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"Go out of your way to make good memories ... At some point these memories may be all you have left. May God bless you all."
-- Dr C Bryan Cloyd, acting professor at Virginia Tech, whose daughter was killed in the massacre.
I must admit to feeling tired and depressed all day and although I got very little sleep (sick child, dog with temporary nightime paralysis of the hips and back legs) I think most of it is due to my unhealthy obsession with and absorbtion of the events that unfurled so tragically yesterday in Virginia. Partly, yes, it is because N is off to college next year and this has been our overwhelming preponderence of late, and partly, I suppose, because it is a train wreck. I am utterly amazed at the bravery and heroism shown by some of the young men and women and I pray that there will be a way for them to get through this.
And so, selfish git that I am, I needed to be cheered up and as luck would have it the lovely J (female J) gave me a Pal versiaon of the Vicar of Dibley Christmas Specials, which I've been watching in the kitchen, surreptitiously on my laptop, while making spaghetti bolognese for the children's supper. Silly I know, but Dibley reminds me of Aldbury, and it makes me happy to cure my homesickness, especially when Little is in here with me, giggling at Alice and imitating her so beautifully. I feel as if I'm home again, in my Mamma's house in the summer, drinking a glass of wine and watching the air balloons go by, high in the sky.
My friend Gary, who is a good deal older than me (by 25 years), revealed that he goes to Mass every Sunday. "I arrive late and leave early" he confides and "it makes me able to face the rest of the week." But, since his mother died, he has been unable to believe in the Catholic idea of God. Death, he says, seems so final now. One is not often faced with belief or put on the spot to describe the specifics of one's beliefs, and put on the spot I found myself speaking about the gratitude that you should feel every day, the thanking of the higher power. But to the question "where do souls go?" my answer was ruefully inadequate. Do I say that I believe that everyone we ever loved is there, in the sky, looking down on us, guiding us? Making sure nothing bad happens? Can I dare say that now? When 32 completely innocent and hard-working children are shot down like so many beef cattle, or worse, is there really an argument that there are angels watching over them? Where were their grandparents or unborn brothers and sisters then? And that poor man, the 76 year old holocaust survivor my mother mentioned to me - he's been through the worst attrocity in history and then stands in front of his classroom doors to bide time with the shooter while he lets his students jump out of the second floor windows to safety? God, it's all so fucking random.
There's a suggestion on CNN by way of that noble institution, The Daily Mirror, that Prince William and Kate Middleton broke up because Kate's mother said to the Queen "Pleased to meet you" and asked to use the "toilet." It then goes on to quote Nancy Mitford ad nauseum, pulls up the old U & Non-U argument and generally suggests that English society is riven with snobbery. How boring. And how blindingly superficial. You'd think the English would've gotten over themselves by now as the Empire was over almost a century ago. Of course the Americans like to exacerbate these ideas, along with the idea that England still has crap food, no matter how many Jamies and Gordons and Delias and Nigellas you parade out in front of them. Everyone needs some framework in which to live and this is created by either religious or social or socio-political or capitalistic or spiritual ideologies, but resorting to judging other men and women by whether they choose to say "couch" or "sofa" strikes one as a little bit parochial and a big bit superficial, don' t you think? I am not unaware that I am hypocritical, but that's part of the fun. It's almost as if snobbery is a game played by bored aristos and pseudo aristos with too much time on their hands, a Da Vinci Code for the louche & debauched gin & tonic swillers. But when any reasonably attentive person can read and take in Noblesse Oblige or subscribe to the Tatler or the Field, or bone up on Jilly Cooper, how interesting is it? How many fat girls in frilly ruffled shirts and faux pearl necklaces did you have to see to realize that not one of them was Lady Diana Spencer. How many young men in mismatched loud socks braying loudly "Air Hair Lair." Boring boring boring. Rats in cages, all of it. We are an idle, vain lot.
Meanwhile, the bees are disappearing even faster than last year or the year before, not just here in California, but all over the US and in Europe too. An alarming story in the Independent confirms that fingers are pointing at mobile phones:
The theory is that radiation from mobile phones interferes with bees' navigation systems, preventing the famously homeloving species from finding their way back to their hives. Improbable as it may seem, there is now evidence to back this up.
Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) occurs when a hive's inhabitants suddenly disappear, leaving only queens, eggs and a few immature workers, like so many apian Mary Celestes. The vanished bees are never found, but thought to die singly far from home. The parasites, wildlife and other bees that normally raid the honey and pollen left behind when a colony dies, refuse to go anywhere near the abandoned hives.
