Retro-Eco

The really fabulous thing about living out here in the country in a house various members of my family have lived in for more than 50 years is that many of the tools of the past are still around ready for use.  Sometimes, they break down due to natural age, and I have to make the decision as to whether or not it is worth it to replace them.

One item I have never had a moment's qualm about keeping in repair is the old-fashioned clothes line my grandmother had situated in the back yard.  She had hers originally strung through huge old fence posts and cedar trunks more than head high.  Even cedar gives up eventually, and the second year I lived here, I had to figure out what to do about it.

The vocational center at school has a welding program, and my dad had them build me a new set of posts, huge steel Ts, to hold updated line.  We set them in quick-setting concrete, strung them with the plastic-sheathed steel cable, and it was ready to go.

Until Katrina dropped a tree on it.

Some time later, we dug up the pole, took it back to school, got the top bar rewelded on, and reset it in the ground.  Since that time, it's been standing sentry like Granny's version did for so many years.

I don't use it all the time, but when I wash all my bedding, quilts, comforter, sheets, all, I use it to sun dry all of that whenever possible.  Today, I got up, stripped down the bed, took the feather mattress out and draped it over a porch stair rail, and began the process of laundering all the fabrics.  Then I carried each load out to the line and hung it up.

Even though it's an old-fashioned thing, I like it for several reasons.  First of all, it keeps me from having to run my dryer and heat up my house unnecessarily.  Even though the laundry area is out of the way, there's no reason to make things harder on my poor old air unit than they have to be.  Second, it's nice to feel like I'm somehow saving electricity.  It never ceases to amuse me that so many of the things that people now embrace as "eco-friendly," my grandmother did on a daily basis because that was all there was.  I suppose there really is nothing new under the sun. Finally, I love how it feels to sink down in the bed at the end of a day of cleaning and smell that freshness that only comes from something dried outdoors.

The only real drawback comes in the form of a never-ending worry that it's going to rain.  It's always a sort of lottery.  Today, for example, I went to Wal-Mart earlier, and I carefully checked the weather forecast before I left.  Nothing but clear skies.  While I was wheeling up and down the aisles, my phone chirped at me, and when I looked, a severe thunderstorm warning had showed up.  At that point, there was nothing to do about it.  I just sighed and moved on to the pet food, hoping I could get my shopping done and get home before the bottom fell out of it.

Well, the skies are still sunny although now and then a threatening cloud passes by.  In a couple of hours, I'll go out and gather everything in, make up the bed, finish up the chore.  When I do, I will feel connected to my Granny.  I remember going out to the clothes line with her to gather in the towels or Grandaddy's overalls.  I remember the little bag she'd made that fit on the clothesline that held wooden clothespins.  It's a small thing, but they are the ones that matter.

Uh-oh.  Even as I typed that, I heard thunder.  Time to get the clothes off the line, I think.....

New Year's Eve and Cookies

It's New Year's Eve, and I'm celebrating with my usual flair.  I have lit the candles that will take me into the new year, and everything I could be in charge of as far as cleaning (which isn't much, actually) is done.  The house hasn't been scrubbed and polished to the nth-degree as I usually do on New Year's Eve, but I did sweep today (bad luck to do it tomorrow), and I washed all the pans and bowls I used during today's manic baking spree.  They're quietly drying in the new little stainless steel drainer in my sink.

Usually at this time of the year, I'm full of introspection, full of thoughts of the past and worries about the future, but not this year.  I'm watching Criminal Minds in my comfy pajamas, and there is an absolute minimum of navel gazing.

And that, of course, is because I made oatmeal raisin cookies today.

This seems like a total non-sequitur, I know, but bear with me.  I'm going somewhere with this.  I promise.

I remember when I had my myomectomy while I was still in Indiana. There was a period after that when all things in my life sort of fell into focus.  I stopped caring about a bunch of things (and one notable person) who I'd allowed to cause me absolute woe.  I started doing things I had always wanted to do instead of smiling wistfully and saying, "Someday."  To use a phrase that is endlessly new-agey and trite, I found myself.  Rather, I found a new version of myself.  I really liked that person.  (Of course, one of the things that happened during that time was going to a meeting of the kendo club, and so the evil T came into my life and things sort of took a hard left for the worse....)

I feel that clarity of purpose again now.  I've been sick for...  God. I don't even know.  Between the migraines and the Topamax and this other, I've been sick for years and years.  I'd say that in just the past calendar year, I've had less than two weeks a month where I felt like doing anything other than surviving.  Now, though, even with the limitations currently on me with recovery, I am finding that other person I lost again.

There were so many things I'd lost along with that other me.  Many of them wouldn't mean a thing to anyone but me, but I guess that's what life is made of, the things we endow with importance for ourselves.  From the time I was in high school, I used to make a batch of sourdough bread every week.  I started it with the idea of giving a loaf (or so) to my grandparents.  That ritual got even more important to me when my Granny got sick.  She couldn't eat a lot of things, but she could eat my sourdough.  I had starter that I kept religiously fed for years.  It died when I went to Japan, clearly, but when I came back, I tried repeatedly to get my routine back again.  As my health declined, so did my resolution.  I just mixed up batch two of the bread today.  Every step of the process made me feel good.

It wasn't just the bread.  The cast iron skillets that are the legacy of both my grandmothers came to me shiny and well-conditioned.  Yesterday, I decided to make cornbread from my Granny's recipe for the first time in what I guess is probably three years, and when I took it out, even though I'd taken pains to store it properly, it was in need of care.

That was one of the moments (and I've had several lately) when how much I'd let go and how much of myself I'd lost really hit home.  My life before the surgery had become about the quickest possible solution, the easy path to finish the necessary before I fell down.  Now it doesn't have to be.  Oh, there's nothing particularly complicated about the foods I'm making.  My grandmother's cornbread is fabulous, but cornbread isn't a recipe requiring Cordon Bleu training.  The aforementioned oatmeal cookies I put together today weren't complex, either. The thing is, I CAN make them now. I don't have to run for the couch and collapse.  Pain and weakness aren't pinning me down. I have the energy and the will again to do something that I enjoy because it connects me to my past and allows me to share with my family.  Somehow, oddly, ironically, by losing something, I have managed to become more whole.

