Aunt Bea from Mayberry

Several years ago, a new friend wrote me an email and said I reminded him of Aunt Bea.  He said he was imagining that I liked to wear dresses, which I do, and he already knew that I liked to nurture others.

I was insulted being compared to Aunt Bea. I am fat, like her, but she is old and sexless.  I was insulted being identified with a sexless, selfless woman who gave to others and had no life of her own.

Plus I was hot for the guy who said it to me and him comparing me to Aunt Bea gave me a karmic indicator that I did not want to hear.  I wanted him to want me. He wanted, I guess, homemade pie.

I have been in a dizzy tizzie about the aforementioned male for about four years.  I've been out of my mind.  He was living with someone when I met him. That was okay with me. She got him first, fair is fair.  It was fun, to let my feelings soar and roar without having to actually risk getting involved or having sex.  I had a great time, mooning about him.  And I got to see him once in a great while, and then I would feed off of that glory, day in and out.  It was actually a good time.

Then his woman kicked him out. He likes to pick women who own houses, living in the San Francisco Bay Area as we do.  He likes women with some wealth.  He likes skinny women. Pretty women. I don't know what I had been thinking. I have no money, I am fat, I am not a looker. What was I thinking?

I wasn't. I was out of my mind.

Then when he left her, a few weeks later, he called me up and he said "let's take this friendship as far as it can go" and he said "let's do work together like our friends Ken and Barbie do'.  Ken, his business partner, and Barbie had recent fallen in love and I knew exactly what kind of 'work' they were doing. They were doing the work of relationship.  Yes, they were having sex the the work stuff was relationship work.  Ken had said "We are both doing lots of work, lots of old stuff is coming up, lots of healing and it's great, it's all great. But it work. Hard work, you now?"

So I did know.

But then when we started to draw close, he got scared and jackrabbited away. He broke off with me by email. And when I left him some timid, polite voice messages asking him to call me, to just give me a few minutes because I had cracked myself open, stumbled into a deep wound, and I wanted a chance to pull myself back from the brink. And he said that I had debased myself when I had asked him to call me more than once.  I didn't beg. I spoke calmly and politely and said "Please call me.  I only need a few minutes.  I am trying to speak pleasantly and this is how I will talk if you call" And he wrote back and said I had debased myself when I had asked to get my needs met.

He had been a coward. He got scared. And me, complete moron that I seem determined to be in perpetuity, I actualy had empathy for him.  I keened as I imagined him suffering because I had feelings and needs.  I am such a selfish cunt, eh?  I wanted to get my needs met.

And then, two years later, when I was being an idiot yet again and talking to him, I said there were lots of stories that I had withheld over the course of our friendship. And I was talking about the big story that had come up, the one that frightened him into breaking up with me by email.  You know how it is. People decide to get close and they meet their shadow. He had fled like a wounded jackrabbit.  But then, when I said "there are stories I wasn't able to tell you" and the supercilious slime said, superciliously, "You should have taken self responsibility for getting your needs met" and I said "what was I supposed to do, stalk you in San Francisco, shout out my story as I followed you down the block?" I reminded him that he had refused to talk to me, that he had ignored voice and email requests that he call. And he said "I will listen now"

And, moron that I am (only when it comes to males), I trusted him.  I thought it over and realized I still really wanted to tell him a story. So I called and asked him to make an appointment so I could tell him. He did not return my call. He ignored my email requests. I kept calling and eventually I reached him and first he said he had just gotten up and then when I said "can we schedule a good time to talk' he said he didn't have time to schedule.

I am very hurt and very sad.  I let him sucker punch me again. He set me up.

My best friend P told me he would. I asked her 'why would someone treat someone like that?  Why would they set someone up?' and she said she didn't know but that it was clear to her that he was never going to give me what I wanted and he got some kind of satisfaction out of seeing me dance like a circus pony.  She didn't say circus pony. That was me. But you catch my drift.

special glasses

"Special Glasses" by Billy Collins

 

I had to send away for them

because they are not available in any store.

 

They look the same as any sunglasses

with a light tint and silvery frames,

but instead of filtering out the harmful

rays of the sun,

 

they filter out the harmful sight of you --

you on the approach,

you waiting at my bus stop,

you, face in the evening window.

