there must be a birthday...

A few nice things about birthdays:
*Waking up to a paper hippo that says happy birthday and a breakfast burrito from a dear roommate who understands that birthdays are important even if they make you feel self-conscious.
*Travel Scrabble.
*A herringbone rosette that matches your herringbone shoes.
*A waiter who's clearly taken some drug that makes him very very happy.
*Two painters painting outdoor Bloomington (town and gown) on a summery fall day.
*The girl with the parasol.
*Realizing a new friend is suddenly an old friend. Being able to talk about melancholy with someone who understands its inherence to fall, to seasons turning, to milestones.
*Getting all the critiques done. Not reading 131 drafts.
*Dinner outdoors at the Runcible Spoon, still chuckling at the feel of its name on the tongue.
*Hearing old, beloved voices.
*Maple sugar candy and all the right presents, none asked for, because Mamma just knows you this year. For example, the cake slicer for the fancy cake that's still emerging from the imagination and the cookbooks.
*A card with a chicken boy. Hooray for whimsical animals.
*Text messages about surprises which turn out to be ferny and rosy and sweet smelling.
*When you freak out about the weird eye problem and it turns your stomach and you think the day has taken a sharp downturn, truly new friends stopping by with cherry nut brownies and photographs of gourds and dogs in trench coats.
*Spontaneous Milne recitations and then the corresponding realization that you've always thought of those books as birthday books. When We Were Very Young. Now We Are Six.
*Conversations on the porch swing, strange things afoot at 813 W. K.
*That the party is Thursday, so it's not over.
*That your birthday allows you to indulge both sappiness and the second person.

Turkey Trot

I've been saying I wanted to experience more of Indiana, since I'm out here and all. So Mary and I took off for Montgomery's annual Turkey Trot. We missed the turkey races, but managed to witness plenty of other kinds of rural fun. Oh, Indiana.

Back in Bloomington

Bloomington assaulted me with its smells, its reckless undergraduate drivers and its naive earnestness as soon as I rolled in yesterday. Here are some other signs I was back:

*At the Vid (the Video Saloon, our local) last night a chick wandered up to my table of three, interrupting our conversation by thrusting a mason jar at us. The jar was topped by paper and contained a chrysalis hot-glued to a stick. She told us her friend saves the Monarch butterflies one by one. The little gold filament will be part of its wing. The coccoon will become transparent. Then she will let it fly away. She was sorry for interrupting but she just had to tell us, she said, it's the coolest thing.
*At the farmer's market I got an application packet for becoming an assistant leader for a Girl Scout Troop (don't get too excited, it will most likely go unfilled) and a free bottle of water stamped with "Jesus Christ offers you God's love as a free gift - just like this free water."
*Tonight I did the dance of eye contact with this dude at Laughing Planet. Fresh from NY, Boston and Montreal, I've been in the tunnel gaze of the city dweller, and last night I was chided for it, so I decided I should not just avoid his glance but attempt to be Bloomington-y and smile. He rewarded me by trying to pick me up via dropping the fact that he's visiting from Chicago because he knows the owner of 420 (as in, a pipe tobacco shop). My confused look didn't seem to phase him. Do I look like a stoner chick?
*When it storms in Indiana it storms. For the past few hours the sky has been lit up every few seconds, that's every few seconds by lightening. For short periods there will be booming thunder or sheets of rain, and then that will stop, leaving the bright lights illuminating the clouds like a broken flourescent light.

Off to packing up all my worldly goods.

nerd camp redux

At the talent show last night (rather, the "CTY Talent Coffe House") one student performed a recitation of 26 digits of pi. To roaring applause.

