something wicked this way comes

Ray Bradbury's 1962 novel, Something Wicked This Way comes, deeply affected me when I read it.  I think I read it when I was bout twelve, which meant I read it about 1965.  I am surprised to learn, as I just did this afternoon, that this novel was only published in the nineteen sixties.  I read very little contemporary fiction in grammar school. There are so many 'classics' for children to read.  I dedicated myself to reading everything that anyone said was good. I don't know how Ray Bradbury entered my system.  I am pretty sure he wasn't promoted at my provincial Catholic grammar school.

When my daughter was growing up, I tried to gift her all the books that had been important to me as a child. I always bought Katie lots of books. She had a hard time reading library books. She fretted about the germs of strangers.   When Katie was ten, in the fifth grade, her therapist diagnosed her as obsessive-compulsive, then he referred us to a psychiatrist to 'manage' her personality disorder.  Both Katie and I recoiled at the idea of psychotropic meds for a kid but we made an appointment to meet with the shrink, to see what he had to say, to sense into the idea.  Neither of us expected that we would go the med route.  Both of knew my Katie struggled.

I knew as soon as we entered the waiting room of the psychiatrist that Katie would never return.  The waiting room was dirty.  This was not a public clinic. It was in a medical office building. It was a private psychiatric practice.  The carpet was noticeably dirty.  I am not OCD. I am not very fussy about someone else's carpet.  If that carpet was dirty to my unfussy eyes, I knew, the place was unbearably filthy for my kid.  I knew we might as well leave without seeing the doc, knew she would never agree to come back but, for reasons I no longer recall, I felt like we had to stay for the meeting.  Perhaps my insurance would have charged me if I stood the doctor up whereas if we met him, then our insurance would cover things.  I don't recall.  I just remember beging creeped out in that waiting room, trying to hide my discomfort from my obsessive daughter. As if.

The doc kept us waiting way long.   He came into the examination room, after keeping us waiting far beyond a reasonable amount of time. He was very fat, he reeked of cigarette smoke and he leaned over my daughter (surely her records indicated she was OCD?) and hugged her.

She cried out, pushed him back and said "Please, mom, let's get out of here."

"Fine with me, honey," I said as I rose, gathering my coat and bag, she doing the same.

"I think you are making a mistake," he said, "I think you should give me a chance. I don't think you should indulge your daughter like this."

"I would normally try to overlook your dirty waiting room, your surly receptionist, your keeping us waiting and even your cigarette smoke, even though you must have kept us waiting so you could smoke that cigarette, after  you had already kept us waiting way too long, but I can't overlook the fact that you are a psychiatrist, you are supposed to know that you were meeting a new patient, a child, with a personality disorder for the first time and that you touched her before you had exchanged names.  You touched her."

I knew, Katie didn't have to say anything except 'get me out of here' that she had noticed all the same things that had creeped me out.  

touch you all over maybe touch your flame which is me

I want to touch every part of your body with every part of mine. Lips over everything, yes, of course. But also knee over everything, elbow, forearm. I want to touch everything there is to physically touch of you with everything physical in me. I want to be ignited by your flame, which is my flame, which is me.

I understand sex for the first time. I know desire for the first time. Before, I had sex and I enjoyed it. And I knew some physical desire, although not much.

But then, in june 2006, I experienced desire. I want you inside me. Suddenly I knew what it would have felt like to have carried a baby co-created by someone I loved. Oh my gosh, it would have been almost unbearably wonderful to have had your flame inside me for nine months. Oh my gosh. In the first moments when I knew desire, I also knew much grief because I can't have any more babies, I can't have you inside me for nine months.

I have had to settle for loving you. No touching. I don't even get to see your face much. sometimes I love you so much, I am so aware of the flame of you, that it seems almost unnecessary to be physically near you.

I came, just about a year ago, to accept that I am about as married as a person can be. I decided I was going to have to love you as you shared our life with Karen. My man sleeping with a woman named Karen. I thought it was unbearable but, as I am forced to learn and relearn, nothing is unbearable. I think I learned more about unconditional love last January than in the rest of my life altogether.