 

Every morning I put them on

and step out the side door

whistling a melody of thanks to my nose

and my ears for holding them in place, just so,

 

singing a song of gratitude

to the lens grinder at his heavy bench

and to the very lenses themselves

because they allow it all to come in, all but you.

 

How they know the difference

between the green hedges, the stone walls,

and you is beyond me,

 

yet the school busses flashing in the rain

do come in, as well as the postman waving

and the mother and daughter dogs next door,

 

and then there is the tea kettle

about to play its chord—

everything sailing right in but you, girl.

 

Yes, just as the night air passes through the screen,

but not the mosquito,

and as water swirls down the drain,

but not the eggshell,

so the flowering trellis and the moon

pass through my special glasses, but not you.

 

Let us keep it this way, I say to myself,

as I lay my special glasses on the night table,

pull the chain on the lamp,

and say a prayer—unlike the song—

that I will not see you in my dreams.

a lemon moon

My daughter's birthday is at the end of June so she never got to celebrate it at school.

One year, she was at Girl Scout camp during her birthday. The camp prohibited all sweets so I brought the largest watermelon I could find for her cabin to celebrate. The cooks in the kitchen made a mistake and cut up the melon for a regular meal, ruining her birthday treat on her first birthday away from home. She was disappointed. I was devastated. I had driven a couple hundred miles, roundtrip, to get that watermelon to her.

One year, in, I think, the 5th grade, we celebrated her 'half' birthday, the halfway point in the year between her birthdays, in late February. I didn't want to be ordinary and do cupcakes. I special ordered a large, crescent moon of a cookie. It was yellow because it was a tart lemon cookie, with tart lemon frosting. It was a gobsmacking glorious cookie, the kind that would sell for a few dollars a piece nowadays.

When I discovered these lemon moons, the bakery was selling them for about a dollar apiece. They were small half moons, about two inches long. The baker, however, who made our special order lemon moons chose to make gigantic cookies: each cookie was the equivalent mass of about five of the cookies I had ordered. I had prepaid. We got those gigantic cookies for a fraction of what they should have cost.

They were so sweet that none of the children had managed to eat an entire one. And Katie's teacher teased me about giving the children so much sugar. And he teased me that he had shared his cookie with his two children during their lunch break -- and still had leftovers.

Those lemon moon cookies were a lovely, magical gift in bleak midwinter February.

I was just in the Oakland Whole Foods. Suddenly, I craved a lemon cookie. They had some cookies on sale called 'lemon lush'. I knew, at a glance, that the lemon lush would not sate my desire.

I think those lemon moons, from long ago, were a bit like shortbread, with lots of lemony bits in the batter and a very tart lemon frosting. If I had anyone to bake for, I might try to replicate them. Gosh, they were delicious. I won't make them. Too much trouble for one diabetic who shouldn't eat them anyway.

Maybe I will look for a lemon-frosted scone. Sometimes they sell them at my Peets.

there is a solitude of space

There is a solitude of space
A solitude of sea
A solitude of death, but these
Society shall be
Compared with that profounder site
That polar privacy
A soul admitted to itself --
Finite infinity.


Emily Dickinson, of course

W. H. Auden

This poem is almost not great . . . nope, it's great. I am looking for poems about misery, if anyone has suggestions.


Vintage

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crêpe bows round the white necks of the public
doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

Alice Oswald, great poet

Alice Oswald, a poem you should know if you do not (she is British and not yet famous), has just published a new long poem. Here is an excerpt of A SLEEPWALK ON THE SEVERN, published by Faber & Faber on March 5, 2009. I haven't check yet but I am sure you can buy it at alibris.com.