The alarm was first sounded last autumn, but has now hit half of all American states. The West Coast is thought to have lost 60 per cent of its commercial bee population, with 70 per cent missing on the East Coast.
Einstein doom-filled prediction that once the bees disappeared "man would have only four years of life left" is being quoted liberally, and I for one am alarmed. The mobile phone theory is only one of the theories being bandied about, the other being that Bayer's crop pesticide "Gaucho" is killing off the little creatures. Either way, this seems to be a more interesting and decidedly more pressing issue to focus on than the very sad but ultimately insignificant demise of the future King of England's love affair with a woman whose mother may or may not say "chimney-piece."
If I sound tired, cynical and bitter, I am sorry. I am getting sick. Both children have had it, one still does, coughs and colds rule our house, and I feel as if I'm running a mini hospital in my bed. No sooner does one patient leave after a steady diet of scrambled eggs, chicken soup, sliced mango, honey-laden tea and Oprah, than another one arrives. This current patient is much longer (bigger) and deeper voiced and has enormously large feet. He's very sweet and grateful. It's actually rather nice to have the chance to bring him snacks and have chats, and an excuse to cuddle up next to him. The dogs like this part too. For them it's an open invitation to slumber party their days away. I just hope today I don't have to deal with a dead squirrel joining the fun.
My mother won the Grand National! Silver Birch (chosen because that is the Norwegian national tree and my mother always chooses horses either because they look like a horse she used to have or because they have good names) came in at 33-1 and she made out like a bandit.
It's quite ridiculous. I've locked myself in the bathroom. N's in my bed, sleeping and coughing, and I can't bring myself to face Monica and her litany of stupid Monday morning questions or her laundry list of cleaning supplies. If I didn't know better I'd swear she'd started an eBay site dedicated to Clorox, she gets through the stuff so fast. She is sweet and dear and she's getting married soon, but I just can't take my eyes off her enormous bottom and God forbid anyone should meet her in a hallway, because one of us would actually have to back up to get through. She loves to be near me and wherever I choose to work, that's where she wants to clean. It's a bit like the dalmatian who cannot and will not even let me be in the loo on my own because she wants to lay sighing and fluttering her eyes at my feet. Monica, bless her - she really is a nice person, a caring person - is the most annoying person I've ever known and will find a way if I lock myself in my office to knock on the door at least six times a morning to ask me questions like "would you like me to clean the ice-cream door of the freezer" or "can i bring you some tea" or "the dog made number two on the carpet and i step in it but i clear it up ok?" I know I should be nice and sweet all the time, I know I should, but after the initial greeting, the smile, the how are you, the did you have a good weekend, the whole wedding conversation, I just want to run away and not be bothered or put headphones on the way you do on an airplane when you're sitting next to a particularly chatty individual.
I wish sometimes I were more direct, like Lucy, who decided to decided to put a moratorium on those leaf blowers in her neighborhood, because all the gardeners come, identically at about two o'clock in the afternoon, just when she's trying to write. So she got together with her neighbors and all the gardeners and got everyone to agree that from now on in that particularly block of Hancock Park, sweeping would become the preferred method of leaf removal. Certainly, sitting on the hard slate bathroom floor and making faces through the milky glass door is not going to get me very far.
Last week, as Minks was ill, I found myself watching the local news, something I never do. A man in Sherman Oaks had approached a couple of nannies in a park and offered to buy their babies for cash. It was a pretty awful story and of course the local news reporters made a dog's dinner of it, interviewing outraged young mothers, all artfully arranged on gayly-colored picnic blankets with their offspring dotted about them. The fire hadn't yet become the big story and so I'm sure the news people were bored. It was like a scene out of Little Children. Young liberal-sounding mothers trying to sound clever for the camera. "It's so scary," one offered, "I mean no-one would ever sell a child, it's ridiculous...but what if you had a new nanny working for you and you didn't know them very well and it was their first day on the job..." The story stopped ominously on this thinly veiled racist remark and faded to black, or back to the newsroom. The next day, with the high winds, fires broke out in the "exclusive Beverly Hills neighborhood above Sunset" and a reporter who looked as if she were reporting from Rwanda, windswept and blonde, in a baseball cap, spoke excitedly into her mike, about the imminent danger, the road closures and the "brave men and women of the LAFD." Again, I rolled my eyes and wondered what would happen if a cat got stuck in a tree at that precise moment. Karma bit me in the arse though, because I discoverd that a friend's house had indeed caught on fire and had it not been for the quick-thinking woman's move to turn on the roof sprinkler, their whole home would have gone back to the dust.
