Poetry Corner Monday

This is exactly how I'm feeling these days, particularly the first stanza:

Restless
Li-Young Lee

I can hear in your voice
you were born in one country
and will die in another,

and where you live is where you'll be buried,
and when you dream it's where you were born,

and the moon never hangs in both skies
on the same night,

and that's why you think the moon has a sister,
that's why your day is hostage to your nights,

and that's why you can't sleep except by forgetting,
you can't love except by remembering.

And that's why you're divided: yes and no.
I want to die. I want to live.
Never go away. Leave me alone.

I can hear by what you say
your first words must have been mother and father.

Even before your own name, mother.
Long before amen, father.

And you put one word in your left shoe,
one in your right, and you go walking.

And when you lie down you tuck them
under your pillow, where they give rise
to other words: childhood, fate, and rescue.
Heaven, wine, return.

And even god and death are offspring.
Even world is begotten, even summer
a descendant. And the apple tree. Look and see

the entire lineage alive
in every leaf and branching
decision, snug inside each fast bud,

together in the flower, and again
in the pulp, mingling in the fragrance
of the first mouthful and the last.

I can tell by your silence you've seen the petals
immense in their vanishing.

Flying, they build your only dwelling.
Falling, they sow shadows at your feet.

And when you close your eyes
you can hear the ancient fountains
from which they derive,

rock and water ceaselessly declaring
the laws of coming and going.

Cleaning Out My Closet

Recently I was making some format changes to my blog when I came across a number of half-finished posts that I never published. Most of them were about my insistence that I can see air molecules, or that during my CSI-obsessed senior year of high school I could lift a fingerprint from a glass jar and analyze someone's handwriting (true story!). The rest of the posts were inane and entirely irrelevant after months spent collecting cyber dust on my unpublished post queue. Naturally those are the ones I'm going to share with you today, along with some more recent stories thrown in to keep you from rebelling.

1. I was channel surfing the other evening and was intrigued to discover a show called Russia's Toughest Prisons. It was captivating...for all of thirteen seconds until the inmate being interviewed was asked to describe, in gory detail, how he harvested and cooked his dead cellmate's thigh. Seinfeld it is.

2. Taffy was doing her morning ritual of sprawling across the crossword right as I'm about to start on it, and my dad stooped down to pick something up off the kitchen floor. "Forget something, Taff?" he asked, and held out a long white whisker. When he tried to stick it back on her face she attacked.

3. In 2007, the lead singer of my favorite band (Pat Monahan of Train) released a solo album with a song entitled "Two Ways to Say Goodbye." He later rejoined the band and they recently released their newest CD. It features a song called "50 Ways to Say Goodbye." Did it really take them five years to come up with 48 more ways?

4. "Did you know that 5/8 is only just the tiniest bit bigger than 3/5? I figured that out in the bath." -Mom

5. It took me two months to notice that my first name was misspelled on my debit card.

 These next three are Work Chronicles stories but I'm too lazy to make an entirely new post...

6. A couple months ago at work we had the kids write down their definitions of the words "love" and "happiness." One girl wrote "Happiness is when I read." One question: What kind of jail time would one count of kidnapping get me?

7. "I'm so thirsty I could eat lemonade!" (Somebody get this girl some liquid STAT!)