The excerpt. .. the poem is set at night, on the River Severn (Alice loves nature):

A SLEEPWALK ON THE SEVERN


Flat stone sometimes lit sometimes not
One among many moodswung creatures
That have settled in this beautiful
Uncountry of an Estuary

Swans pitching your wings
In the reedy layby of a vacancy
Where the house of the sea
Can be set up quickly and taken down in an hour

All you flooded and stranded weeds whose workplace
Is both a barren mudsite and a speeded up garden
Full of lake offerings and slabs of light
Which then unwills itself to listen

All you crabs in the dark alleys of the wall
All you mudswarms ranging up and down
I notice you are very alert and worn out
Skulking about and grabbing what you can

Listen this is not the ordinary surface river
This is not river at all this is something
Like a huge repeating mechanism
Banging and banging the jetty

Very hard to define, most close in kind
To the mighty angels of purgatory
Who come solar-powered into darkness
Using no other sails than their shining wings

Yes this is the moon this hurrying
Muscular unsolid unstillness
This endless wavering in whose engine
I too am living.

it aint easy being brilliant

The air is thinner. It's a little isolating. It is a lot of fun, though, to think and see, dream, feel, love, see more. Love more.

I think I have written about Luciferic vortexes before. I am caught in one right now. I am in a mobius orbit, moving closer to the love of the gods and goddesses. Resistance is futile. I will be love. I will be loved. I will be loving. I am love. Closer. Closer still.

I am Goddess.

So are you.

back in the swim

Finally, I returned to my local swimming pool. I haven't been swimming in Mountain View for an entire month. I did swim one day last week while I was out of town. I only swam half an hour on Friday. Today, I gutted out forty five minutes. And now, it's 8 p.m. and I am falling asleep.

Gosh, it felt good to resume to my normal routine. I walked to the pool. Then I walked to the grocery store. Then I hopped a bus to the drug store. Then I walked to the post office. And, finally, I took a bus home. If I had walked all of these errands, I would have walked about ten miles. As it is, I walked, maybe, five miles. I am feeling a little guilty. I was inactive long enough that it affected my fitness. Gosh, I am drained.

Still, being out and about today, doing dull, ordinary things, well, I felt like me again.

It helps that it is sunny again. My tan had faded. This evening, my skin has that sun-kissed feeling, the very sleight burn of fair skin out in the sun a smidge too long. It is, generally, a good feeling.

I was going to try and push myself to do an hour but after twenty laps, I had a bad headache.

This is such a boring post. I have heard from a few friends who became aware that I had been way sick. I love it when people who care about me inquire about my wellbeing.

I took a nap today. It's only 8 p.m. I am going to bed right now.

On the mend. It feels great.

One more thing: it is fun to be hailed by my swim buddies. Everyone had heard I had been sick. I love having people care about me. Pete doesn't swim on Tuesdays but I ran into him at Whole Foods. It is a sign that I am knitting myself into a community when I run into people I know at the grocery store. I had strong urges to give Pete and hug, even to kiss him chastely. . . but I didn't. I write a good game but I am shy. Pete said that he had heard I was sick, that he had worried about me. And then he said 'how do you feel, you look like you don't feel so great'. I

Lake Woe-Is-Me

Goddamm.

Goddamm.

I was up most of the night. I just went downtown to return some movies to the library. The overdue fine is a dollar a day, per DVD. I renewed them once. I couldn't renew them again.

I am so crabby. Worn down. I am so mixed up about being sick. Am I sick? Or am I imagining it? I am so tired. So very, very tired.

Once I start moving, though, I do all right. It is nice to be out in the sunshine. Gosh, it feels like the whole world has changed since last I was well. It warmed up. Blossoms everywhere. Daffodils. Birds of paradise. Some big flowering trees are flowering. I don't know what they are.

Wah. I want. I want so many things that I do not have. I think I am sick because I want.

When I was a kid, I survived my whacko mother, well, survive might be putting too much positive spin on my story. I avoided more damage by needing nothing. I couldn't even let myself ask for things for Christmas. I would try to ask for humble little things. And, of course, I got positive reinforcement for asking for a book for Christmas. I never asked for a doll. Deep down, so far down that it was not conscious, not at all conscious, I wanted dolls.

My best friend, Tammy, she had dolls and was very generous about sharing them with me. She even let me bring her dolls to my house. My mom hated Tammy (she hated Tammy's mother, which amounted to the same thing). Mom liked to rant about the stupid presents Peony Montag bought stupid Tammy. Weren't they stupid to want dolls?