J is bigtime nervous at the moment, and of course, in his inner-dialogue way, lets it all out. This inandofitself is a good thing because as they say a problem shared is a problem halved, but I feel desperate and pathetic that I cannot help him more. I'd sort of like the role where I sweep in like a prince on my white charger and miraculously change everything around for him. I can't. All I can do is listen, bring him cups of tea and try not to open my mouth, at least if there are words that want to come out.
"O, beauty before me
Beauty behind me
Beauty to the right of me
Beauty to the left of me
Beauty above me
Beauty below me
I’m on the pollen path."
-- Navajo saying
I have received my first official rejection letter from the New Yorker. It's so pleasant that I can't really feel offended, and plus I probably should have started at the Metro Station not the Eiffel Tower:
Dear MissWhistle,
I feel as you do about birds and birdsong even though this poem didn't find
a home here. Many thanks for sharing it.
Best wishes,
Alice Quinn
Isn't that the nicest rejection letter you've ever seen?
Jumby is already up and out and off to Philadelphia after one comfortable night in our own bed. The dog we nicknamed Syphilly (the children named it after I mentioned rather too loudly I fear that it appeared to have syphillis) was left on the dock in Yelapa, with tears all round. Like a miniature labrador with a fox's head, chihuahua body and fox terrier snoot, it followed us around the beach and was dutifully fed. The people that named it "Tamale" seemed to fair better, and not surprisingly so. They were from Indiana, with beautiful blonde children who played catch with a baseball mitt on the beach, and the dog protected them from all interlopers including an over-zealous puppy. But the Indiana father would not melt, and as it was Easter Sunday, it could not be ascertained that a carrying case would be tracked down, even though the local vet will fill out paperwork just as easily as our own Dr Kipper will fill out prescriptions for Vicodin. So the dog stayed, and we cried as we pulled away from the dock. Sarah and Day being the worst offenders, snuffling and pink-faced behind their sunglasses.
I have a hideous Britannia meeting to go to. "Don't get a parking ticket" says my beloved as he heads out the door. I want to sit in my little office and write but as it is, I have donned high heels and a navy blue skirt and I am off to sound intelligent. I fear it may be a stretch.
Mexico, just in case you're gripped, was amazing. Both children stopped complaining about the scorpions in their room by about minute 23 at the little beach hotel and by Sunday morning they were rolling around in the surf like beached whales, sunburned, grinning, salty-haired and happy. I don't want to see another bowl of guacamole or another margarita for at least three months, but other than that, a good time was definitely had by all. Next time we'll bring Syphilly home with us.
But you can have the fig tree and its fat leaves like clown hands
gloved with green. You can have the touch of a single eleven-year-old
finger
on your cheek, waking you at one a.m. to say the hamster is back.
You can have the purr of the cat and the soulful look
of the black dog, the look that says, If I could I would bite
every sorrow until it fled, and when it is August,
you can have it August and abundantly so. You can have love,
though often it will be mysterious, like the white foam
that bubbles up at the top of the bean pot over the red kidneys
until you realize foam's twin is blood.
You can have the skin at the center between a man's legs,
so solid, so doll-like. You can have the life of the mind,
glowing occasionally in priestly vestments, never admitting
pettiness,
never stooping to bribe the sullen guard who'll tell you
all roads narrow at the border.
You can speak a foreign language, sometimes,
and it can mean something. You can visit the marker on the grave
where your father wept openly. You can't bring back the dead,
but you can have the words forgive and forget hold
hands
as if they meant to spend a lifetime together. And you can be
grateful
for makeup, the way it kisses your face, half spice, half amnesia,
grateful
for Mozart, his many notes racing one another towards joy, for towels
sucking up the drops on your clean skin, and for deeper thirsts,
for passion fruit, for saliva. You can have the dream,
the dream of Egypt, the horses of Egypt and you riding in the hot
sand.
You can have your grandfather sitting on the side of your bed,
at least for a while, you can have clouds and letters, the leaping
of distances, and Indian food with yellow sauce like sunrise.
You can't count on grace to pick you out of a crowd
but here is your friend to teach you how to high jump,
how to throw yourself over the bar, backwards,
until you learn about love, about sweet surrender,
and here are periwinkles, buses that kneel, farms in the mind
as real as Africa. And when adulthood fails you,
you can still summon the memory of the black swan on the pond
of your childhood, the rye bread with peanut butter and bananas
your grandmother gave you while the rest of the family slept.