We saw one another last January. We went to the Kiefer show. You picked me up at Palo Alto Caltrain. Karen called and you said you had to pick it up, you said 'it's my honey". I had mixed reactions. Mostly, I cringed because she was not your honey, even I knew that. I cringed for you because it seemed to me that you were trying to force it to be so but when you said 'it's my honey', gosh, I felt clearly that she was not and I felt a little bad for you that you were faking it like that, I thought you were faking it for your own benefit, not mine. But also I cringed because your honey had my man.

stumbling and fumbling

Something unusual has come over me. Normally, I am great with detail but in the past couple weeks, I have become a stumbling fumbling doofus. I am having trouble managing the minor administrative details of my applications for MFA programs in creative writing. Very minor administrative details. Minor. Very minor. And I am flubbing them, missing deadlines, failing to track basic detail.

It is so weird for me to be befuddled, at least with detail, that I don't have the problem-solving skill to fix my confusion. My mind becomes pink cotton candy when I try to pause and think about what I have to do to fix my pixilation.

Maybe I am not supposed to apply? Maybe my best self is trying to send me a signal?

Or maybe dementia has set in and I am going to be a goofball for the rest of my life.

Gee, I hope not. I have come undone.

the new year or something

Lots of things are wrong about me but something that isn't wrong about me anymore is that clinically depressed is no longer my baseline. Clinical depression was my baseline for about 45 years. The thing wrong about that is I didn't know. I didn't know I filtered my entire experience of me being me through a dark glass. Inside a dark lens, well, you don't even know it is dark.

I am not sure what my baseline is now but it is better, I think, than it was.

It used to be that when something happened to upset me, I would hunker down, assuming that misery was going to last and last and last. And then misery would last and last and last. Of course. You get what you expect. Or something.

Now, I'm muddled but in general my life is much better. I have a lot of grief. Everything about my life would be different if I had not been clinically depressed since I was about seven. Everything.

I would never have become a lawyer. I would never have had Katie because I never would have met her dad. I might have had and lost some other child, true.

I would have lived an entirely different life, one, I am pretty sure, that would have much less grief. I know everyone faces struggles in life. I don't suggest that I would have avoided heartache. It's just that everything would have been different. I'm just thinking about that. The new year or something.

I guess lots of folks engage in such reverie, the path not taken. Can we avoid our destiny? I don't think so. All the lessons I have had thus far in this life, they were lessons I needed. I guess I chose, sometime, to

I been wracking my memory

I've been wracking my memory for some new year's memoir. I have squeezed out a few.

Back before I married my kid's father, when I was still in law school but he was out earning a living, he bought us tickets to a New Year's Eve party in an old art deco hotel in St. Paul. There was going to be a swing band and a cash bar. I have avoided reasons to get dressed up most of my life. He-wh0-shall-never-be-named should have known from this single date that I didn't have the chops to be his wife. And I should have known that he was not the guy for me, also based on this single night. Maybe I'll write more about this evening some day but for this evening's trip down memory lane, I will limit myself to my standout memory from it. This particular New Year's, the hotel, the swing band, I think it might be the only date I've ever had on New Year's. I have spent many New Year's Eve's with people but this is probably the only one that required special shopping for evening wear. I actually had to buy a pair of high heels just for this night. Is someone ever going to explain to me why anyone wears spiky high heels to go dancing? I admit that I never have given high heels much of a chance. I don't get them.

Anyway. to the standout memory. We got dressed up, we drove downtown, we got a table, one of those little cocktail tables. And ordered drinks. Then we danced to that swing band. This was fun. Then he got way drunk. This was the night I realized he had a drinking problem. He kept drinking and drinking. I got drunk, too, but I remember dimly deciding that I was going to have to stop, that I couldn't possibly keep up with his drinking pace. I decided, right there in the old Commodore Hotel ballroom, with F. Scott Fitzgerald Daisies-wannabes and Gatsby-wannabees partying all around me, that I was going to have to discipline my drinking. I had this little epiphany in which I flashed back and realized that I had been more or less keeping up with him when he drank. In this little moment, I resolved to stop drinking when I was out with him. Later, when I would order cokes in bars, he used to get angry at me. He said spending a buck for a coke in a bar (this was the eighties) was a waste of money. I said spending if spending a buck for a coke was a waste of money, wasn't it also a waste to spend a buck on a beer? Anyway, I concluded, in the middle of my one New Year's Eve date, that my boyfriend was a lush. And I married him

where's my flying car?!