One year, Tammy's grandmother gave me a Barbi doll. I loved that doll. And I loved that woman for giving it to me. But I behaved like I did not want the doll. My mom went ballistic when Tammy's grandmother gave me a Barbi doll. She felt, and probably correctly, that Tammy's grandmother was judging her. Mom was embarassed. So was I. Finally, I had a doll but I never played with it. Eventually, I kept it over at Tammy's. I could not play Barbie dolls in front of my mom. My mother said Barbie dolls perpetuated bad female images and she was right. But I was still a little girl.

Some time after I got that Barbie doll, my mom announced that she was going to spend $100 on each child for Christmas. She said we could all place our orders, she would buy us exactly what we asked for. For some reason, I believed it. I poured over the Sears catalogue for many, many hours, carefully choosing how to spend my hundred dollars. I factored in sales tax, shipping costs. In my fantasy, I spent the entire amount on Barbie outfits. I had so much fun picking them out. When I was very sure which ones I wanted, I presented the lists to my mother. I was such an idiot. I must have had some weird issues. I so believed she was going to do what she said and get us exactly what we wanted. My mother hated Santa Claus. She didn't like to go along with the Santa Claus bullshit at all. Her hundred dollar game was really her way of scorning Santa Claus. Also, she was probably angry with my dad, who always bought us way too much stuff for Christmas. Way, way too much stuff. She probably came up with that hundred dollar plan as a futile effort to control my dad's spending.

So I put in the order, with mom. And I did not ask for anything else. I expected mom to keep her word. One of the incentives for her hundred dollar plan was that we were supposed to make a list of what we wanted, keeping her budget in mind and then no nagging, no pleading.

I kept my end of the bargain. I made my selections. I gave her the list of Barbie outfits I had chosen. I thought long and hard about going strictly with Barbie clothes. There was plenty of other things I could have asked for. But I believed this was my one chance to spend money, to direct the purchase. I so totally believed her.

I sincerely expected to get ten new Barbie outfits for Christmas. I couldn't believe the magic in that. Tammy and I talked

I've lost my mind

I have lost whatever was left of my mind.

My apartment is pitted out. I've been sick about two weeks. I get sloppy when I am sick. When I don't have enough energy to walk across the room to get a drink, a drink I am just about desparate for, well, gosh, I don't stop to put anything away. I drop things in their tracks.

I am interested in food. I don't exactly feel hungry. I am bored. Food is something to do. But my kitchen is all clutter, dirty cups and saucers. It is too much trouble. I have never been able to cook in a messy kitchen. You clean, first, right? I am feeling a mild panic, thinking about all the work that lies between me and food. Even if I wake up tomorrow and declare myself well, gosh, it seems like it will take days for me to tidy up enough to do food prep.

Laundry is not a problem. I have tons of clothes. I can go weeks without doing laundry, esp. since for the past two weeks, I have been wearing the same things for many days in a row.

I have dirty clothes dropped all over the apartment. Cups and saucers all over. Empty water bottles that I tried to drop in the recycle bag and I missed. Tea bag wrappers, kleenex.

I am not a very messy person but right now I am surrounded by two weeks of untidiness.

Yesterday, I was very excited. I had called my doctor and been promised she would phone in a prescription. they told me to wait until 6 p.m. to check with my pharmacy. At 6 p.m. I learned that she had prescribed a cough syrup.

I know that

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

beauty and the beast

Many folks don't know that Minneapolis often gets previews of shows that move to Broadway. The Lion King previewed in Minneapolis before it became a blockbuster in New York City.

My Katie was always interested in a career as a performer (until she switched to The Hotel School at Cornell where hospitality is considered a performance art). I spent beaucoup dinero on theater tickets over the years. Minneapolis, of course, is a great theater town. I took her to tons of stuff.

She applied to High Mowing, a Waldorf boarding high school (she got in but she wouldn't go). On the application, they asked the prospective high school student, to list the theater productions the student had seen. Just for fun, we tried to make a complete list. We got several pages into the attachment before we gave up. I still think that was an interesting question to ask an eighth grader applying to a Waldorf boarding school. Any kid looking at High Mowing came from a family that, um, cared deeply about the kid's education.