oh but nyc

NYC was so wonderful. I needed to just move at hyperspeed from one thing to the next, and thankfully that is what I did. I saw the origninal Phantom of the Opera in Prospect Park, Alloy Orchestra providing the score. The second projecter blew (in a great flash of light and puff of smoke!) and so we sat through the reel changes listening to the theramin drone. E and I ate sushi and people-watched. It was another one of those situations in which you feel as though you ought to be running into a hundred people you know, but actually these are people like your friends in an alternate universe. And then in five years you'll make a new very close friend and one day you'll be sitting in a coffee shop and someone will walk by and you'll think, whoa, their posture is just like Lon Chaney's when Christine takes off his mask, and you'll tell your friend about it and she'll say, oh, yes, isn't that so, and then you'll realize that you were both there on the lawn in 2005, and you'll try to remember whether you noticed each other. But yes, the gesticulations were amazing. My favorite part of the movie was when the police inspector was wandering in the underground tunnels with Raul and he told Raul to hold his hand up beside his neck because it was quite likely that the Phantom might throw a noose down over their heads at any minute. And then Raul forgot, and we all kind of giggled, and then the interstitial titles (or whatever the proper term is) came up and the inspector was admonishing him, "Keep your hand up! It may save your life."

Mango ice is amazing, particularly when you have it at a pizza parlor/ice cream vendor where you end up the next night for slices of pizza with your soon-to-be-roommate after watching her friend's pirate rock girl band (er, mostly watching the lovely oceany slideshow which was actually somewhat better than the band) and it turns out the place is 2 blocks from her NYC apartment. You know, small city and all.

The Friedlander exhibit at MOMA was quite good, and I was really happy to see his contemporary work, which was a larger format than most of the 35 mm work I'd seen of his in many, many books in the Bard photo library where I would sprawl when I was supposed to be working on my Senior Project. What was fascinating was comparing the recent series of self-portraits with the earlier work, which was all about reflection and shadow, and the way the figure of Friedlander became inflected in the compressed, flattened landscapes he created. In the later work he was actually in the photographs "in person," but he arranged his body against backgrounds (like photo collages, or woven blankets, or simply the side of a picture frame and a corner of a bed) so that the lines of his body and the lines of the background (or the lines of shadow and light) got all mixed up with each other, flattening the space as much as in the earlier work. And it was fun to go with E and hunt for the reflection of Friedlander in all his reflection photos, even if our giggling caused a bit of a ruckus. What was more unsettling was noticing a girl with a bar code sticker on her ass and trying to decide whether we should politely inform her. When E decided to intervene (cause, you know, bar code sticker on her ass?), the girl turned around and said "yeah, I know." In a very patronizing fashion. And I realized it was a girl I studied photo with at Bard. And all 3 of us tacitly agreed (as the looks of recognition flashed over all our faces) not to acknowledge this fact. It was kind of beautiful, actually.

And also. I was very happy to see CJ. It's been too long, I've been feeling lately, since I've been in good touch with the old guard, the people who have known me good and well and long. We watched the roller skaters in Central Park (including the guy who skated with three water bottles stacked on his head and the man who held his hands like he was rubbing the heads of two small children roller skating beside him) and then rowed off into the pond, which wasn't quite as good as sailing on the Charles (or Swan Boating) but was still a singular experience. And we ate mussels at a darling French Bistro (which is exactly what one does with C in the city, whereas Scrabble in a gay coffee shop is exactly what one does with E in the city) and drank wine and just laughed.

And the moral is: I was so glad to remember the big wide world outside CTY.

south hadley hodge-podge

It's been hard for me to conceive of blogging about this experience, mostly because the majority of it hasn't been that pleasant for me, and I've been loathe to blog the hard times. "Hard times is a daddy and a mother, livin in a mansion and hating each other....We ain't got no hard times, at all." I'd say 10 cents if you can name the reference, but little moose knows Lacy J.

Eveyone here is obsessed with foosball. I want to throw myself into the obsession, and have that little mini-bliss which can happen when something unexpected takes over your world. Only I'm embarassingly bad at foosball, in the way that it's possible to be when you haven't played since 1984 in Georgia with your cousins Mike and Amanda in their rec room. Man. Because, also, there's a tournament going on. And of course, all the admin staff, who spend the day playing foosball in the campus center, are the only ones left in the finals.

Yesterday my students had a wonderful conversation about empathy and literature. J was so frustrated that we keep reading disturbing stories/plays ("The Lottery," "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?," "The Glass Menagerie," "A Doll's House," "A Rose For Emily") that she asked if the publisher was still in business so she could write to complain about their anthology. And K said she didn't like to think about the sad sorts of things the stories made her imagine. But someone else referenced a line from "The Glass Menagerie" to make the point that it's important to educate oneself about unpleasant events in the past so that one can make the present different. And then P brought up how WWII might not have happened if Germany had been treated differently after WWI. I'm glad I can have these conversations with 10 year-olds. Sometimes I feel as though my 20 year-olds at IU couldn't do it.