HAPPY NEW YEAR

The number 2008, it sounds, I don't know, off.

I crawled over to the Starbucks tucked inside my neighborhood Safeway, wanting out of the house but also not really wanting to go anywhere. If you could transport me, yeah, I'd like to be a lot of places. If I have to walk downtown to the train station, thanks, but I'm gonna stay home. Thank goddess the holidays are over.

I order my ghetto latte, my grande drip in a venti cup, which gives me lots of room for cream. I can eat fats. Carbs, I control. Fats, I eat.

I ordered the drink and while the kid is pouring, I said, almost under my breath, more to myself than the barista, '2008, it sounds so, I don't know, so, well, wrong."

The kid said "I know what you mean. If it's 2008, where is my flying car?"

Another perfect, meaningless moment in the golden tunnel. Happy 2008.

starbucks sucks, don't it?

I like to go to Starbucks stores that have comfortable chairs. I know that Starbucks is consuming the urban landscape like PacMan eats those yellow dots. I don't think there should be a Starbucks on every corner. I want mom-and-pop coffeehouses to thrive. I worry about all those paper cups. I worry about growing the human addiction to coffee. If we are all supposed to become localvores, then some of us are gonna have to give up coffee. Starbucks represents much of what is wrong with our culture.

I get that Starbucks sucks. I really do. But my favorite local Starbucks has two plush purple chairs that are nearly always drenched in sunlight. I like to sit there and write.

And Starbucks drip really sucks. I am certain that Starbucks has deliberately chosen to make crappy drip, thereby encouraging folks to buy the more expensive drinks.

I just read a story on salon.com which suggests that Starbucks stores are actually good for small coffeeshops.

my next-door neighbors

On December first, a guy moved into the studio apartment next to mine. On move-in day, I heard a child's noise and I assumed that the child was a friend. I assumed just the one guy had moved in.

A few days ago, there was a knock on my door. It turned out to be the wife of the guy I saw moving in. She had propped open the storm door to her apartment, she could not get it to close and she sought my help. The door can be propped open by some kind of springload. In order to close the door after you have locked it open, you have to turn a little doohickey. As this woman explained to me, she is new in this country, from India and she could not close the door. You will help me, yes?

After I performed the small task, she asked me into her apartment. The room was empty except for one metal folding chair. I could not see inside the kitchen cupboards, into the closet or into the bathroom but in the main room, there was nothing but that folding chair. There was also a dancing dolly scampering around the room. A very tiny girl, no more than two-years-old but very small by my standards.

"You don't have any furniture?" I exclaimed. I guess I was rude but I was shocked. I had figured out, during the past month, that the apartment was occupied by a couple and a child. The child is noisy. The mother seems to lack confidence in her parenting. I don't know exactly why but I have a sense that she is overwhelmed. The kid is up at all hours. The kid is very noisy a whole lot of the time. I don't mind the noise. This is not a complaint about the child. I love the sound of children, the sound of the human racing leaning into the future. It's just that during the past month, this child has sounded way stressed and the mother seems to do odd things to cope. The mother takes the child outside the apartment, out onto the landing. Maybe the father wants a moment of peace inside the apartment? Our landing is not heated. It is cold out there. It just seems like an odd thing to do, to take a small child out into the cold night, into a dimly lit apartment landing, at midnight, especiallyl if the child is crying.

So. I've known for the past month that this family was living next door. I've been aware that they were recent immigrants. And I've made other assumptions. The guy probably has a high tech job. This is Silicon Valley and tech companies love to hire tech-savvy employees from India, to pay them less than they pay Americans. Silicon Valley is full of Indians. I've been told that osme of the best Indian restaurants in America are right here in Mountain View.

Even if we assume the guy next door is paid less than his American counterpart, we can also assume he is earning enough money to live on in America.

When I realized three people had moved into the one-room apartment next door, I told myself