Fear

For L.D. because he said I should...

After I asked my last question last night, I started thinking about where the horrible things we do to one another come from. My current obsession with CI undoubtedly fueled this pattern of thought as well since the writers of that show often utilize things that I fervently hope they had to strain a mental muscle to create but fear actually happened somewhere in some form or another.

Whenever I get interested in a topic, I pretty much chew it to pieces until I feel like I've reduced it to whatever truth I can find and keep. Now, as to whether or not these truths I dig out of situations that confuse or horrify me are universal or not, I wouldn't attempt to judge. All I can say is that they work for me. With that caveat in mind....

Pondering the motivations behind the horrors we humans so gleefully perpetrate on one another, I came to the conclusion that the motive behind all these actions is a type of fear. I'm not talking about monsters-under-the-bed fear here. I'm talking about fears that go down to the bedrock of our identities. Some examples might be: Robbery: the fear that one will never be able to possess the things one desires without taking them from someone else; Rape: the fear that one will never be respected or seen as powerful or desirable so one decides to use violence to simulate these things and fulfill an image of potency; Racism: the fear of something different from what one is used to by way of appearance, language, or cultural norm causing one to strike out rather than to reach out for understanding. I thought about it for a long, long time last night, and I feel that fear is at the bottom of it all.

I believe these fears start small: tiny seedling doubts that whisper in the ear of the soul. At first, it's easy to shrug them off or to pretend they're not even really emotions we have. All of us have to struggle with those doubts. I don't know of anyone who could truly say they never have to fight those insidious whispering fears. Those thoughts must drive down their hair-like roots and then lead to words: words of hate, racial epithets, angry arguments, and expressions of dark desire. Once they've been talked about, the thoughts take on a terrible physicality. They lose some of their abstraction and begin to seem reasonable, even arguable. Words blossom into action and another fear-born sliver of humanity's worst is the fruit.

I John 4: 18 talks about the opposite of fear: "There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love." I John 4:18 Note the use of the phrase "drives out." That says to me that once those tiny doubts get going, they send deep roots into us that something has to come and remove to prevent them from maturing into great evils. That also says to me that my fumbling efforts, my search for truth, aren't enough. There has to be an outside force, love, that can kill the fear.

This passage defines that fear-killing love as God (see the chapter linked above for the exact wording). For me, personally, I have found that to be the truth. I don't think this to be a pat answer or an easy solution to a Gordian problem. To receive that love, one has to go to God and be honest. There's nothing that is so difficult as to confess these fears because I think they're tied to us in a very personal way. I also don't think that coming to God is a one-time panacea. I think this coming, this taking of love and killing of fear, must be a daily thing. In the same way that an invasive plant springs up unexpectedly after being sprayed with "weed killer", I think these fears can come back if we don't constantly apply love from the source of love, God.

As I said above, these are just my thoughts on an issue that troubled me. This is the truth that I'm working on right now, that I'm trying to come to a deep understanding of to help myself move forward. You may take it with the proverbial grain of salt, si quiere.

Charger Lust

We took a trip to see my uncle in the northern part of the state, and as we were passing through the city where my mom bought her vehicle, we left it at the dealership for service and took my car on the trip. The dealership had one perfect silver Charger sitting a little to the side of the other used cars.

It gleamed in the afternoon sun like a katana blade. The muscular front end curved toward the ground like the chin of a predator crouched to spring. I swear, I could almost hear the thing whispering to me, soft rustling murmurs of big engine and fast acceleration.

I wanted to trail my fingers across those shining curves to see if it would purr. I wanted to sit behind the wheel and feel those huge tires eat the pavement. I decided that when we got back, I would cast caution to the winds and find out how much they wanted for it.

I knew from the beginning that there was no way I would walk out of there with that gorgeous car. My pittance of a salary would never allow me to make the payments, even if they financed them for a hundred years. I just had to ask. What harm could come?

While they were running the credit checks (a process that increasingly scares me with it thoroughness...next they'll be requesting my shoe size and wanting to know how many serious relationships I've had, why they failed, and what I plan to do now), the dealer threw me the key and said, "Take it for a spin." I wrapped my fingers around the heavy, chunky, key and turned in anticipation. This, this was the moment I'd waited for since I first saw a picture of a Charger in a magazine.

I slid into the seat, slipped the key into the ignition, and the big engine came to life with a throaty rumble. I took it out of the parking lot and I swear it wasn't so much like driving as it was like using the reins on an intelligent animal. I took it out to a four-lane section and put the pedal down. I could feel the power immediately. The back end grabbed like a panther gathering itself for a lunge and the engine roared. I was at 60 in seconds.

I know it's not girly, but there is something inside me that absolutely thrills to those big engines. I wanted to keep it on the floor and run until the gas was gone from the tank. I wanted to roll down the windows and scream "WHOOHOOO!!" I wanted to catch the Mustang that was sedately cruising down the same strip and blow the doors off it. The car went straight to my head.