It's not just the cooking.  My house has been full of projects that I was "going to get around to" but never have.  I have been systematically fixing, changing, and moving.  I've been making things I pinned on Pinterest for someday happen now.  It's not perfect, but I'm making progress.  I have two great piles left to tackle, but as I look around my living room now, this house reflects me again.  (And maybe those two great piles are representative of me, too, heh....)  It feels like home.

So I'm back to the salad days.  Maybe it's the baking days for me.  Whichever.  I can't say that there aren't moments of difficulty and sadness, and I'm not such a sunshine-dazzled fool that I believe everything is always going to be fabulous, but right now, I have to say, things are pretty good.  That's a nice place to be as I get ready to leave 2013 and head into 2014.

And now, I'm going to have a cookie.  Happy New Year to you wherever you are.

Sufis

For some reason, just tonight, that evening in Istanbul when we saw the Sufi performance is stuck in my head.  It's almost like I'm there in that domelike converted bath chamber seeing and hearing it again.

I remember seeing all of them, being interested in the diversity of ages and expressions on the men as they stepped into the circle for the performance.  One looked so young and somehow nervous.  One was stately and older.  One had the face of an angel.

I remember the way their dance began, the way their arms slowly unfurled to their dancing positions as though it were something as natural as a plant's leaves slowly growing under the sun.  I remember the way they seemed to switch off the act of leading until everyone had started the pattern.  It was soothing and compelling.  It made me wonder what it would be like to be one of them, to spin and spin and accept and let go at the same time....

Once I knew the symbolism of what they were doing, something I found out later, it was even more powerful, and it continues to be even now that they are spinning only in my mind.  I'm stealing this from Wikipedia because it's faster than my telling it all myself.  Semazen is another word for sufi:

In the symbolism of the Sema ritual, the semazen's camel's hair hat (sikke) represents the tombstone of the ego; his wide, white skirt (tennure) represents the ego's shroud. By removing his black cloak (hırka), he is spiritually reborn to the truth. At the beginning of the Sema, by holding his arms crosswise, the semazen appears to represent the number one, thus testifying to God's unity. While whirling, his arms are open: his right arm is directed to the sky, ready to receive God's beneficence; his left hand, upon which his eyes are fastened, is turned toward the earth. The semazen conveys God's spiritual gift to those who are witnessing the Sema. Revolving from right to left around the heart, the semazen embraces all humanity with love. The human being has been created with love in order to love. Mevlâna Jalâluddîn Rumi says, "All loves are a bridge to Divine love. Yet, those who have not had a taste of it do not know!"

The Sufis have been turned into big-time tourist capital by Turkey.  Almost any product you can imagine can be found with their image on it. Every country has something like that, some symbol from their past they've turned into a cultural shorthand for commercial endeavours.  I sort of think it's a shame that this really deeply personal thing has been used for that.

On the other hand, maybe it's all good.  Maybe the symbolism and the beauty of it can reach out through all the tshirts and spinning glass dolls somehow.  Maybe when people use the Iznik trivet with the brightly painted dancers on its surface, some of the original intention is passed along.  I am not wise enough to know.  All I can say with any certainty is that, along with the Hagia Sophia's golden dome, the slow wheel of Sufis rests permanently in my mind.

Flying Roadtrip

Thursday, my best friend and I took a flying roadtrip west.  We started in Port Gibson to see the giant golden hand on the top of First Presbyterian.  From there, we went on the back road that never ends to see Windsor Ruins.  Finally, we finished up in Natchez where we ate at Mammy's Cupboard and toured Longwood before we had to turn back home.

I'd been on mostly this same trip last year and shot a ton of pictures.  It was so different having my friend along.  We talked in that way that people who have known each other forever can do as we traveled, and it wasn't necessarily that anything earthshattering was said.  It was just nice to have someone to say something to.

For both of us, this was sort of an abbreviated version of a long trip we took in 5th grade, the Mississippi Trip.  Both of us remember bits and pieces of that tour of our state.  My friend had a Polaroid camera, and she took pictures everywhere we went.  On this trip, she had her husband's good Nikon instead.  There was a gentle echo of that other trip so long ago as we traveled.

The sites themselves were much as I saw them last time.  Windsor didn't have a carload of thugs napping under the shade trees this time, and part of the single-strand wire fence built to keep people out of the structure was down, but everything else was just like it was before.  The big gold hand in Port Gibson was still large and golden.  Longwood was still frozen in time, silent, majestic, dreaming.

Of them all, Longwood always moves me most.  I don't know why I keep going back there.  There's something about the innovation and the forethought that Haller Nutt put into the design of that house that makes the unfinished part so much more poignant. The potential for wonder that is revealed in all the existing details is tantalizing and somehow saddening as well.  What would it have been if it could have been finished?  Would it still stand today, or would it have been torn down, burned up, forgotten and discarded?

Every tour I've had through the house has been a bit different depending on the docent.   The only thing I don't like about any of these tours is that the guides don't give you enough time inside simply to absorb the history and the feeling of the place.  It deserves a moment of quiet contemplation, of silence, of listening to the wind through the oaks outside.  It deserves a moment for the mind to paint the red brick walls with lustrous plaster, to create the missing statues in the domed niches, to remove the planks that hide the interior or the onion dome and add the mirrors that would have lit the whole house with their reflection.  Instead, there is sort of a brief patter, a quick "run-through," and next thing you know, you're being ushered politely, gently out the graceful front doors and into the nuclear heat of a Mississippi summer where, quite frankly, it is not possible to imagine much of anything that doesn't involve glacial cold.

It feels like there are a million untold stories in Longwood.  I am sure this is true of every house, past and present.  There is just something lingering in the air and the objects there, though, that invites imagination to embroider details.  There are paintings of those who lived there through time, and there are the very beds and books they used and loved.  The hand-drawn plans of what was to be created line the walls.  Tools and packing crates with hand-written address labels sit as though workers will return to tidy up soon.  Objects picked with care to provide comfort and beauty remain.  It feels like a place that lives in a half-life, wanting to be more but knowing that somnolent state is all that it will ever know.