8. J: Tomorrow is officially the first day of summer!
    E: Then why is it sunny today?

A Rude Interruption

     I was baking cookies a few minutes ago, sitting at the kitchen table doing the crossword while they baked. All of a sudden I heard scratching noises coming from the direction of the oven and pantry--noises like the ones my cat makes when she's trapped in a room and believes her air supply to be quickly depleting. Taffy had heard them too, and she was crouched next to the pantry door with her ears in full upright position, not unlike an airplane tray table during takeoff and landing.
     I stood for a few moments with my ear to the door to make certain that the pantry was the source of the sounds. When I was sure, I did what any grown ass feminist in my position would do: I went to look for my dad.
     "Daddy," I said calmly and sweetly, "I believe there is something in the pantry. Living. There is something living in the pantry."
     He got up and surveyed the situation. "How should I get it out?" he asked. The words of a true manly man.
     "Go get the trap!" I suggested. (You may recall from previous posts that my brother set a live trap in our yard near the compost pile to catch rats.) "You can open the door a crack and then snap the trap shut when he's in it!" In case it's not abundantly clear from this statement, I don't think well on my feet.
     After a minute or so of thought, my dad reached his own (equally ridiculous) conclusion. "I'm just going to open the door," he said.
     "Open the door?" I asked, incredulous. "You're going to open the door and let a rat into the house." It was more a statement than a question.
     "Do you have a better idea?" my dad asked.
     "Yeah," I said. "Don't."
     "I need to open the door," he persisted.
     "Get a broom!" my mom shouted from my parents' room.
     And precisely where do you think the broom was located? Oh yes. The pantry.
     "You're just going to let a rat run around the house?" I asked.
     My dad nodded. "Until it disappears somewhere." Because that makes sense.
     My mom's concern? "Just let me close our door first!"
    Despite my desperate attempts to prevent my dad from releasing a filthy rodent--a rodent possibly carrying some rare and untreatable communicable disease--into the place in which we live, my dad was firm. He did, however, arm himself with a backup broom he retrieved from the shed.
     "Okay," he said, "I'm gonna do it."
     I climbed onto the counter and held my breath as he inched toward the door.
     "Wait!" I shouted. "My cookies!"
     My dad shot me a look that said "You've got to be kidding me!"
     "They're going to burn!" I said, and pulled the baking sheet from the oven.
     By then the scratching had stopped. I climbed back up onto the counter and my dad, convinced that the rat was actually gnawing at the wood in the crawl space underneath the pantry, slowly slid the door open.
     Nothing.
     "It probably just retreated to its dark pantry lair," I suggested.
     My dad shook his head. "No, he's not in here. He's down below."
     "Are you sure?"
     "Pretty sure. Almost sure."
     From behind my parents' closed bedroom door my mom shouted, "Did you get it?"
     "Dad's only slightly sure there's nothing there!" I shouted back.
     "I'm pretty sure," he corrected.
     "He's pretty sure!" I yelled. "He's only partially positive that there's not a rodent in our house!"
     "No," he said, "it's not in here. It's definitely in the crawl space."
     And, like a good daughter, I told him I believed him.
     I'll be taking my cat with me the next time I need a snack.

Summer Books

Can I just say one thing about the whole "summer books" phenomenon? I don't like it.

I understand the impulse to turn to lighter reads--what my mom and I call "starchy fillers"--once school lets out you can lounge outside without scanning the horizon for ominous clouds, but is that really an excuse to pick up--and I apologize to those people who have read and loved this book--50 Shades of Grey and other equally trashy non-literature?

Yes, I know most people are not psychotic like me and my friend Casey and do not read books like Ulysses and War and Peace for fun, especially not in the summer. I know that for many, the warmer months are a time of mindless indulgence. The end of school frees up obscene amounts of time to let the brain atrophy, and the occasional mystery or legal thriller can be a great way to debrief after nine months of cold and the stress of classes. I get it.

Here is my argument, though: Does a little sunshine and a lot of idle time really excuse the kind of vacuous books that are marketed to us as tantalizing beach reads? Consider, for example, these two literary gems that I found on a number of summer reading lists:

Hush by Kate White
"The first stand-alone thriller from the best-selling series author (and Cosmopolitan editor in chief) is about a soon-to-be-divorced marketing consultant's dangerous one-night stand."

Fly Away Home by Jennifer Weiner
"This tale of a politician's sex scandal is witty and smart, as expected from the author of In Her Shoes."
  
Apparently summer validates salacious page-turners with insultingly simplistic vocabulary and plot lines that teeter on misogynistic. Now, I'm not saying that every summer book list comprises nothing but starchy fillers. One of the same lists that featured Hush also advertised In Zanesville by Jo Ann Beard, a beautifully crafted coming-of-age novel that I loved about a girl growing up in a town so small that she and her best friend spent their time pondering things like why you can't say "fudge" with a British accent.

I've seen poetry on summer lists (fantastic!). Memoirs. How-To books that tout the importance of travel on warding off depression. These I can deal with because they help build a collective understanding among readers that the written word is powerful and unifying. Books don't have to be part of the literary canon to be important. Not all summer reading lists are the enemy. The very first book listed on NPR's summer list is Home by Toni Morrison. I'm not in utter, utter despair here. I'm just saying that I don't think June through August should be a time to let yourself go, literature-wise. Without all the mental stimulation of school, shouldn't summer be a time to keep your mind sharp and active?

Again, I'm not urging you to race out to the library or bookstore and snatch up a copy of Ivanhoe. I'm simply asking that you make good literary choices in the coming months. Think of this as a rallying cry--a call to battle for your mind armed with nothing but page after page of glorious words.

I'll be praying for that sunshine.

I Smell a Joke Book

Lady and gentleman, the comedic stylings of two kindergartners:

E: Why did the marker run into the paper?
R: Because it wanted to write?
E: No, because someone was using it!

