it.

After the defendant’s lawyer asks a very brief set of general questions, the two sides deliberate on their choices. Papers are passed between them. Finally, jurors are called to their seats. You are not one of them. The rejected return to the waiting room. You spend some time at the window. The trimmed lawn with its tufts of intermittent plantings, linear hedges grown fat into embarrassed forms, remind you that Americans can’t garden. An announcement is made that all are excused for the rest of the week. You walk back to your car in the parking garage with afternoon returned to you like a beloved lost pet, as the plaintiff and defendant dissolve from your mind and into the sun.