Today is the 149th anniversary of Haller Nutt's death.  Heartbroken by the way his fates fell during the Civil War, he contracted pneumonia and succumbed.  I can't help but think that when he died, he must have been so worried about everything, his failing fortunes, his family and what would become of them after he was gone, the treatment he'd received at the hands of a government he had not defied.  He was a brilliant man by all accounts, and that shattered half-finished magnificent experiment of a house is terribly, terribly sad.  I wondered how often he stood in the center of that main floor or roamed the upper levels forbidden to modern tourists, worrying and hoping about the future, seeking some way, any way to bring some level of control and sanity back to his world.

I don't know if I'll make this same trip again, and if I do, I don't know that I will  go back to Longwood.  Likely, at some point, I will travel that way again.  There is so much in Natchez to see that I wouldn't have to go there to have something to do.  I am pretty sure I will make my way up that curving and treelined drive again, though.  The sad majesty of what awaits at the end seems to demand it.

Little Red Blooms

I saw them when I got out of the car at Wal-Mart.  Their blue vests and hats marked them as did their gesture of trying to hand something to the people passing by.  I could see the little flickering of red in their hands.  I felt something inside me tighten up, and I reached for my wallet, gritted my teeth.  It was Memorial Day, and the Buddy Poppies were out again.

As you can see from the picture, I do not object to the Buddy Poppies.  I buy at least one every year.  Whenever I see the American Legion or the DAV handing them out, I always contribute.  The thing that made that little spring inside my clockwork heart wind tighter was what these tiny red blossoms mean to me.

Almost every male member of my family has served in the military.  Both my grandfathers were WWII veterans, one almost freezing to death in Italy while the other went all over the place loading bombs onto planes.  My dad was sent to Vietnam while he was in the Coast Guard. My uncles were Vietnam-era Marines; one of them also served in the Coast Guard after his tour with the Corps ended.

It has been just a little less than a year since I lost the uncle who served in both branches, my Uncle Gary.  He spent the last years of his life in a veterans' care facility in Kosciusko after having a major stroke that left him partially paralyzed on one side.  For whatever reason, even though there are so many veterans in my life, those little red flowers always make me think of him.

I miss him.  Even though at the end, his condition and his medication kept him from being mentally sharp, I miss going to see him and talking with him.  Today, seeing those little flowers again brought the end of it back, the long hours in the hospital waiting room, the last time I saw him.

I believe in donating to the men who hand the poppies out.  They are men who served our country and who continue to serve it still by making sure our veterans are taken care of.  They are men like my grandfathers, like my dad, like my uncle, like my friends, like my students, like all those men and women who have left behind comfort and safety to do what was needed.  Their sacrifices deserve to be remembered, whether those sacrifices were physical on the field of combat or those much-harder-to-spot renderings of psychological health, family closeness, peaceful dreams at night.  I cannot do much about most of these things.  I can, however, do this one little thing, show my respect in this one way.  Maybe it means something.

Magic Hands

I have had a pain between my shoulderblades all day like someone stabbing me with a sharp knife every time I move or turn my head.  I don't know if I slept wrong, if I've pulled something (pray God not TORN IT again), or if stress has just balled all the muscles up there into one big Gordian knot.  All I do know is that I would give all 57 cents I possess to get somebody to come here and undo it.

I have always had this problem.  I carry my stress in strange ways that cause pain and problems.  When I was in my last two years of undergrad (and taking too many courses like a fool...what am I saying...I know I would do it again...), it was a constant problem exacerbated by a backpack a friend of mine fondly called "the circus tent."  (Screw him.  I was an English major.  Nortons and Riversides had to go where I went.)  I would lay down on the hard dorm floor sometimes flat out trying to stretch the muscles so they'd relax.  And I'd want to cry.

I guess massage from a real-live therapist/masseuse could help me with this.  It's just that every time I've tried, it hurts like the devil.  I tried it in Japan and wanted to cry.  The only time I've ever had anybody get all the knots out and not hurt me was this guy at the Wesley who had absolute magic in his hands.  He came by when I was sitting in one of the Wesley big rooms complaining about the pain, and he said, "I can take care of that for you."  And he did.

Holy crap.  I went from a ball of tension with an actual lump of raised muscle at the nape of my neck to basically not being able to move because I was so limp. Why did I not somehow manage to marry him?  How was I ever so dumb to let him get away?

I wish I could find somebody now that had that same skill.  In general, I am not overly "touchy," especially with people I don't know well, so it's not like I am likely to find out if somebody was able to relieve this agony.  I can promise you this, though.  If I do stumble over one by accident, this time, I'm merry well keeping him.

Notes to Myself

In preparing a lesson plan, I opened an old Norton Anthology to skim it for a particular work.  As I thumbed through the pages, it became less of a search and more of a discovery.  I had an accidental encounter with myself, long, long ago.

All along the margins, carefully written with the needle-pointed black pens I preferred all through college, were annotations, questions, lecture notes, commentaries.  Wallace Steven's "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" contained terse notes on interpretations, plays on words.  Plath's acerbic "Daddy" is written almost completely up with marginalia about symbolism, biography, metaphors.

Inside the text itself are other little pieces of me at that time, a draft of a note I wrote to a professor I was going to interview and write about for a paper that became one of my all-time best was hiding in the works of Gwendolyn Brooks, an information slip about a get-together to go see Romeo and Juliet marked a segment from D.H. Lawrence.  As I rifled through the pages, the fragments of my undergraduate slipped around me, pulling me back to that time briefly even though there was not one single picture to be seen.  I remembered the hot, tatty lecture rooms of Lee Hall with their battered furniture, peeling walls, and tatty tile.  I remembered the roar of too-loud window units straining to cool us or the tick-ping-ping of a steam radiator fighting an early December chill.

I remember, too, all the other things that were going on in my life, a grandmother in the last stages of a battle with cancer, the unresolved and endless ridiculousness of my relationship (or whatever) with D., persistent questions about what was coming next in my life.  This bulky volume with its onionskin pages brings it all back, every golden gingko leaf on Engineering Row, every late-night conversation.

Sometimes the past comes rushing back in to swirl around me again, like a tide that shifted without warning. Just that quickly, the fragments I surround myself with coalesce, solidify, and that strange duality of the person I was then and the one I am now have to make peace with each other, find a way to share the space.

The Beauty of the Pinterest Recipe

I spent some time tonight after church talking with a lady there who is from Brazil.  She and I were comparing notes about my recent trip, and we started talking about food. She expressed how much she missed certain dishes and items from Brazil.  I know what she means.