We had season tickets to the Children's Theater while it was still age appropriate. We went to everything at The Guthrie. We caught a smattering of every theater season, all over town. Plus music. Plus dance. Like for a couple years, Katie thought she wanted to be an opera singer. She discovered opera and boing! She was in love. So we had opera season tickets for a couple years. I even sent her to 'opera camp' one summer. Katie used to go to one of those summer camps for gifted students and one year they offered a stream called 'opera camp'. She found out that she loved the pomp and emotion of opera and she loved to perform but, alas, she was not a singer. After that, for many years, her career goal was to win three Tonys on Broadway. Margot, a Waldorf classmate, used to ridicule Katie for that goal. Margot, who also aspired to Broadway, some of the time, had taken tap dance her entire life because her mother believed you had to tap to get on Broadway. For Margot, in those days, Broadway was all about big show tunes and tapping. For Katie, the theater was more Tennessee Williams and William Inge.

Margot and Katie were the smarted kids in their Waldorf class. Everyone, really everyone, agreed. The girls were fiercely competitive with one another.

In Waldorf schools, each class puts on a class play in the spring. The 8th grade play is the biggest deal. For their 8th grade play, Margot got her wish to do Arsenic and Old Lace and to be the sister with the most lines because Katie had gotten her wish to be Titania in Midsummer Night's Dream in the 7th grade. Margot, of course, had also coveted Titania but Mr. Maier gave the role to Katie. Margot's mom was always frustrated with David, Mr. Maier. She believed that he favored Katie. Well, Jennie, if you are reading this (I am sure she isn't), I have news for you.

Waldorf classes always go on camping trips in the spring, too. For the 6th grade campout, the class had camped on the St. Croix River, up by Taylor Falls State Park. You could rent canoes at Taylor Falls and paddle down to Stillwater, an easy, beautiful way to enjoy the river. Katie had ended up in Mr. Maier's canoe and she had suggested that their canoe sing Broadway show tunes, challening one another to see who knew the most. At age eleven, Katie knew more show tunes than anyone, including David. After the trip, he told me about that day in the canoe with Katie, how much fun he had with her. And then David gave me a prescious gift. How I love me David Maier. "I probably shouldn't say this," he said, suddenly getting emotional as he recounted the singing game in the canoe, "But Katie is my favorite student. She is such a whole person, multi-dimensional. I forget sometimes that she even is a kid. She is right there with me, emotionally, no matter where I go. How did she come to know all those Broadway songs? She's not old enough to have that much history." I don't exactly know how she came to know all those songs. I didn't, like, play that kind of music around the house. I did expose her to movies. Maybe she picked up the lyrics from movies. My Katie has an awesome capacity to memorize and to mimic.

One summer, after her first year in college, she had a marketing internship at Jacob's Pillow, the first and most prominent modern dance festival in this country. The interns got to stay in cabins that were just like going to summer camp. Plus they got to see tons of the best modern dance on the planet, day after day an extravaganza of art.

One aspect of the marketing intern's job was to give tours. There were three marketing interns and each of them were supposed to take turns giving the tours because that was not the most thrilling part of the job. All the girls wanted to interact with the artists and their companies, to talk to the New York Times to place reviews of the shows. Nobody wanted to give tours to little girls who showed up with their mother's to dream about being a dancer.

The tours weren't exactly scripted but Jacob's Pillow's archivist had written out the tour. He was very concerned that the tour presented an accurate history of Jacob's Pillow. I guess if you are an archivist for an arts organization you, like, care about its history.

So. All three marketing interns had to learn the tour information and then the archivist had each of the girls take him on a tour. Katie had memorized the whole thing. By then, Katie had been in many plays so she was accustomed to memorizing. Plus David Maier had the children memorize many poems in grade school. To this day I am pretty sure Katie could recite Poe's Raven.

I miss her so much.

In her freshman year in h.s. (I know, my mind is rambling all over the place, weaving in and out of time), between Christmas and New Year's, I splurged and got tickets to see Beauty and the Beast, previewing in Minneapolis. It was her first 'Broadway' show. To me, it was just another night at the theater but for her, it was a romantic thrill. Broadway. The play we would see would later be on Broadway. It was just like going to Broadway, right mom? I was so glad I had bought those tickets. I had no idea it was going to thrill her like that. The tix were a Xmas gift.