There is the voice you can still summon at will, like your mother's,
it will always whisper, you can't have it all,
but there is this.
-- Barbara Ras
From Eric Norden's "The Final Quarry":
"Listen to me, my son," the priest continued, the ancient words falling with liquid precision from his lips, "this beast you seek to slay is the last guardian of man's innocence. Unicorns live on thoughts of beauty, and the radiance of their sould has fallen like sunlight on the world for thousands of years, even before the Old Ones were dreamed into substance on Olympus." The priest's voice fell even lower and the mad eyes filmed with grief. "But the day Christ died on the cross the king of the Unicorns took it upon his race to suffer penance for the act, for otherwise God's wrath delivered on the heads of man would indeed have been terrible. And so on that day, while the heavens shook and the earth trembled on the brink of chaos, he ordered all the females of his race to die, and in great silver flocks they mounted the heights of Thessaly and threw themselves to death on the crags below, singing the ancient songs as they fell. Their voices reached the ear of God, and the tears of Christ rained upon Greece for three days and three nights, and beauty crept into the dreams of everyone."
He is mad, thought Deverish feebly, why does he keep looking at me, why does he not let me out into the sunlight ?"Since then," the priest went on, "the remaining unicorns have died one by one, always by the violence of man's hand, because Christ in his love has spared them pain or illness or suffering or death, save that inflicted by his own tormentors. And with the death of each unicorn over the centuries, something of beauty, something of innocence, has gone out of the world, and a candle has been extinguished in the heart of every man, and the darkness has grown. This poor tired beast you plan to kill is the sole custodian of that ancient, guttering flame. When he is slain the last light of God's mercy is snuffed out, and even children's hearts shall become soiled, and wonder will die slowly, strangled until it becomes only a word, and innocence shall never return. A vast darkness hovers over the earth, peopled with the horrors of the apocalypse, and this beast is man's last solitary light. So God intended it and so it shall be. Go and destroy him."
For the anniversary of a death, the day is already surprisingly plump with optimism. I can almost imagine my father smiling down on us from his grassy field in heaven where he walks all his dogs (generations of them), smelling faintly of halitosis (I found it most comforting), and with that familiar twinkle in his eye, watching our dumb moves, our crazy thrashing about, trying to pound meaning out of this mortal coil. He is smiling like the Buddha and telling us all to relax and look for the signs in nature. We're all trying too hard. It's there for the scooping up. The birds know it. That's why they have all the fun.
Norwegian cabbage stew (lamb, cabbage, salt, peppercorns, water served with boiled potatoes and masses of chopped parsley) was on the menu last night. Everyone but me turned up his nose at it. Minks opted for Lean Cuisine (ew) and John made a Thai Pork Noodle concoction. But I luxuriated in the velvety overcooked cabbage, the lamb neck falling off the bone, the floury potatoes. I cooked it unwittingly, forgetting it was his favorite meal. But now I know why I cooked it. The parsley is the key - you need loads of it. And of course, a wee dram.
My friend E who's a poet (and I didn't know it) came for tea. I felt like one of those "ladies" in Little Britain, with cucumber sandwiches, egg sandwiches, earl grey and jaffa cakes, sitting outside in the late afternoon sun - "oh doo come for teaaa" - and discovering that everyone that starts a book over the age of 40 thinks it has to be Gravity's Rainbow, and the sooner you can disavow yourself of that dumb notion, the better. E is right and E is very wise and today, armed with my new African Violet that I vow will not die, at least till I'm done, I march bravely into the fray, with a new desire to not let the bastards get me done. I will finish this thing if it kills me (now doesn't that make you want to break into a chorus of "Rule Britannia"?).
I miss you DEW.
Whenever my father and horses are in the same dream, I know everything is going to be all right. That he was haggling over a room service bill for two beers and a glass of white wine is beside the point. His mere presence is soothing to me, oddly enough, even as a disembodied voice at the end of a phone line.
strolling on the pampas I rather love this.
I am missing QT's premiere. I had every intention of going. He asked me t come. He was looking forward to it. I miss him. I want to see him; in fact, I can't wait to sit down with him to laugh belly laughs and sing badly, but I just can't face going alone and seeing all those people, and feeling miserable (why would I feel miserable, it's ridiculous, but truthfully premieres make me nervous and miserable and I remember the bad ol' days). I am pathetic, I know. I am completely pathetic. I do not want to drive down town to watch three hours of an explotation picture, albeit an exploitation picture with an excellent pedigree. If Jumby could come, I'd rethink it. I don't know if this is procrastination or self-preservation or just downright stupidity. I'm thinking of you Mr T, and I hope it goes well, and I miss you and I know this one will be brilliant, because you are never not brilliant. And bugger them all if they don't understand you. And, if if makes you feel better, my sixteen year old son can hardly contain his excitement that the movie will be in the theatres Friday. But perhaps it's the girl with the machine gun leg that does if for him.