Why is it always the food that we miss when we leave a place?  Why does what we eat become such an evocative reminder of somewhere we love?

The taste of green tea, good green, always takes me back to Japan.  It makes me think of all sorts of things...sitting and talking with friends, coming cold and tired into the train station in Nagoya and having a bowl of gold-flake matcha, having green tea soft serve ice cream at the annual pottery festival in Seto.

There are other things that take me other places.  Spicy green curry makes me think of Chiang Mai and walking up all.those.steps to get to the temple at the top, the little hotel where I stayed where I slept in mosquito netting, the market where I bought a cheap pair of flip flops and ate coconut balls off leaves, the bicycle with the broken seat I rode around Sukothai.   Oddly enough, guacamole also always makes me think of Japan where I learned to make it from a fellow teacher.  Thanksgiving dinner carries me back to my college days at State when my friends and I commandeered the Wesley Foundation kitchen and made a meal for about twenty people.

There are dishes from Brazil I want to learn to make.  Feijoada, a sort of black bean and pork stew for lack of a more accurate definition, is the first one.  I adore it, and it is linked to both my recent trip and a friend I lost track of a long time ago who introduced it to me.  Brigadero is a sweet that we were served in almost every classroom party we were given.  Tonight, after my conversation, I decided to see if I might be able to find some easy recipes for these things.

God bless Pinterest.  I think everything is there.  I did a quick search, and I found the things I was looking for.  Next week, I am going to attempt the feijoada.  I didn't get to bring home the proper stone pot, but I will substitute my crockpot instead.

I don't know if my plans for getting back to any of the places that are special in my heart will succeed.  Until such time as they do, I will keep my memories of it all alive through my photos, the assorted bits and pieces I brought back, and my kitchen.

Rings and Things

I'm sitting on the couch looking at two rings, one on each index finger.  The stone in one is clear quartz crystal.   The stone in the other is amethyst.  Each is a single large gem in a simple silver setting.  As I look at them, I see not the rings themselves but rather the places where I got them and the people who created them.  I will always see Brazil when I look at them on my hands.  It's why I bought them to start with.

The large amethyst was one of the first things I bought when I arrived.  I was walking in the Hippie Market at the base of the TV Tower in Brasilia, and I found a booth that had the most incredible gemstone jewelry.  I knew that I wanted a large piece of Brazilian amethyst, and when I saw the cabochon ring in the case, it felt exactly right.

I tried it on, and of course it was too small for me.  The jeweler and I negotiated in our respective languages for him to adjust it, and by the time I went back to the hotel for dinner, I was wearing the large dusky purple stone on my hand.  When I came back to Brasilia, my friends and I went back to the Hippy Market for one last bit of shopping before leaving the country.  I made sure to stop back by the gemstone jewelry booth while we were there.

To my happy surprise, the jeweler remembered me instantly.  I do understand that I am a little remarkable in my appearance, standing out even more when I'm abroad usually.  It still pleased me that he was happy to see me, not running away since we'd been through the whole resizing of the ring thing before.  A customer was there with him when we walked up, and as I looked through the cases, she started to speak to us in English.  She was a language teacher who liked to come down and buy things from the jeweler.  She helped us talk to each other, and I found two other pieces by him I liked, a pair of earrings and a pendant that matched my ring almost exactly in size and color.  As I was leaving, the jeweler asked me when I was coming back to Brazil.  I told him, "As soon as possible."  I meant it.  I also told him with the assistance of the teacher who was there that every time I saw the ring on my hand I would remember him and his kindness.  I meant that, too.

The other ring, the crystal one, is from Pocos de Caldas.  I bought it in the little shop downtown that was full of beautiful things from top to bottom, the mineral wealth of the region and the nation.  The girl in the shop and I found a way to communicate, she speaking Portuguese, me answering in Spanish, and she told me about each of the stones in the rings and necklaces when I asked.  Given the situation, it was a surprisingly good conversation.

When I saw the ring, I knew I wanted it.  The stone is clear as ice, and it catches light beautifully.  She brought it out of the case, and of all the things in the store, it was the only ring I tried on and had fit instantly.  I needed to go get more cash (since by this time the theft of my debit card number had occurred) to get it though.  I told her I would be back in my broken communication, and I headed for the ATM.  About 45 minutes later, after walking to the bank, calling my US bank and having an unpleasant conversation about my access to my accounts, and finally getting some money, I came back.  The ring balanced the Brasilia amethyst the remainder of the trip, and now every time I look at it, I think of Pocos, the hills, the city of clear, pure spring water, the cool and sweet air there.  The crystal quartz just fit.

Now, even though I am thousands of miles away from Brazil, I still carry it with me both metaphysically and literally.  It is as if the memories I have in some way solidified, were polished,  have been wrapped in delicate silver, and now can be seen by others, too.  I like the idea of that, actually.  These may not be pieces that fit every single person's tastes, but for me, they are a perfect memento of my journey.

Tilt-a-Whirl

For a day with no students, yesterday was incredibly busy.  I started the day by cobbling together a summer reading brochure and did the necessary dance steps/divine invocations to get it printed and into report cards in the tiny fragment of a year we have remaining.  It went out much later than I would have liked, but, drawing on one of my favorite kid quotes of the year, "Sometimes it just be that way."

I started work on the program for the National Honor Society induction for Thursday as well, changing out what I could and putting in all the names of candidates that I have so far.  Students continued to run in throughout the day waving forms.  The deadline was not until the end of the day yesterday.  I will have a few stragglers today.  This is just the way these things go.  I will finalize that this afternoon before I leave and print it, one less thing to worry about tomorrow.

In addition to the program, I took care of printing individual student certificates for each inductee.  We try to make it nice, and these things are heavy paper with a gold seal.  They come from the national organization.  It takes time to get it all done, but I think it is worth it.

I did all of this, every last piece of it, feeling like the living dead.  There were moments when the room was doing a merry little flamenco complete with castanets and swirly skirt.  I would stop, put my head on the back of my chair, and just hold onto the arms until the ride stopped or at least slowed down a little.  There's nothing like having your own personal roller coaster ride, I guess.  Actually, if I were to compare it to a carnival attraction, it was more like a Tilt-a-Whirl, that pause and spin, pause and spin......