Katie got all dressed up. My daughter was born to be glamourous. She came out of the womb caring about clothes, I swear to goddess. Over the years, every friend I ever had and all my relatives poked fun of us. How did I get a fashion hound for a kid? Where did she get it? As soon as she could speak, she had definite opinions about clothes. Basically, when she was around two, she declared that she would only wear pink and purple. And she wouldn't. Just before she made that pronouncement, the pink and purple thing, I had bought her an adorable pair of Oshkosh by Gosh blue overalls. Powder blue with a floral trim. There was a teeny tiny smattering of pink in the floral trim. Over and over I pointed out that pink in the floral trim, trying to coax her into wearing that outfit. She would not.

Another thing she did, from her earliest days, was she would try on all her clothes. As soon as she learned how to get clothes on and off, she could get untold pleasure out of trying on all her clothes.

And my Katie was always very fussy. She really is obsessive compulsive but when she was two, we didn't think of it like that. We, well, I, thought it was cute that she fussed. She could easily go through all her clothes, trying them on, discarding them, trying more. And then, get this, she would refuse to wear them again until they had been laundered.

'But honey," I implored, "you only had this jumper on for two minutes. It doesn't need to be laundered again. I won't waste the water or the electricity."

My Katie had an iron will. Always. That's why I know she isn't coming back to me.

I would haul her discarded clothes to the laundry room. Then I told her that I laundered them while she was asleep.

I miss her so much.

The night we went to see Beauty and the Beast, she got dressed up in a brown velveteen dress, knit and clingy. She put on darker, more dramatic makeup than I had ever seen before. She make little spikes in her hair, which was very short. The spikes did not have a punk/goth effect. The spikes were hot, grown up. In the dark eyeliner and eyeshadow, the richly dark lipstick, the dramatic rouge on her cheeks, she was a woman. A very attractive woman. During the intermission, as she walked through the lobby of the ornate showplace theater lobby, almost every head turned to watch the beautiful young woman. How did she know how to make herself look like that? And how had I failed to notice before that evening that my little girl was gone.

In 2003, as my fiftieth birthday approach that August, I decided I did not want to turn fifty, not without my kid. When she was a baby and I was still married to her father and I was very, very depressed, I got some therapy. Over and over, back then, my therapist asked me 'where do you see yourself when you are fifty, what will your life look like?'. It's a standard shrink trick. He couldn't get me to see happiness in my short-term future so he was trying to lift my thoughts to the horizon, to rise above my present misery. At this time, I was legally separated from her father and we were locked in a custody fight. I could not see beyond the custody battle. If I lost custody of Katie, I could see no future for me. So Dr. Engler tried to get me to see some kind of future. Why did he pick fifty? Everytime he asked me about what my life would be like at fifty, I said "Katie will be twenty one then, safe from her father. When I am fifty, I want to be dead." Gosh, I was so miserable.

Then, in 2003, I was turning fifty and Katie was twenty one, safe not only from her father but safe from me. Over and over in that summer of 2003, I replayed those sessions with Dr. Engler. Over and over I told myself that the time had come to end my life.

I was still in touch with Katie, just a bit. She said to me that if I was going to kill myself, would I send her my books? And I did. I sent her my books and every photo I had. I thought it made simple good sense. I was living, at the time, on Whidbey. I had only been living there a short time. Nobody around me would know what to do with my belongings after I was found dead. I thought it made perfect sense to ship everything off before hand. Now I can see that what I did was gruesome. It must have been really awful to receive that stuff. Plus I sent her all mementos, all my jewelry. Box after box, I grimly packed and shipped. In my suicide note, all I said was please mail my laptop to my daughter and I gave her address

deep cleaning

I never have company. I have lived in this apartment fifteen months and I have only had company once. I think this phobia got started, avoiding having people in my space, when I lost my daughter. I am pretending this is not my real life. Massive life dysphoria. Is that psychosis? Delusion? Whatever?

I think everyone pretends everything, making it all up. Shakespeare said it all. He said nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so.

OK, if a tree falls in the forest but no one hears it fall, does it make a sound?

It's all made up. So why not make up happy? Is it that simple?

I own few material things. Everything I own, except for some cash in a checking account, is in my studio apartment. Seriously, I own hardly anything. In recent days, though, I have been feeling