I forced myself back into the land of reality, and I took the car back to the dealership. Once I was back inside, the news was both what I expected and better than I expected. Of course I couldn't afford it. Had I bought it, I surely wouldn't be writing this. I might be in Mexico by now flying down the highway. I wasn't really disappointed since I never truly expected to get it, but the good news was that my credit check came up with good credit, just not enough to swing a payment low enough to be affordable.

The good news is that after I finish my second MA and my pittance increases to something more like a living wage (super-pittance?), I might actually be able to get one. It might be a "midlife crisis" type of thing, but I want a Charger. I want to get out on the highway and be a danger to myself and others (not really). I want to pull out to pass something and not have that sickening moment of hesitation before the engine hits passing gear.

Even though I didn't come home with that gorgeous machine, I did finally get behind the wheel of one. Like any addict, a taste just makes me crave more, but at least I can say that I've driven one.

Five Questions to Which I Expect No Answers

This is another one of my silly list posts. Here are five things I'd like to ask various people. Keep in mind that some of these people are no longer living:

1) To the assembled Congress: When are you really going to get serious about education and do something other than make unenforceable and useless policies and regulations/kill trees for paperwork?

2) To Jane Austen: Were you satisfied with making the choice to live the life of the mind and the pen instead of settling for a man who may have been good but didn't move your soul? Did you regret not following the expected paths?

3) To my former friend Alexa: Why?

4) To Vincent D'Onofrio: How is it possible to become all the diverse characters that you play? From where to you pull them? How much of them is in you and do they leave any traces when you're done with them?

5) To those willing to kill in the name of their religion: Do you really believe that a loving God calls for you to slay his children and creations? How do you reconcile that?

Just random musings from somebody who should probably go on to bed.

Animal Day

Dillon is still very much in the land of the living. He (I did finally get a chance to flip him, and I think it's a he...it's very young yet) has already earned a nickname PT, short for Pocket Tiger and in honor of PT Barnum's famous axiom about suckers being born every minute.

PT/Dillon is exceptionally loving. All he wants is to be rubbed, scratched and held. He loves belly rubs, chin scratches, rubbing between the ears, and if you'll just hold your hand still in front of him, he will enthusiastically just sort of throw himself at it. To be as tiny as he is, he purrs like a miniature buzz saw.

He's still very staggery, though. I don't know if he's just young and uncoordinated or if he sustained damage yesterday. He can walk on his own, and he even jumped over my hand to get to his little Japanese teacup/dish of fishy food. We will just have to see how everything goes.

I was feeling kind of sick this afternoon, and I lay down for a nap. When I got up, I checked on Dillon and Roux came to see me. One side of her face is swollen. It looks like she got stung by a bee. She's poky this afternoon, too. Being a pit, she's not showing any pain, but if the swelling doesn't go down by tomorrow morning, I guess I'll have to load her up and take her to see the vet.

It's just been an animal day. I hope we'll all be as well or better tomorrow.

People Stink

About 7:30 tonight, Missy started barking her "there's something here" bark. I assumed it was my neighbors out for their evening walk, and I really didn't think about it much. I walked over to the door to call the dogs in for the evening, and Missy was sitting sphinx-style in the yard, tail wagging, in front of a pile of something I couldn't make out. Standing there, I suddenly saw it move.

I was out the door as fast as I could slip on my flip flops and go. As I got closer, I realized it was a kitten by the pointed ears. I had thought it was a rabbit. Sometimes the dogs catch young or unwary rabbits in the fields, but they never bark about it. The kitten was tiny. There was no blood on it, but it was meowing pitifully and didn't seem to be able to move.

Grabbing it as gently as I could, I ran for the house. Its shoulder looked disjointed, and from the wetness of its fur due to Missy's mouth, I couldn't tell what was wrong with it. I found a box from a recent eBay shipment, placed a dishtowel in, and took the box into the kitchen and the strong lights there.

I was so relieved that there was no blood. I figured Missy's prey drive kicked in when she saw the tiny furry moving thing and that she had broken and punctured with her huge powerful jaws. The kitten continued to mew. It tried to hiss at me a couple of times, but mostly, it was confused and afraid.

Taking an old vet syringe, I fed the kitten four full measures of milk. At this point, I wasn't sure if the kitten would even live more than a few moments. It was breathing so hard, and I couldn't tell whether or not Missy had paralyzed it. All I could do was try to make it feel as safe and comfortable as possible for whatever time it had left.

I checked in on it, gave it some more milk, and talked to it and petted it. I was almost shocked to see the tiny front claws knitting as I stroked it gently. If it could move its front paws, maybe it wasn't really paralyzed totally.

I went to eat at Mom and Dad's and came back with a can of soft cat food (mine don't eat cans) and steeled myself to find whatever I would find when I looked in the box. The kitten raised its head and meowed at me. I fed it tiny spoonsful of the fishy canned food, and it ate as if it hadn't had food in a long time. After it ate, it actually pulled itself up for a minute. If it can do that, maybe nothing is broken after all.

I don't know if the kitten is male or female yet. I don't want to traumatize further by turning it over to look. It rolled over when I was rubbing its belly, but its tail was in the way. I decided to name it Dillon after Dylan Thomas because all I could think of when I first put it in the box was "Rage, rage against the dying of the light." The name will fit a male or female. I don't know if it will live yet. It may have injuries inside that I don't know about. All I can do is give it the best home I can for as long as it's with me, the same as I do with all my other animals.