It's funny.  As a kid, I always loved the Tilt-a Whirl.  It was one of my "must rides" at the fair.  I absolutely loved the swoop and dive of the spinning cars.  I've discovered that it's just not as much fun when there are no lights, no bright colors, and no machinery moving me.  Tilt-a-Whirl courtesy of big bad crap going on inside my body is not cool at all.

You Probably Think This Song Is About You....

The other morning I was listening to something on the radio, and "American Girl" came on.  I sang along like I always do to Tom Petty, and I thought, "Yeah.  That song is mostly me."  That started me thinking about other songs that sort of "define" me or that I identify with strongly.  I don't mean songs that I love or that are my favorites.  That list would look very different, although I suppose one or two of these might make that list, too.  I pulled songs that have people in them with issues that feel like me.  Here then is a list of ten songs that can be said to define me in some way.  I suppose none of them can be said to be the whole picture, nor are all of them together the picture complete.  Call them facets of a prism, then, throwing colors on the wall.

1)      “American Girl” - Tom Petty

·     I am frightfully close to being that girl in that song.  Like her, I can’t help thinking “that there is a little more to life somewhere else” because “After all it [is] a great big world/ With lots of places to run to.”  I like to go see this world.  Often.  As much as I can, in fact.  Like the girl in the song, too, I wind up with certain people on my mind, no matter where I may roam.

2)      “Let Me Die in My Footsteps” - Bob Dylan

·      The whole song, really.  It has that Transcendentalist and Carpe Diem philosophy of seizing the moment and making a difference, of not coming to the end of your life only to find that you’ve had no life at all.  Let death take me in action, not waiting around for it.  I want always to be one of the ones who is “learning to live,” not the ones who is only “learning to die.”

3)      “Fly Away” - Lenny Kravitz

·      “I want to get away/I want to fly away/Yeah, yeah, yeah….”  Yeah.  All the time.  Yeah.  At the end of long bad days, more than usual.  Some days, this is my own personal national anthem.

4)      “Ecstasy” - Crooked Still

·    “Oh had I wings I would fly away and be at rest/ and I’d praise God in his bright abode…”  I wish for wings, renewal, and escape more often than any other thing, I suppose.  This song touches the church music of my childhood, the old hymns I was raised with.  There are several things about this one that are foundational.

5)      “Stay Away” - Chris Thile

·    “Cause she don’t care at all anymore/And I don’t know why I still do/ and why I’m telling you/ Cause you are the devil / And you can stay away from me…”  Every line of this song.  Switch the gender and you have every relationship and every piece of a relationship I’ve ever had.  Every time. 

6)      “Meheni Rachi” - Laura Marling version

·     “And I am from a country land, where beauty only grows/ You know I’d love to leave someday, I dare not ever go”, “I don’t need anybody / But I want someone”, “Perhaps I’ll be a bird one day, if I’m good enough / And I’ll get up and fly away and give up all this stuff.”  This song, too, is about expectations and not being able to live up to them, about needing a different path and longing for wings.  In a way, I guess it summarizes some of the others.  It’s just lovely. 

7)      “I’m Not That Girl” (Elphaba’s Version) - Wicked

·    “Don’t wish, don’t start/ Wishing only wounds the heart/ I wasn’t born for the rose and the pearl…”  I heard this song the first time when I went to see the musical with my friend, and it was as if somebody put my entire life to music, painful and true.

8)      “Dark Turn of Mind” - Gillian Welch

·     "You know that some girls are bright as the morning/ And some girls are blessed with a dark turn of mind.”  This song describes what it’s like to be less than “sunny” pretty accurately.  It also covers that it’s not always a bad place to be.  From the first time I heard it, I knew it was me.

9)      “I’m a Woman” - Koko Taylor

·    “That means I’m grown/I’m a woman, I’m a rushing wind/I’m a woman, I can cut stone with a pin/ I’m a woman, I’m a love maker/ I’m a woman, you know I’m an earth shaker.”  Booyah.  Enough said.  Tread carefully.    

10)   “Ruby Tuesday” - Rolling Stones

·     “Don’t question why she needs to be so free/She’ll tell you it’s the only way to be/ She just can’t be chained / To a life where nothing’s gained/ And nothing’s lost/ At such a cost.”  And there’s more.  The whole next stanza, for example.  I don’t care if Richards originally wrote it for a temporary groupie who wouldn’t stay or a long-term girlfriend he couldn’t keep.  The lyrics fit me in the here-and-now.  

Wonderfulness

Something horrible happened to me yesterday.  In the way of such things, I can't fix it until Tuesday, so today, I did things that were designed to distract me and make me feel better.  I got my hair cut (already scheduled conveniently).  I picked up some supplies to work on a craft project I've had in mind for awhile.  I found a jacket that I love that I'll wear for Easter.  I made plans to see my best friend Monday.  I spent long hours in my hammock reading.  I took a couple of pictures.

Tonight, I went to Mom and Dad's for dinner, and while I was there, one of us made one of our usual family in-joke references, this time to the Bill Cosby comedy albums they had when I was little.  I used to listen to them all the time.  We all did.  I knew "Chicken Heart" and "Noah: Right" by heart almost.  When I moved to other forms of media, tapes and then CDs, I left those big 45s behind.  They still have them, but I don't think any of us have anything with a turntable that still works.  (Well....I might have one that still works, but it's on an ancient  console entertainment center in the back of my house.)

The longer we talked about the routines and the pieces of them we always quote, the more I wanted them.  I decided to look on amazon to see if they had been converted to mp3(because hasn't everything?) and get them if they had.  There they all were.  The three of us could remember having Wonderfulness, but it took some time to remember which one of the others had the ones I wanted on it.

I'm looking forward to hearing them again.  They're finishing up downloading to iTunes from the amazon Cloud now.  Once again, I have to say how much I love technology and all the instant gratification it allows.  It's a wonderful, beautiful thing when it works right.

Ireland

We’ve seen a bit of everything so far, the ancient and picturesque and the urban and modern. In all its forms, Ireland feels very familiar to me, much more so than can be accounted for by the simple fact of my having traveled here before.

I noticed this phenomenon before. There are pieces of it that just feel like home. The area we toured around Killarney, despite its great hills and mountains, felt like Mississippi. Maybe it was the rurality of it, the farm country of it, the out-of-the-way-ness of it. Maybe it was a slant of light through the trees. I can’t explain it, but I know I felt it.

