I Could Drink a Case of You

Saturday night after the super moon refused to show its face, there was more darkness. I pulled the mail out of my mailbox to find a "letter" from my attorney which wasn't a letter at all. What is was was a photocopy of the judge's ruling on my motion to recover attorney fees. Denied, it said.

 I'd been waiting since our day in court on March 2nd for the news. I'd emailed my attorneys asking for an update a week after the court appearance. The judge was out of town, they said. So I waited some more thinking I would email the attorneys again after the weekend. Maybe the beginning of Spring would bring good news.

Or not. But it wasn't the bad news about the money that was the worst thing. Instead of days of waiting, I could have used a prompt email last Tuesday when the ruling came down. Or a phone call. I could have used a tiny slice of personal communication--something like, "Dear Denise, We're sorry to be the bearers of bad news, but don't be discouraged, and here's what we'll do next..." I could have used a scrawled post-it note stuck to the corner of the blurry photocopy with some kind missive like "hang in there"--or even a crude little drawing of a frowny face. Nope.

I admit to dark thoughts. I have them. I'd been having them less. But Saturday night the dark thoughts had a party. They wore black and carried knives. They looped ropes over beams. They made tea and reminded me that the deranged husband in Tim O'Brien's excellent novel  In the Lake of the Woods killed his wife with boiling water while she slept. I didn't sleep Saturday night. I sat in my bed frozen with dread. I emailed Mr. Ex. I texted him. Then the sun sort of rose--or did what the moon did the night before--lurked somewhere behind the clouds while doing its job in a less than satisfactory way. And that's what I did Sunday. I skipped a good friend's fabulous First Day of Spring party and drank mimosas in my pajamas with M. while we watched basketball. Then I crawled to bed and slept the day away.

When I woke I felt stupid and lazy and realized I had a house full of people whom I love. I cobbled together dinner, took a shower while the chicken was in the oven, then lit the candles and sat at the dining room table like a human being. And somewhere in there I'd talked on the phone with the man who loves me. He was wrestling with his own First Day of Spring demons. "You'll know what to do," he said. "You always do." Or somethin' like that.  Maybe not, I thought. And maybe this thing between us could be going a little better.

I was putting the last of the dishes into the dishwasher when the brass door knocker that nobody ever  uses announced that someone was at the door. Yup. "Someone's at the door," the daughters said without moving as if they knew it was for me. There he was, the man who loves me standing in the rain with a little cluster of daffodils in one hand and a case of wine hoisted onto one shoulder. You read that right. Not a bottle. A case.

I'm still on my feet.

Waiting for Super Moon

Last night I went looking for the moon. I wanted to see it rising over the red tile roofs of my condo complex--benign brightness and beauty, a silver river of light pouring out of the darkness. Instead there was a dirty blanket of sky, one corner torn and scrap of light showing through. 1983, the news reports said, was the last time the moon came so close in its orbit. In 1983 I'd already been in Los Angeles nearly a decade. Mr. Ex and I were in love then. Maybe I was in a play. Maybe I saw the moon that night before going into a rehearsal, or maybe I was captivated by it standing in an alley between scenes of a performance and came to my senses in a panic wondering if I might be late for an entrance. I don't remember that moon. Maybe Mr. Ex was already changing then, two years out of law school and  besotted with our relative wealth after years of scraping by. Maybe he looked at the moon and saw his future, unbelievably large and bright.

I had no children in 1983. Although my son was thirteen years old and somewhere under that moon,  I didn't know where. I didn't know his name. Maybe he was in a park playing basketball, or going into a movie theater to see Star Wars for the the twentieth time. Motherhood was my secret then. A part of me covered over and not allowed into the light. Mr. Ex and I had agreed we wouldn't be having children, but maybe by 1983 with our checking account growing fat, that resolve had begun to wane.

In the year of this moon, the light resides in my children. All three of them. It seems something of a miracle that both of my daughters, now grown women, are asleep in my house tonight. And just four nights ago I stood in my son's backyard with him and his wife and children as we took turns peering through a telescope at the moon.

One night years ago as Mr. Ex and I lay in our bed in our apartment, I heard yelling. Across the street the homeless man who sometimes stayed in the crumbling house owned by an ancient silent film actress was  patrolling our block with his shopping cart. We called him "Ratso" after Ratso Rizzo from the movie Midnight Cowboy.  "Diane," Ratso bayed. "Diiannne." A jolt of paranoia ran through me. Did he mean to say my name--Denise? Was he calling me?  I stood at the window. In the moonlight he pushed the cart down the middle of the street, limping behind it with his shoes in the basket. "Oh moon. Oohhh moooon," he cried, "Thou art woman. And man has walked all over you." Ratso and his cart and his shoes were illuminated, shining in the dark street as I watched from my window. Maybe that was the night of the Super Moon of 1983.

The photo above was taken in Vermont in February of 2009. 