The thing about this whole situation is this: when I picked the kitten up from the yard, I saw a white van parked down the road in the pull-off to our pasture. A person was standing in the pasture looking toward the house. I know, even though I can't prove it, that these are the people who threw this kitten out on me. If Missy was a little more violent and a little less used to cats, she could have torn that kitten into pieces, literally.

Those people were not only so irresponsible that they had not spayed or neutered their adult cats, but were so totally uncaring that they flung a nearly helpless creature out into a yard with a pit bull, and I guarantee they saw Missy when they stopped because she was out and about at that time.

If I could find them, I would shoot them for both actions. Both were acts of senseless, thoughtless cruelty to something too tiny, too innocent and fragile to survive it. Actions like these make me really despise my race. I don't know if Dillon will survive, but I hope that those people never get to own another animal again as long as they live. They don't deserve it. What they do deserve, perhaps some form of divine justice will provide.

Not Much to Say

Today was an odds-and-ends day. I finished out some paperwork for the classes I'll be taking in the fall, filed some stuff, and contacted some people about the various conferences I have to go to next month.

When it cooled off some outside, I went out and started the process of trying to reclaim one of the shrubs in my yard from the muscadine vines that have invaded it. It took me about an hour and a half, but I got a tunnel cut between the privet hedge/muscadine thicket and the thorny apple I'm trying to save. I will have to get Dad's truck and stand in the bed with a saw to cut the rest of it, and that may be more than I get done in the next few precious days of freedom before the rush toward the school year begins.

I did other pruning, too. I finally bought a set of bypass pruners, so I was able to take some large limbs off the chestnut tree and one of the cedars that had gotten out of control. There wasn't a whole lot else to do. I can't really mow since everything is so dry, so I have bahaia sprigs everywhere. I hate bahaia grass. It makes me sneeze and it looks so ugly in my yard.

I'm going to start reading some of the old Conan stories tonight. I borrowed the books from Dad, and we'll see how it goes. I have been doing some online research about Howard, too, and I find it interesting that I have discovered him 100 years after he was born. This is the anniversary year.

Well, as the title said, there wasn't much that was exciting to relate today. It was just an ordinary day. Those are nice to have sometimes.

The Old Place

The land where my mother and uncle grew up is referred to as The Old Place. It's way back on dirt roads, and the only building still standing from the original homestead is an old barn. I don't know how many acres are there, but it's a generous country space.

The parcel that was my grandparents' has been cut into two sections and eventually, each of the three grandchildren will get a segment of it. At one time, Indians lived there. Arrowheads sometimes wash up from the red clay. It was a working farm when my grandparents lived there. Now, we mostly use the various parts of the property as hay fields, tree farms, and animal pasturage.

My uncle and cousins hunt there sometimes, and it's a wonderful place to animal watch. There are turkeys, deer, rabbits, all manner of smaller creatures such as raccoons, and today I startled (as much as it's possible to do) an armadillo. I figure we've also got bobcats there somewhere, but I've never seen one.

Toward the back side, a small creek cuts through the property. In part of the property, there are three fields stepping down to this creek and one across it. It is, quite simply, one of the most beautiful places on earth to me. I used to go every time I was home from Japan and take pictures just to be able to take it with me.

Sitting in the pastures, no sound of the outside world intrudes. It's so rare to find any place now where the sound of traffic doesn't trickle in, but at the Old Place, the main sound is the sighing of an ever-present wind through the tops of the trees. It sits high in the clay hills surrounding Podunk, and because of its position on a high ridge, there is always moving air. The only real sign of modern civilization are an old car rolled up in the edge of the woods and left to die and the silvery flash of a cellular tower two or three hills away. Planes don't fly over often, and traffic is infrequent.

The sky is clear, too. Even though there are deep woods elsewhere on the property, the fields are open enough to watch the weather changing. At night, there is simply no light pollution and it's possible to see the entire sky.

There are times when it becomes absolutely necessary for me to go back there. Today was one of those days. I was wrestling with a big issue and I really couldn't even think at home. I went out to take care of running the church bulletin, and almost without thought, I found myself skidding down the dirt roads and at the gate to the Old Place.

Even though I wasn't wearing "Outdoor Clothes", I slid under the gate and walked into the second field, the Red Field, and just sat down. The sky was golden with the light that only comes just before a storm. As I sat there, I watched the ballooning storm clouds roll across the horizon. It was almost hypnotic. I wish I had taken my camera.

Through the magic of cellular technology, I was finally able to call a friend and talk about what was bothering me and find some relief. I don't think I could have made that call if I hadn't been there. The line from Gone with the Wind comes to mind where Rhett tells Scarlett that she draws strength from the red clay of Tara. For me, it's not an antebellum plantation, but I feel that way, too.

Someday, I want to build a house there. Maybe only a small one that I can go to on the weekends or something, but I would like to have a place there in all that peace that I can go to when I need to recharge.