Killarney was good. I got to see things I’d already done again, revisit them, refresh old memories. We did the jaunting cars again. That was lovely. I had forgotten how nice that was. It wasn’t good before. I don’t know why. This time around, though, I could just relax and enjoy it. In the evening, I got to have a glass of Guinness, too. I haven’t had alcohol of any shape, kind, or color in five years, and although I felt this and probably won’t have any more for a long time, just having that here in Ireland where it is so much better than anywhere else was wonderful. I bought a stupid postcard today of Mona Lisa holding a pint with a foam mustache to commemorate the occasion. It’s going in my journal when I get home. Heh.

Now we’re in Dublin. For all its size, this place always feels so small. It does not feel like almost one third the population of the entire nation lives here. It does not seem possible. And then there’s the age of most of them. It’s like a giant college town. We did a walking tour today, and we started it in front of the Bank of Ireland where the Occupy Dublin movement was. There wasn’t much to it, to be brutally honest. I guess it hasn’t taken off here like it has in NYC or other places, but I just looked around at all the teenagers making out, playing hacky sack, and standing around trying to look important and cool, and thought, “Yeah. I believe it now.” Our students were a little shell shocked, I think, to look around at all the blue hair and skin-tight clothes. It was sort of funny. I kept thinking, “Oh my children. You ain’t seen nothing yet.”

Sure enough, as we wandered, the Six Nations Rugby match that was on let out and the Scotland and Ireland fans filled the streets headed to the pubs (or from the pubs) in various states of despair or ecstasy. Then it got really good. We got greeted, high-fived, happily jostled, and one person learned what the Scots wear under their kilts. (A question you know you should just never ask.)

Tomorrow is the part I’m waiting not-so-patiently for, Trinity College. The Claddagh I bought today to replace the one I’d damaged and Trinity College are my two big Irish things. Oxford and Stratford are my two big ones in the UK. Past that, everybody else can do whatever they like. I don’t really care. As long as I can have mine, I’m good.

Cheesy Does It

If I said you have a beautiful body would you hold it against me
If I swore you were an angel would you treat me like the devil tonight
If I were dying on thirst would your flowing love come quench me
If I said you have a beautiful body would you hold it against me
~ Bellamy Brothers
_________________________________

I was coming home from getting a banana shake after church tonight, and as I flipped through the radio stations in my borrowed vehicle I stumbled across this old, old country song. It made me laugh. It's just so....cheesy, riddled with bad pickup lines as it is.

It reminded me of this guy I used to know in college who collected back pick up lines as sort of a hobby. Every time my best friends and I would see him, he'd have a new one to try out on us. They were fabulously awful. From the classic, "Hey girl, you must be tired. You've been walking through my mind all day long," to the oldie but goodie, "Did it hurt?" "Did what hurt?" "When you fell from heaven...." to all the others he had stored up, they were always good for a laugh and a groan.

Where do these things come from? They seem to have been around in Shakespeare's time as well, and I wonder just how far back you could go and find them. That might be a good research topic, actually. How long have men been trying to pick up women with cliches? How long have women been laughing and letting them do it?

It just amused me. I guess we're silly on both sides of the equation. As long as everybody involved is laughing, no blood, no foul.

40

(No.  Not me.  Not yet....  That particular milestone is still a few years down the road.)

This week Led Zeppelin's IV turned 40.  I guess I heard a clip on the radio about it when I was on my morning high speed  interstate rally  drive to work.  I don't know why it hit me like it did.  I mean I did know the album is older than I am, right?  Even when I was in high school and everyone was dividing into the two or three musical camps all teenagers seem to wind up in as they are exploring their musical tastes, those of us who leaned toward stuff with the guitars did know that Zep was older.  It is just weird somehow to hear a number put on it, I guess, because to me this is music that should exist without them.

Some music dates achingly fast.  It's the stuff that the DJ pulls out at a high school reunion, some of it novelty songs from the your school years, some of it just not very good. You laugh with your friends over it like the old snapshots of you and your friends in bad hairdos or ridiculous clothing trends, and you sort of shudder and think, "My GOD.  What were they thinking when they came up with that crap?"  Other music never, ever sounds like it belongs to any particular age.  It is always good, always fresh.  It is an archetype.  It sets the pattern, is the mold that everything else tries to follow.   It's like an empire-waist gown, I suppose, always in fashion.  (And you can tell my mind is rambly this morning because I suspect I've just compared Led Zeppelin to an empire-waist gown... HA!  I will leave that there, too, because it makes me laugh....)

This entire album is special to me for another reason as well.  This music is my dad's music.  So much of my taste in music is his.  His album collection would make a classic rock vinyl collector tremble.  He's the reason I listen to the Stones, the Beatles, Zep, CCR, and so many others.  Riding around with him in his truck to basketball practices, to visit my relatives, or whathaveyou, he'd tell me about this group or that one.  There were always stories related to his life that went with them or that started because of them, and so I grew to love the music we were listening to.  He would give me his old cassette tapes of them or I would buy them myself.  That's how it started.

All these years later, I am still in the process of replacing all my old analog copies with digital ones.  "Stairway to Heaven," the most heavily-publicized song on IV (although probably not my favorite song on the album) is rolling through my iTunes right now.  I guess as formats change that is going to be a lifelong process of keeping a current library of my favorites.  I have to say, though, when I consider how much more than just mere music this is, it's worth it.

And It's Gone

I shot this last year after I got my camera.  I took this from the middle of an overpass, got trapped on a pedestrian footpath by my own carelessness while shooting because I wasn't paying attention to the "locals."  Stuff like that happens to me when I go out to take pictures.  I sort of need a bodyguard, or at least a friend who can say to me, "Really?  Um....or not...."

I had wanted to shoot this building for a long time.  Its red sign advertising "European Plan" rooms with "reasonable rates" used to make me smile every time I saw it.  I knew that it was one of the things I wanted to capture when I got my good Nikon.  When I did a day taking pictures of various structures in downtown Meridian, I made sure I got this shot.  I am exceptionally glad I did, because today, they tore it down to make way for a new museum that may or may not get built on that site.

Time marches on.  Progress requires renovation.  You can't make omelets without broken eggs.  Whatever.