More about Houses...and Plastic

As I sleep I pack boxes, load them onto trucks, and stand at the doorways of houses. When I wake the dreams slip beyond my reach. Since the quake in Japan, I think of houses during my waking hours too. All the houses lost. The people homeless and weeping. The piles of rubble. Man made materials melding with  earth and ocean. The toxicity of so much that man has created and Mother Nature crushing it all to bits. How so much of our stuff is unnecessary.

The son of a friend of mine has a tiny house: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Wills-Tiny-House/104607962954040.  My friend and I traveled for months when we were twenty years old, our belongings on our backs. What I owned then wouldn't even fill the wall unit I have in my living room now. I have only a fraction of the stuff I had when I was married. I walked away with only what I wanted, and it still filled a small moving van.  

35% of fish in certain parts of the Pacific have plastic in their bellies. The earthquake and tsunami is a human and ecological tragedy of immense proportions. I try not to buy plastic. I haven't drunk bottled water in two or three years. Orange juice sometimes, but mostly I just eat the orange. Thank god, wine and gin come in glass bottles, but the Greek yogurt I like comes in plastic. 

I'll be heading back to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts for a month-long writer's residency in a couple of weeks. The last time I was there I met a writer/photographer who was working on a book documenting the ingestion of plastic by giant albatrosses. This is not an excerpt from her book--it's an article I found on the internet. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1193130/Pictured-The-astonishing-collection-everyday-plastic-items-swallowed-single-albatross.html.  Just one albatross.

I knew a collie once whose nose skin was peeling off. It was an allergy to a plastic dog dish. http://www.vetinfo.com/dog-nose-problems.html

Why don't we just stop making plastic? Maybe we just can't "man up." http://abcnews.go.com/Health/MensHealthNews/bpa-linked-sexual-dysfunction-men/story?id=9048200

I'm going to step up my personal anti-plastic campaign. 

And maybe I'll start dreaming of Tiny Houses made of wood like the one that Will built. 

Review of William Trowbridge's "Ship of Fool" published by Red Hen Press

Foolosophy

William Trowbridge’s new volume of poetry, Ship of Fool, is a litany of the things that can go wrong in life—and beyond.  Fool, the protagonist of each and every poem in sections I and III, is an accidentally-fallen angel who, after a truce between God and Satan, finds himself on Earth suffering through “ innumerable earthly lives.”

Ship of Fool reads like one of Anne Carson’s  verse novels as we follow Fool through incarnation after incarnation of misadventures both comic and tragic. A flat tire in a bad neighborhood, love derailed, cross-cultural miscommunications in a foreign land, a dog-bite that results in lycanthropy, and a nanostint in the Army account for only a few of Fool’s days/lives run amok. When fool sets out to save the world as Hitler’s guardian angel, he’s no Clarence, and there’s not much hope for a wonderful life. But the poem, “Fool and His Money” which chronicles this “wide-shot at guardian-angelship” twists us toward the silver lining that we sometimes find in our own missteps.

            “Fool’s put in charge

             of the Small Consolations detail that plants

            dimes and quarters under sofa cushions.

            Each one you find contains his blessing.”

The middle section of Ship of Fool—the meat in a Fool sandwich, if you will, takes us from the mythic to the personal in a series of poems that are most likely autobiographical. In the specifics of this particular life’s stumblings lie universal truths and the unveiling of the family skeleton: Fool is our brother. But there’s power in knowledge of the truth. In the poem, “The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” the narrator is our navigator, and his hand is on the throttle:

            “…stare at that box that just fell off the truck in front of you

            and you’ll hit it square as if you’d aimed;

            stiffen up in danger, struggle to regain

            control, and you’ll invite an overthrow

            that could be final. The things is,

            as the analysts say in chorus,

            to relax and focus on the bright side,

            on the place you want to go,

            not on the dark spot near

            the pavement’s edge…

            Think

            of your old fox terrier, snoot thrust gladly

            out the window of the Galaxy. Think

            of when, stretching out your arms and running

            down a hill, you were flying, flying.”

           

In Part III, the final section of the book, Fool is wiser and sadder, but he’s still all fool. In the “Fool Tree” it seems that there might be relief in store when Fool returns to earth no longer tripping and bumbling, but literally rooted to one place as a tree.  

            His twiggy pate

            will leaf out

            every year. Tall

            Anchored. Majestic.

            his thick bark deaf

            to the chain saw’s

            choke and rattle.

Fool can’t escape his nature. Nature can’t escape man’s foolishness. In Ship of Fool, God drives a Hummer, and the whole world is “hobbling the thousand miles that begins that doozie of a first step.” Thank God Trowbridge holds up a mirror to the works and coaxes us to belly laugh through our tears.


This is the first in a series of reviews that I will post from time to time. 


Ship of Fool is available at Amazon.com or from Red Hen Press.