The Whole Wide World

I got a copy of this film today and watched it. I think it's one of the best movies I've seen lately. Without trying to spoil anything, I cried like a baby at the end.

Dad has always loved Robert E. Howard. He has most of the Conan series in tattered paperbacks, both Howard's and the fruit of those who followed him. Even though I was raised up on Michael Moorcock's Elric with dashes of Lovecraft and later masters like Brooks, Cook, Anthony, and scores of others, I have read very little of Howard. He was the original grand master of them all. Between Tolkein and Howard, almost all of the world of fantasy is spanned. Too many modern fantasy authors are bad imitations of one or the other style, like an image that's been photocopied so many times it's lost its original resolution. I stopped reading the genre about two years ago because I was so bored with the predictability of it. Only a few authors still interest me, Salvatore, Jordan (when I can summon up the patience to make a flow chart to keep up with all his dadgummed characters), but maybe I need to go back to where it all began and rediscover there. Now I am fascinated, and I'm going to have to borrow those books from Dad.

The portrayal of Howard absolutely broke my heart. Howard had universes in his head and the gift to get those out and onto paper. He understood the value of those places and was willing to go there and tell anyone who didn't support that to go to hell. I respect that. He was focused on the thing that he most needed to do and he understood what that thing was. I don't think he fully understood, at least based on the film Howard, how to reach for and hold the human love that would have allowed him to truly flower and live. What would he have become if he'd had someone to be the bedrock from which he sprang? The place to return to from soaring on strong wings? Could he ever have actually drawn from that stability or was he doomed from the start? That story calls to me.

I, like most of us mere mortals, have never been able to get my universes any farther than my conscious brain to play with them. I cannot write fiction worth the proverbial tinker's darn. In the film, Howard says something to the effect of you can't do something else and write, too. I think maybe that's true. Maybe that's why my fiction has always been one step up from toilet tissue. I don't put any time into it, not the sweat and blood immersion that it needs. The most detailed fiction I've done was for use in a game, not for the actual telling of the story. I have stories I'd like to tell, but I don't think I have the discipline to tell them.

For that matter, my poetry suffers from my not taking enough time to let it flow. For me, the instance of inspiration is more like an inescapable cloud burst that has to be channeled at that moment or lost rather than the deep river in which he seemed to wade. It comes over me and I have to write. I have to put it down. Later, I come back to it and tinker. Usually, during that first phase, I write it down as fast as possible, and then I have to get away from it. It bursts out and it clears away whatever thing inspired it. It doesn't really take its final form for a long time after that.

I have often wondered what it would be like to simply take a year and write. A friend of mine from college used to tell me that I needed to do that. I'd like to move somewhere like Costa Rica and spend a year in a shack on the Pacific Coast. Something Elizabeth Bishop. However, I don't know that such a luxury will ever be mine. To do that, one has to have some means of support, and God knows I am so deep in the financial hole now that I may never have large amounts of disposable income again.

The film left me moved as few films do these days and curious. Both of these things are good things in my book. It brought back to me several things that I haven't paid enough attention to lately. It made me hungry for those wonderful worlds of my childhood. Not the childish worlds, but the worlds of swords and albino kings and dragons that shaped me. It's been too long since I took the time to dive deep into those rivers and let the current take me.

Getting Something Done

Today I finally escaped the inertia of the couch and started working on my bathroom. So far, I've gotten the top layer of the old contact paper off the walls. I am working on the paper layer underneath. Hopefully by the end of the day tomorrow, I'll have clean walls to work with.

It's nice to finally get something started, if not completely done. This month, money has been tighter than usual, and for some reason, that's made me very lethargic. I suppose not being able to go through our local home improvement and get inspiration or knowing that I can't afford the paint and other things that I need have killed off my drive to get this going, but now that I've stripped this first layer, I am starting to regain some of it.

The bathroom won't be fancy when I'm done, but maybe it won't look like such a badly cobbled-together mess. It's the worst-looking place in the whole house right now. I am going to finish the walls, and with some clean paint and something done to the floor, maybe it can change. Unless I stencil Day-Glo clowns all over it and installed shag carpeting, I don't really see how it can get worse.

Well, I'm in the final stages of a major Goren fix (thank you USA Network), and I think I might actually be able to go to sleep before 2:00 a.m. Maybe my insomnia has been caused by the horrid bathroom? More likely, my recent indulgent sloth is responsible, but isn't it handier to blame it on the inanimate? :) Of course, I do have another Greg Iles sitting on the kitchen counter. I know if I crack the covers, I won't be able to put it down until I'm done. Temptations, temptations.....

Nothing Lyrical Here, Folks

Just one more thing to say before I go to bed....I saw another CI with the other set of detectives. Are they going to get better? They need to get personalities and strong ones fast, or I think I'm going to cry. I really liked Chris Noth in other things I've seen him in, but what's going on here? It's like they've got him reined in tightly or something. I know he's good; they need to let him out of the box some.