I saw pictures of the inside of the building that another very lucky professional photographer got to go in and take last week before they started razing the building, and it was completely beyond hope.  The west wall had begun to sag noticeably, and it's a well-known fact that there is water under and in some cases in the basements/foundations of all the buildings on Front Street where this thing is located.  After seeing the photo essay, even the staunchest of hearts, even I, couldn't say that there should have been restoration.

That doesn't mean it is easy to know the next time I come over that bridge there will be that gaping hole in the skyline.  That doesn't mean it will ease the absence of that somehow cheerful if fading red sign inviting us all to stay in a place that was once "new" and "fireproof" but that now will only exist in the memories of a city all too full of them.

What We Became

for L, L, B, C, and everybody else who was a part of those late-night imaginary worlds... even G

While I was in the shower this morning, my thoughts were roaming randomly as they are prone to do, and I was thinking about my AP students and the things they tend to find interesting.  Some of them are geekish the way I used to be when I was in high school and gravitate toward some of the cultish and traditional genres of Geekism:  Monty Python, Star Wars, Star Trek, RPGs, Doctor Who,  or the vast and shifting world of computer geekery.

I thought back over the long hours that crew of guys and I spent together playing D&D or what have you, and then a very odd revelation hit me.  We have, by and large, become the characters we played the most in those games.

L always played a wizard, and now he more or less is one.  The magic he wields is the code he writes, the specific computer languages that bend the electronic world to his will.  He continues to learn new forms of it, digging deeper into the mastery of it, just like his characters always did in the game.

L, his brother, was usually a ranger, keeper of the woodlands. Rangers knew all the lore of animal and plant and could move with ease in that environment and survive there.  He grew up to be a registered forester.  Once again, later in life the real world followed that character choice.

Then there's me.  I had several characters, but my favorite was a cleric.  Clerics had a type of magic, too, that came from their religious devotion to their canon.  I would say that I am devoted to the mysteries of my authors and my poets, that I find magic in their glorious words.  I am spending my life trying to share that beauty with those who come to my secluded place of study to learn it.  Yeah.  I pretty much lived up to my archetype choice, too.

There were other guys I knew that played these games with other groups that wound up "becoming their characters."  One of them was always a paladin.  He was first a Marine and is now a prison warden.  Check and check.  I am not sure about the others.  I've sort of lost touch with them.

Is what we were going to become somehow patterned into us that deeply from our youth?  Is it hiding in our subconscious just waiting to pop out?  I had NO plans to be a teacher at that time. In fact, I was actively opposed to the idea.  I'm not sure about the others.  It's a curiosity to me to think that we were somehow exploring our future selves through those rolling dice and THACOs.  I think that we have all become very good at what we are, and I think that, unavoidable frustrations of our jobs aside, we all enjoy what we do as well.  Perhaps those little previews we got, those excursions in imagination, were somehow tied to that success after all.

A Song for Your Birthday

-just for reference, this you is not the you I usually write to/about.  This you is a something of a ghost, and I cannot call him fiction, more's the pity.  If ever there was a confirmation that I am worthy of the title "fool," though, he is it.  

Dates sneak up on a person sometimes if they're not paying attention.  I was just putting stuff up on Tumblr, and a post about Faulkner's birthday rolled through.  That set something, a dim memory of an unfortunate conjunction of dates, spinning like fall leaves in my mind, and I looked at the calendar.  Sure enough, the numbers don't lie.  Tomorrow would have once been significant to me, would once have had me getting ready to tell you happy birthday, wondering whether or not I was currently "in favor" enough with you among all your collection of girls to get to do something with you on the actual day.  I might have even been trying to figure out what to get you depending on what phase of that long, dark night we were in together.

A friend of mine is a quite a fan of Dylan, and he and I have a running conversation about his music since I famously haven't been.  He sent me several songs to listen to since lately it seems I might be on the verge of conversion.   In the playlist, there was one that immediately made me think of you, "What Was It You Wanted."  It rather perfectly sums up the confusion I always felt every time we went somewhere and you hugged me too close too long, were just a little too affectionate; every time one of my new roommates ever told me, "Oh...but...I thought....," after having to have the stupidity of the situation of you and me explained; every time you gave me silly little gifts or roses and then turned around and hit on one (or more) of my friends; every time you somehow kept me together when the world shattered, pushed me to reach for things I didn't know I could do, and then casually kicked me down a flight of stairs afterward by ignoring me, being in a bad mood, or by switching to one of the girls you collected, who, like me, were damn fools enough to put up with you.

Yeah.  God, I wish I'd had it back then.  It would have made a perfect present for you.  I could have just sent it as a response to an email, or low tech as we all were "back in the day," left it burned on a CD hanging on the door of the Wesley for you to pick up on the way through.  I could have left it, let Dylan say everything that needed to be said, and walked away from you.  It's what should have happened so long ago.  In a perfect universe, those "do-over" sorts of universe possible only in the movies and in worlds populated by blue police boxes, I suppose it still could.  I like to think of it.  It makes me proud to think that in some alternate world, that tall, long-haired girl flipped you the bird musically (the most appropriate of all possible ways for you after all since so much of our time together seemed to revolve around music, the playing of it, the listening to it, the participating in it, the talking about it) and walked away.

You are long gone now, and you've finally stopped sending me Christmas cards.  Whatever I felt for you ended a long time ago, too, except for the lack of understanding of what it was all about, about why you were the way you were, what it was that you wanted from me, about why I was so foolish as to keep on in a situation that was as full of stupidity and pain as that one was.  And all that, I guess, is never going to be made clear to me.   I'm just going to take this last birthday, then, to give you one last belated present.  Burn it to a CD if  needed to get the right feel and sort of consider it a statement asked many, many years too late.

The Obligatory 9/11 Anniversary Post

Everyone is turning their minds back to that moment ten years ago when the world shifted.  FB is full of "where were you then" posts, "commemorate the heroes" statuses, and people generally testing the tender edges of a wound that may not ever fully heal.  I remember in all of the media blitz going on at the time one of the talking heads saying that 9/11 was the day America's innocence ended.  I think that is probably about right.

I wasn't living in country at the time.  I was still in Japan.  It was late evening for us there with the time difference.  I'd cooked dinner, watched a movie, and when I turned the VCR off, I saw an image on the screen that looked familiar, but somehow wrong.  It still seemed to be a film of some kind.  It was, of course, the Twin Towers just after the first plane had hit.  As I began to understand through the confusion of my lack of Japanese that what I was seeing was NOT an action film but a live news feed from New York, the second plane hit.  