Work Chronicles

I have come up with a new segment on this here blog, all about work - just in time for me to be done in two weeks. (My timing is simply impeccable.) Here's the latest:

The other day a kid named S found a packet of sweet relish on the ground. He has been carrying it around with him for days in a paper cup filled with water.

Ever since the Day of the Blue Button Incident, Alyx and I have been approached by at least five children every day who are all eager to inform us that the water is still freezing and that someone has once again pushed the blue button. No amount of sarcasm on our part is comprehensible to them. God bless the age difference: it keeps them from hating us.

This afternoon at snack time I was sitting at a table eating my orange and I felt a tap on my shoulder. J, a second-grader, was beaming as he held up Tin Tin: The Black Island which he'd just checked out from the school library that day. "Check this out!" he said, and set it on the table between me and Alyx. "Hey J," I said, "we've got our food here and the tables are a little sticky. Why don't you take your book somewhere else and I'll come look at it as soon as I finish?" "Okay," J answered. He picked up the book, took two steps from my left side to my right side, and set the book back on the table in front of me.

A couple months ago Alyx was drinking a juice box when it was time to clean up for recess. "Okay, guys!" she said, "The markers need to get put away, the paper goes in the recycling, everything needs to be up off the floor!" Several moments passed and no one made any move to do anything. "I've realized," Alyx said to me quietly, "that I have absolutely zero authority when I'm holding a juice box."

L: Knock knock. No, wait. You start.
Me: Knock knock.
L: Wait. I start. Knock knock.
Me: Who's there?
L: Joey.
Me: Joey who?
L: Joey thinks I'm really funny for telling this Knock Knock joke.
Me: Who's Joey?
L: I don't know.
Me: Good joke.

AR: I get a lot of owwies.
AC: I have two bandaids on my hip right now.
AR: One time I got hurt and had to put a bandaid on my peanuts.

The Blue Button

     Yesterday at work during snacktime, a kid got up to get a cup of water from the dispenser. "This water is freezing!" he announced, at which point nine other kids found it necessary to rise from their seats and shuffle over to taste the water for themselves.      "Someone pushed the blue button!" one of them exclaimed.
     The water stays at room temperature in its plastic jug unless a button is pushed--which triggers a little blue light--to make it cold.
     "This is pretty freezing," said E as she made her way back to her seat with her cup.
     "That's because someone pushed the blue button," A told her, and E nodded her concurrence.
     "Hey guys!" yelled a voice from across the room. "You have to taste this water! It's so cold! It's freezing! Someone must have pushed the blue button!"
     At this point Alyx and I had our heads down on the table trying to hide our laughter.
     "Hey A," Alyx said, stifling a giggle, "will you go over and see if someone pushed the blue button?"
     Without an instant of hesitation A rose from his seat, scurried across the room, and after a moment of scrutiny emerged at the scientific conclusion: "Yeah! They did! Someone pushed the blue button!"
     "That's it," I said to Alyx, "I have to taste some of this water for myself! I hear someone pushed the blue button." I grabbed a paper cup from the stack, filled it, and took a long gulp. "That's freezing!"
     "I bet you someone pushed the blue button," Alyx said.

To say that this room-wide discussion went on for ten minutes would be a conservative estimate. After the initial discovery that someone had pushed the blue button, a follow-up investigation had to be conducted by a group of kids who just could not believe that someone had pushed the blue button. When they had verified the claim that someone had indeed pushed the blue button, they then had to sample the water to see if it tasted like someone had pushed the blue button. Every single one of the twenty kids in the room had to make the discovery for themselves, and each time one cried out excitedly that the water was freezing and that someone had pushed the blue button, the others responded as if this were news to them. "Oh my gosh, it's soooooo cold!" they shouted. "Did you know that someone pushed the blue button?"

Eventually their interested petered out and that was the end...

...Until this afternoon when E went to fill up her cup and noticed, with renewed suprise and delight, that someone had pushed the blue button! "Taste this water," she said to me and held out her cup. "It's freezing!"
     "I know it is, E, I had some yesterday after someone pushed the blue button."
     "No, but taste this water. It's even colder!"
     When E and the rest of the kids were settled into their free-time activities, I approached Alyx who was at the computer looking up activities for next week. "I don't mean to alarm you," I said, "but have you tasted this water? It's freezing. I'm no detective, but I have a sneaking suspicion that someone has pushed the blue button."
     "I knew it!" she answered.

I can't wait until it occurs to them to figure out who pushed it.