Of course, you know I'm prejudiced. How can anybody compare with the lovely and delectable (a word I did tell my AP kids not to apply to people, but it fits) Det. Goren and his intelligent and witty partner? Maybe I'll get my Goren fix tomorrow night. Oh that the real thing was running around somewhere....all 6'4" of him....

Sean Connery, etc.

I'm watching the AFI award for Sean Connery, and I am swept with affection for this man I do not know. It occurs to me that I have never seen a movie he's been in that I didn't enjoy. He brings something, that indefinable element that made the great stars, to all his projects. After all, not everybody could have pulled off a red doublet and eyeliner in Highlander. Not everybody could have addressed a woman as "Plenty O'Toole" with a straight face.

He has always been sexy. I won't lie and say anything different. Men like him don't exist free range. He was always charming and elegant, even when he was scruffy or gruff, and most importantly to me, he always seems to be having fun with his job and his life. Every interview I've ever seen with him reflect his love of his career and his profession. I've never heard him act like he was better than the rest of the world or somehow entitled because of his success.

There aren't many like him left, I think. Many of today's stars seem so caught up in the fame part of their job that they always seem conscious of it. Tom Cruise is to me the prime example of this. There's never that submersion of himself into his character that I think has to be there. Tom Cruise is always Tom Cruise in everything he's in. The ego overrides all, and I must say he scares me. I keep waiting for him to declare himself God or some stupid thing like that.

Now, I'm not necessarily knocking attitude. After all, I LOVE Bette Davis, and we all know she was the queen of attitude. The thing is, her attitude, when she flexed it, was always appropriate within her roles. Those big stars all projected an inner fire. The great stars were famous because of what they accomplished. Their drive took them into the public eye.

Now it seems like celebrity is THE only goal. So many of the modern ones just seem like voids. They don't seem to be having any fun with it. It must be a demanding job to force yourself into somebody else's mold every day all day and be believable at it; why would you do it if it wasn't fun? I think that if a person didn't truly love it, it would have to suck the marrow out of him or her and leave him or her a shell, especially since there's no such thing as a private life for a public figure. Maybe that's what's so wrong with so many of them.

Maybe they're supposed to be that way. God knows I know NOTHING about acting. It's never been a calling I felt much inclination toward. The closest I come to acting is creating persona in poems or in the imaginary stories in my head. However, I am grateful to the ones who do it well and make it great. Even if I don't understand the sacrifices and the processes necessary to create these great and lasting characters, the Bonds, the Norma Desmonds, and the Baby Janes, I am lucky to have them preserved to cherish again and again.

Small Pleasures

It was a banner day for me today. I made four major errors in our church bulletin. I still don't know how I screwed it up that badly, but there you have it. It was also my turn to play the offertory tonight, and that always makes me a little nervous. You'd think that it would pass after all these years, but the tiny butterflies of nervousness never fail to flutter. The offertory went better than it had any right to based on my amount of practice, but by the time church was done, I was in need of a little treat.

After church, I drove down an old highway toward a small town near Podunk that has fast food. Podunk, bastion of civilization that it is, is far too tiny to have even a McDonald's. Most of the time, that's a nice trait, but occasionally one needs an infusion of grease and salt. This other town is probably three or four times as large as Podunk, and it has an alluring assortment of grease with the additional assuring factor that none of my students will be behind the counter of these places like they might be if I went in to the town in which I teach. Anybody whose ever been a teacher can appreciate the potential importance of that.

There are two ways to get to this place, one a major interstate and one a rural highway. I like to take the highway. It goes past fields, through patches of deep woods, and over river sloughs. When I was a child, hundred-year-old oak trees lined the road and were like a canopy shading it on even the hottest summer days. Those oaks were cut long ago; too many drunks did themselves irreparable harm by crashing into them, I suppose.

Dirt roads intersect the highway at regular intervals, and almost all of them look like you could take a left or right turn on them and disappear into the lush piney green through which they slice their tiny knife-thin red lines. I always entertain the thought that one night, I'll just pick one at random and head off into whatever may be out there. Of course, since I don't have the Evil Jeep anymore, that's become a riskier proposition than it once was. PT Cruisers, as I've noted before, aren't really good for dirt road exploration.

Sunday nights are when MPB, our state's public radio station, broadcasts Echoes and Hearts of Space. I have been hooked on these since high school. The music is good for just drifting in the world of thought. Rarely are there interpretable lyrics, and the international mixture of artists sends spirals of thought through me like drops of dye slowing dripping into a basin of still water. They make interesting patterns. Those two shows were the first two experiences I'd ever had with ambient music. Now, of course, it's everywhere. Satellite radio can provide aficionado with 24-hours of commercial-free feed. Then, though, it was a special treat that only came on Sundays.

Now, I still enjoy it on Sunday nights. Driving down the old highway in the indigo gloaming, my imagination always runs wild. The open fields of a huge farm span both sides of a mile or two of the road. At this time of the year, there's a crop of corn and a crop of sunflowers growing. Because it's open farmland, there's very little light pollution, and on a clear night, the skies are wide open. It would be an excellent place to take a blanket and watch stars. It looks like something out of a dream. During the summer, the music and the light mix, and my heart always feels calm.