The university I taught at provided housing, neat little apaatos, for the gaijin staff.  My colleague lived just across from me, and although I don't remember covering the small distance between her apartment and mine, I do remember her, her boyfriend, and me sitting and staring at her TV (she had English language newsfeed) for hours as Japan's night and the horror in the United States unfolded.  We watched people make the decision to end their lives rather than burn, something I don't know if some audiences here saw.  We watched the towers come down.  And, because we had so few news options even though we were also pulling news feed from online, we also were in absolute terror because we kept hearing there were more planes in the air....more planes in the air....but nobody knew where they were....

We fought international phone lines congested beyond the point of their tolerance and an already overtaxed domestic grid trying to get through to our loved-ones back home as we sought that most basic of reassurances, the answer to the question everybody asks, "Are you okay?  Is everything okay at home?" It was hours, many many of them before we could get a connection through, and we waited eyes glued to the TV as we tried to piece together the information coming to us as the Pentagon was hit, as the other plane was taken down by those brave passengers who chose their own end rather than to be used as a tool against their nation.

The next day, the other American teacher and I stumbled through our classes in a daze.  The reaction to us was to be an indicator of the world's reaction.  So many were full of sympathy and grief, anger that anyone would commit an atrocity of that nature.  Japan has such a complicated set of emotions when it comes to acts of violence, but mostly, now, and most ironically now, thanks to the very nation they were extending sympathy toward, they value peaceful resolution above everything else.  And then there were those others...the woman from Ireland who told my friend that what had happened was really just too bad, but it was all our own fault, wasn't it?  The war protesters who sprang up in the middle of campus immediately and ran up to hand us flyers, bowed very formally, and ran away again, as if the two of us somehow were responsible for our nation's foreign policy....

Flying home after 9/11 was worlds different.  Everyone was scared:  passengers, airline crews, the men who suddenly appeared with assault weaponry in every place in the airport.  The first time I went home afterward, I flew the day the Shoe Bomber tried to take a plane out of the sky, and I went in through LAX.  I didn't know it had happened until I touched down in Jackson and my parents grabbed me and held me.  That's when I knew that we were never going to feel safe again.  

Of all the things we lost, of all the precious things that are gone, that were taken, that's the one I worry about the most.  Fear makes any creature do terrible things, self-destructive ones.  It is always sensible to take precautions for safety.  It is unwise not to care for one's wellbeing or to prevent danger when possible.  I worry, though, that after 9/11 we have slowly started to become afraid of everything, and in that way, we have begun to allow others to do things for us and to us, both our government and the people we're fighting against, that never would have been stood for before that date.  

9/11 stands as a dividing point in our nation's history.  I'm not sure yet what the ultimate outcome of it will be.  I hope that we are still in a period of change from it.  Today, there will be so much said and so much remembered of that day.  I hope that people will not use this as a moment to relight old flames of paranoia, divisiveness, and destruction.  Instead, let's remember some of the highest and most honorable things from that day.  There were other lessons to take from it, after all, other models shown, examples of some of the finest things we as people are capable of. Let's remember all those who gave of themselves that day, who conquered the fear instead.  Maybe if we can do that, then we can find a way back to a place of safety once again.  

Ghosts

My friend and I wound up driving through the town where our old high school was yesterday because of some construction that blocked the route we'd intended to take to get home.  We started talking and reminiscing over things, places and people, and one individual in particular made her say, "Why were you ever friends with her?  She was crazy."  I paused a minute and thought about the person she was talking about.

The person in question had once hit the long flat reservoir bridge with the accelerator pedal all the way down, pegged her speedometer at 120 while looking at me wide-eyed, yelling, "Are you scared?!!  Are you scared?!! Scream!!"  I stared back at her like I was bored, saying, "No.  I don't know what you're talking about," before I looked away.  There are nasty curves on either end of the bridge, and I can't say I didn't have a tight grip on the door handle beside me, but I wasn't going to give her the satisfaction.  Not even if it meant we wound up in the water.  That incident pretty much defined our friendship.  It ended over some lies told sometime after our Senior Prom (oh GOD...Prom...there should be no Prom, or at least it should come with a warning label for ridiculous amounts of drama).  

As all this flickered across my mind, I looked back at it and other events in a sort of astonishment.  I shook my head.  "I don't know," I said. "I guess I sure can pick 'em."  I was silent a moment more, and I laughed a little.  "Her and D. both."  And my friend cracked up.

We'd been on MSU's campus much earlier that afternoon, driving around all the old places where I'd known him, where that Greek tragedy (or tramedy?  there were funny bits, I suppose) unfolded, so he was on my mind.  I can't drive past Simrall or what used to be the ERC without thinking of him.  That campus is haunted by that strawberry blond ponytail and sandals for me.  I don't much like that.  I don't even go to the Wesley when I'm there.  I haven't been back since I graduated.  He would be everywhere, the amazing D. and his Gibson leading the praise band or just sitting moodily in a corner or asleep on a sofa or sitting on the porch swing or doing his homework, and the Wesley was so much more to me than him that this would be a debasement.  

And it's a debasement of MSU, too.  My time there was more than him, more than that damn guitar-playing engineer.  I was more than him and the stupid cycle we were locked into.  I was more than riding around with him late at night, him showing up on my doorstep at ridiculous hours, conversations that never ended but that never exactly headed where they seemed to be going.  More than just that horrible push-pull.  More than just him singing at me, playing for me, playing with me.  

The next time I go, I am going to deliberately think of the rest of it, going to remember flying kites on the drill field, sitting in the arbor until 2 in the morning and talking, playing the piano in the Chapel with the rest of my stealthy anonymous brothers and sisters who rotated through there with me, hanging out and laughing with G. and J. and B. and M. and C. and all the other wonderful people at the Wesley who weren't insane collectors of women to no purpose, creating a giant web of multicolored yarn so thick it had to be cut out in the downstairs apartment of the Wesley as a practical joke, and getting pranked in return for that by the guys who lived there, working at Alley Kat's (except for D's role in it), and Fleur de Terre (except for the time D. brought me roses).  I'm going to drive him out with the other things, and that way, the next time I go through, his memory won't be there; only the good things will remain.