Outside feels like Norway, the ominous threat of rain hanging over us, spreckling us a little, but not quite letting go. It's gray and cold, but cold in that summer in the fjords way, cold enough for a couple of layers and flip-flops, under the awning, buried into a deep chair that smells of India. Today even the hawk who lives on the ridge of Horseshoe Canyon is quiet. Minks is on vacation and on best behaviour as I've confiscated her computer. She visits me occasionally and shows me her latest projects - photographs and stickers cut and pasted into little books, labelled in curly, childish writing, ribbons around the edges. We had adventures this morning, some birthday shopping, some lunch, some giggling, and now we're both working silently, she inside and me out, she in a coccoon of pink and white, me in green - spiky flax, feathery eucalytpus, and underside of olive. I like this kind of alone-ness, when she is here and chattering, just a room away from me. It's hard, the alone time. Kurt Anderson did a show on it this week, with a novelist. I've downloaded it and plan to listen to it alone, walking the dog.
"Visions of Argentina in my head, plans for everyone... it's in the whites of my eyes", (with apologies to Bowie and swastikas). Huechahue dances around in my mind and I'm trying to write about it, but finding a way in that does it justice is not easy.
I love my husband. I would like that to be noted. And it's not because of the rolled pork he made last night.
It's become so commonplace now for me to write down everything that goes through my head (yes, I'm actually that dim :-) ) here that I don't really stop to think that it might be read, or that, God forbid! I may be judged on this stuff, but it's probably too late now to worry about it. However, what I find odd, or curious rather, in an adult person such as myself, is that like a dog whose mate is taken away, I get very sad when J has to travel. This is made worse by the fact that we've just spent 10 day, twenty four hours a day in each other's company and actually had rather a nice time together. We maybe fought once, and that was when we got back home, grumpy and jet-lagged. But yesterday, when he left for Mexico City, it was all I could do not to stare at the wall and wait for the tears to roll. It's pathetic, I know. Not exactly pioneering or feminist either. I don't like it when he's on planes. I'm scared that something will happen. It's nuts. Entirely irrational, but there it is. There is a space when he is gone, a very large (and quiet) space. It's more harmonious I suppose, but in rather a dull way.
So, overcompensating, I made tea and breakfast of onion & red pepper fritatta and wheat toast with apricot jam for both children, lunches for Noony as well as Minks, even though I know he goes out for sushi. But today is internship day and he's usually to busy to buy lunch. I bought big fat floury bread rolls and filled them with butter and salami and baby lettuce and cheddar. Bags of grapes and Cadbury's chocolate eggs and garbanzo beans. He eats three mouthfuls of fritatta because he can see I've made the effort. They're all gone now, all three of them, by car, by bus, by plane, and I'm here with the dogs, the tulips, the grey morning, the white plum blossom, the hum of the refrigerator, an occasional bird that makes its way through the low cloud, Minky's blue ribbon from Sunday, and the envelope that contains the final payment for Noony's college trip back east. He leaves on Saturday. Two days ago we were looking at pictures of a little blonde seven year old fishing for crabs on a jetty in the late afternoon sun, gappy grin, sunburned nose, and in a couple of days he will be making choices between NYU ad BC and Middlebury. It's wild. He is handsome and clever and wise and most of all, he is kind. I know he will make good choices. I have no worries that he will land where he is meant to be, but oh my, did it have to go this fast?
Pema Chodron (I think that is her name, without looking it up, I can't be sure) talks of making sure the moments count, of being mindful of each moment, because we cannot rely on hope or what will come, because we don't know, and that all things will happen because they are supposed to, and for a reason. By this way of thinking, I wonder whether the two mouthfuls of fritatta are in fact the things one remembers. The sitting up till 10:30 last night, in the kitchen, talking about college, the fact that he chose to share his storyboards for his film project with me because I happened to be there? I think she's right. This is what counts. I watched them both cut up a pair of Mink's jeans because it's Spirit Week at Buckley. Left alone, they help each other, have fun together, and I can only stand by and hold my breath and enjoy the ephemeral moments.