It's a small pleasure. I don't go every Sunday night. Sometimes, I come straight home after church or wind up staying late to work on something. Sometimes I just stay and talk. On the nights I do make this journey through rural Mississippi, I always try to hold the peace and carry it with me for whatever the week ahead may bring.

Rain and Falling Trees

"The elements have come to destroy us..." (just for Clip, who will understand)

We finally got rain today. We've been very lucky that we're not as dry as Texas and some of the western states, but things have been dry. Even going down the driveway has raised a cloud of good old red Mississippi dirt.

We didn't get a huge amount of water, but another wave of the front is supposed to move through. At least now maybe we'll be able to breathe and the danger of fire will be suppressed. For some reason, every fool in the free world decides to burn when we haven't had rain for a long time. I don't exactly understand their reasoning. Perhaps there's no reasoning to understand.

Before the rains, there was a huge and powerful wind. It came up suddenly, and the trees were swirling in those scary, tornado-like circles like inverted wind-driven pendulums. It was the kind of wind that makes me feel as if I might be able to spread my arms out and fly. Of course, if that actually happened, I don't guess it would be like my childhood dreams of flight and would probably, at some point, involve smacking into something immobile.

Since Katrina, we've had lots of trees die from hidden damage or come down, so I was anxiously going from door to door and watching the skyline. Isn't it funny what sorts of irrational things you do in situations like that? Really, I have to laugh at myself. What was I going to do if a tree DID fall toward the house? Use my superpowers to make it go away? Catch it?

Anyway, I did pace and fret, and I stepped outside to secure a garbage can on the south porch. As I was tinkering with it, I heard a huge thud and saw a movement from the corner of my eye. The giant dead pecan tree in my front yard had fallen.

It was nothing more than a leafless trunk, and at some point this summer it was going to be removed anyway, but I have many childhood memories of that tree and have to admit that I was somewhat sorry to see it fall. That pecan, one of three big ones in the front yard, was our monkey swing tree. My two cousins and I spent hours and hours entertaining ourselves with the simple wooden round and rope swings that hung from the strong limbs of that tree. I'll never forget being at the top of the swing arc and having the rope break. I was actually airborne that time; unfortunately, the landing pretty much knocked me out.

The tree I remember has been gone a long time, though. It started dying when I was in college, and pieces of it have been falling for years. Today's wind didn't really destroy my memory tree. I'll always remember all the games and injuries my cousins and I garnered playing there. Tomorrow or the next day when the rain clears, Dad and I will use the tractor to remove the husk. The memory will stay.

Things I'm Not

I'm having an odd moment, and this is what's come of it. So often, we try to define ourselves by what we are. This doesn't really come up to the standard of self-defining, but I was thinking about some odd things in my sleep-deprived state and, thus, the list was born:

I am not:

- patient (although I really do try)
- wise (although I want to be)
- short
- a person who suffers fools gladly
- good at math
- riddled with existential angst
- afraid to ask questions about anything
- athletic
- able to sleep right now
- in Japan, Thailand, Costa Rica, Ireland, or England (but, Lord, I wish I was)
- a good eBay seller, apparently, although I tried
- tolerant of my own weaknesses
- going to go raid the fridge, despite the knowledge that cheese awaits me
- an organist who practices enough
- ever going to meet the wonderful Vincent D'Onofrio
- filled with regret
- sure about where I'll be in five years
- always good and/or kind
- knocking myself, but rather, I'm being brutally honest
- fencing right now, but I soon will be (Yippee!!)
- designed to teach little kids
- going to tolerate being backed into a corner
- easily impressed or intimidated
- usually at a loss to express my opinions
- always careful enough to express my value of the opinions of others
- ever going to be tired of Roux hugging me when I come home
- ever going to be chic or ultra-stylish
- unhappy with who I am
- having any luck with eHarmony
- rich enough to afford a full set of Fire King Restaurant Ware plates
- in contact with my friends enough
- eating fried chicken or green curry
- going to bore you with any more of these random things

Goodnight, one and all.

Collections

I was just making my evening check on my eBay auctions, both bidding and selling, and I was thinking about the things we collect. As I've said in a previous post, one of the best things about eBay is that no matter what your particular passion is, somebody on eBay is bound to be selling at least one type of that thing.

What is it that our collections say about us? I'm sure a psychologist/psychiatrist could have a field day with this topic, but I really wonder. What does it say about me that I collect Fire King Restaurant Ware, PEZ, vintage scarves, maneki neko, vintage tablecloths, and old fashioned Santas? I have friends who collect GI Joe, porcelain clowns, NASCAR, teacups, ladybugs, lunchboxes, horse figurines, nutcrackers, and all kinds of other stuff. What is it about these objects that satisfies? Is it simply the thrill of acquisition?

I used to think that the collection bug was primarily an American thing, but I was disabused of that notion the first time I went to Costa Rica in college. My host mom there collected geese. Her whole house was filled with goose things. My Japanese friends collected everything from purses to porcelains to Hello Kitty. Everybody has something.

Do we do it just so our friends and family can give us gifts? I've often thought that everybody ought to be required to collect something just so people can find something for special occasions without having to go generic with a gift card. My best friend does the ladybug thing. I am always on the lookout for something interesting with ladybugs for her. It's almost as much fun for me to find something unusual for her as it is to find some new trinket for myself.

Do we define ourselves with these collectibles? I could probably do some amateur analysis on myself and say that I have a strong connection to vintage and kitsch based on my list of collectibles. I am not conscious of collecting these things for that reason. I don't think anybody I know is making a conscious statement about his or her life based on his or her collection. I guess somebody might collect something because it was expensive, to show that he or she can afford it. Maybe that's a conscious thing. I wonder if the people who collect for that reason get the same joy from their collections.

I can walk into my office, flip on the light, and my PEZ collection never fails to bring a smile to my face. I can remember finding or winning most of them. Going into Dollar Tree and seeing a new seasonal display of PEZ always quickens my pulse and rifling through the bins and coming up with a full set of the latest release always gives me a "PEZ rush." I guess as long as I can be made happy for about $4, I shouldn't question it.

The Search for the Dog

Tonight Missy played a cruel dog joke on me. Since the weather was not quite so hot today and since my cat Yoda is about ready to kill anything that moves (and somethings that don't) from dog-induced stress, I left Missy outside today. She usually comes in during the middle of the day and sleeps during the hottest part of the afternoon. Today, she came and peered in the door with her right ear aloft quizzically, but I didn't let her in.

About six, I started trying to get the dogs in for supper. Yelldo came running with his perky little tail wagging as usual, but no Roux. I called and called, received no response, decided that Missy wasn't ready to come in yet and sat down to eat my own supper. Seven came and went; no Roux looking in the screen door.

At eight, I started calling her and walking around the yard. I checked the ditches and the pasture. No Roux. I started getting really worried and not a little panicked. When the last of the day faded, I came to the house, got Roux's training clicker and turned on every outside light attached to the house. With the porch lights blazing, I made the rounds again calling and clicking. No Roux.

I grabbed my car keys and got in my car. I took my poor little PT Cruiser out into the pasture to the far end and called and clicked. No Roux. I managed to back and turn without hitting a tree or a terrace row and crept back up to the house. I love my car, but it wasn't made for off-roading, even in a recently mown pasture.

I decided to go up and down the road and check the ditches again. By this point, I had already started crying. I couldn't stop thinking about Britta and how similar the situation was. I was on my way down the driveway, and I heard the faint jangling of a collar tag through my open windows. I slammed on the brakes, looked in my rearview mirror, and there was Missy. I literally felt my heart unclench.

I jumped out of the car and grabbed her. She was panting heavily like she'd just come a long distance or had been running hard. It's possible that she followed me from the far end of the pasture. I don't know where she came from, but I am so happy she's back. I loaded her into the car and we came back up the driveway. When we got back to the house, I brought her in (on a leash) and she went directly to her water bowl and drained it. I fed her, she ate, and she immediately curled up on the loveseat and went to sleep. She seems exhausted.

I guess all this was her way of paying me back for leaving her to her own devices all day. I have some news for her....it's going to be a LONG time before she gets to have an outside-all-day day again soon. Of course, that may have been the point to begin with.....

Cleaning

I forced myself to take a break from reading today and actually accomplished some cleaning. I worked on the back storage room. It's not done by any stretch of the imagination, but I have this Clean Sweep euphoria about being able to see even the tiny patch of floor that I opened up today.

That room has been a convenient dump site for years. It is the last bastion of crap-in-boxes, that phenomenon anyone who has moved a lot is painfully familiar with. My goal is to make it all go away. The room will probably still have a bunch of stuff stored in it, but I want to be able to walk in and not have to vault over stuff to get to wrapping paper or my store-in-inside holiday stuff. This past year, I simply didn't put out all my Santas because I couldn't get to them. Absurd.

One day, I'd like for that room to be a bedroom again, but I have to clean out the storage van (an eighteen-wheeler trailer) first. That's not a task to start when the day''s base temperature is over 100. Maybe I can do it in stages. A lot of it needs to be thrown out or sent to someone who can use it. Who knows? Maybe I'll find something wonderful to eBay and be able to afford some shelving for the van. Right now, there's a really scary system of old doors and wooden spools holding everything up. Every time I go in there, I am secretly afraid the whole thing is going to fall down like a house of cards.

Once I get everything out of the back of the house and to its final destination (charity or the dump), I will be a happy woman. Hopefully this week will be the magic week in which all that stuff and the big stuff that's collected near the barn will all leave my place. Increasingly I feel like Thoreau about things. The railroad is riding on me in the form of the seemingly neverending piles of junk I have to shuffle from place to place in this house. I want it Zen, stripped to the bone essentials.

Actually, that may not be strictly true, else why would I keep eBaying? I guess it's better to say that I want things of my own choosing and that are useful rather than things that have followed me from another life somewhere and no longer function for me. The guy on Clean Sweep (and believe it or not, I cannot think of his name as much as I've seen that show) always talks about not confusing keeping an item with keeping a memory. The first time I heard that, it really struck me. I don't have to keep the set of ceramic geese Granny bought at a yard sale somewhere to remember her. To be honest, I do have a lot of things that I love and won't get rid of because they were this person's or that one's, but this guy's philosophy has helped me get rid of lots of things that hopefully have gone to make somebody else happy.

Well, Law and Order: CI is on, and even though it's not Goren and Eames, I am going to watch it and go to bed. Where is Goren? I need a tall, cute, smart guy fix....

Law and Order: CI

I have gotten hooked on Law and Order: Criminal Intent. I have seen the other varieties of the show, but I love CI. Each evening, I tune in to USA's seemingly endless stream of Law and Order episodes and watch Goren and Eames tear it up. I always love to see the little details that give away the criminals.

My favorite part of the show is the closing of the trap at the end, though. I love the way they mess with the criminal's mind to make him or her confess. Goren always find the right psychological buttons to push and it's fascinating.

I also have to admit that I'm sort of infatuated with Detective Goren. How could you not be? The character is incredibly passionate about what's important to him, super, super intelligent, and, I have to say, very easy on the eyes. I have no idea what the actor who plays him might really be like, but I bet the character's intensity comes from the actor.

Knowing that TV is highly unrealistic, I wonder if any of what goes on in these shows is like real police work. I don't mean the various ways people find to be evil to each other. That I believe is real. I wonder about the solving of the crimes.

Police work is something I don't think I could ever do. I don't think I could ever get the requisite distance to be able to focus and solve the crimes. I think I'd just cry over every victim.

Well, another bad guy has been successfully foiled, so I guess it's time to go get supper from somewhere. Sometime around 10:00, they'll be on again....

Summer Evenings

Tonight is one of those most wonderful of summer evenings in the South. The humidity has abated this week. I don't know what meteorological fluke is responsible for this, but I'm grateful. It's cool enough to enjoy working outdoors and to have the windows and attic fan on in the evenings. The sun stays out until past 8:00, and those final wonderful lingering hours of sunlight are the golden part of summer. I wish I could catch that light in a jar and carry it around with me always.

There's a softness to Southern summer nights like this that I've never found anywhere else. The air always smells of fresh-cut grass, late-blooming honeysuckle, or gardenias. Right now, the sweetness of it is rushing in through my windows replacing the stale, recycled air that has been trapped in for so long when the A/C is running. The flow of it and the fragrances make me feel centered and, for lack of a better description, home.

Nights like this always bring out the urge to go walking in the woods. I wish I had a good walking path cleared out that I could use when the world turns velvety like this. Katrina felled huge trees onto the only good path on my property, and we've not cleared them, so I suppose that urge will have to be suppressed. It's probably just as well. Snakes and other critters are bound to be enjoying this gentle summer, too.


I'll probably be up much too late tonight with a good book (Greg Iles may become a favorite author if this book continues to be this good), my two crazy dogs, and the soft comfort of Mississippi wrapped around me like the coolness of a clean white cotton feed sack quilt.

Yard Redux

Guilt dragged me back outside yesterday, and I finished off the yard. I used the trimmer, and it looks a lot better. In fact, the trimmer made things look so good that I was inspired to pull out my pruning shears and hedge clippers. I suppose I got a bit carried away.

It's nice to be able to walk around the yard and have it look like somebody reputable lives here, though.

Well, that's it for tonight. Just a quick note. Maybe I'll get philosophical or have an exciting day tomorrow.

Yard

I have to admit, I'm not much into yard work. My mom spends every sunlit hour outside building, landscaping, and grooming. Her yards are a work of art. Mine are more like a velvet Elvis painting.

I do mow once a week or once every two weeks depending on rain. My big orange Husqvarna zero turn helps that be a relatively pain-free task. It's a big grownup go-cart, and I still get a kick out of riding it.

I do not keep them up like Mom does, though. I don't like the weedeater and I absolutely hate the push mower. My yard, because it has steep grades in some places, requires both. It usually winds up with neatly groomed flats and raggedy slopes.

Right now, it's about due for me to get out with the trimmer and the push mower again. I generally wait until I just can't stand to look at it anymore before I can force myself to do something to it. I think today is that day. Maybe, though, I can just ignore it until it gets too dark to do anything and escape the chore for another day.

Selling on eBay

Today I joined the ranks of sellers on eBay. I am trying to clean out some things that I don't use and to which I have no great sentimental attachment.

When I moved into this house, the cabinets and closets were full to bursting with things from my grandparents and other family members. I have slowly been sorting through it all. Right now, I'm auctioning off a set of Frankoma Plainsman dishes. Granny got them at some garage sale somewhere anyway, and I am not attached, so we'll see how it goes.

Now that the items are listed, I feel a little anxious. What if nobody bids? I feel almost protective towards those blue green dishes. Strange, but true. I am not looking to make millions, but I do hope the items go "to a good home."

Well, it's late, or early, depending on your point of view, and I think I'll try to go on to bed. Tomorrow promises to be busy. Dad is going to come down and we're going to try to finally finish off the great water heater problem and install a ceiling fan on my porch. Hopefully, we'll not have a machine curse day and we can get everything done.