Tonight's second activity was child labor in the guise of fun. Seventy kids signed up to wash the staff members' cars. I couldn't get my kids to do that when I was nannying, but these "gifted and talented" kids were totally into it. It was amazing. Almost as good as the activity which consisted of everyone playing Simon Says and me dumping buckets of water on anyone who made a mistake.

I think I need a little distance before I can blog about the real frustrations: the pedagogy issues, the qualms I have with the particularly elitist bent of this program, the persistently bizarre social climate. The 100 degree room (4th floor, no a/c). But I've been feeling my silence and not liking it very much. So there's something, at least.

nerd camp

Everyone jokes that CTY is nerd camp and that's really true. I made a joke about William Henry Harrison the other day and everyone listening laughed. It's not the kind of camp I long for, sleeping outside and singing all the time, but it has its merits. The kids had a social the other night and you haven't lived until you've seen 250 kids shouting "die, die, die, die" after the line "this'll be the day that I die" in "Bye, Bye Miss American Pie" while strobe lights flash around them. Today is Super Death Dodge Ball which reportedly involves the staff standing in a tight huddle while all the kids surround us and throw balls at us. Eek.

The social scene here is a little funny. While the staff aren't all as nerdy as the campers, there's certainly enough social awkwardness to go around. It's getting better though. I stayed up til 4am the other night learning to play chess (nerdy!) and last night we gathered to watch the phenomonally awful movie Dr. Mordrid (my geeky moment was recognizing Kabal, the evil wizard, as the actor who played both Luke and The Judge on Buffy). Making friends is happening slowly, not in that tight camp rush I remember, but I have a feeling it will happen by the time I leave. And I'm telling myself I need to write anyway.

This is sure pretty turf at any rate, and I'm going to enjoy hiking around and hanging out in NoHa and going off in search of swimming holes. Summer is barrelling head over heels. I'm not getting nearly enough done.

nevermind cellar door

I think "kitchen door" is the loveliest phrase in the English language. I think of all the people I have ever loved leaning against the doorframe of my kitchen(s) as the heady smell of garlic snaps up from the stove. I think about all the times I've leaned against the kitchen door in friends' houses, listening quietly for the gentle hum of their lives running -- picturing the food stocking their cabinets, the photographs and little notes papering the fridge -- before stepping in to absorb it all. The kitchen door is space between the ribs where the heart is visible. It's cool and wooden and the floor underneath supports your weary body and cinnamon, bread, soup are all within reach.

"K-k-k-Katie, k-k-k-Katie, you're the only one that I will ever adore. When the m-moon shines, over the mountain, I'll be waiting at the k-k-k-kitchen door."

cave ceilings are so pretty

cave ceiling
Originally uploaded by equinoctial.

like popcorn ceilings made of mud

is this where popcorn ceilings came from?
Originally uploaded by equinoctial.

the longest underground river in the states

runs through bluespring cavern.


people in the midwest really are just different

The insurance agent. His name is Lance. He is gregarious. He fields multiple phone calls during our talk and refers to me on the phone each time as a "young lady." Once he makes a joke about how he's not supposed to refer to the estimate as a "quote" but as a "proposal," and how he wouldn't want to tell his wife he'd had an attractive woman in the office and he'd made her a proposal. But the thing is, and here's the midwestern thing, it's not gross. He's so effusive about the online arts and music course he's taking, about maybe going to law school and about how much insurance he sells compared to the old guys in the office, that it's just part of this whole "earnestness" thing he's got going on. And it works. I like him in spite of myself.

The woman at the DMV. Like Lance, she asks what I'm doing here in Bloomington. You'd think what with the university they'd all just default. When I tell her I'm studying creative writing, she tells me how she got kicked out of her creative writing class because she got mad when the instructor criticized one of her characters. She was pregnant. She threw something at him. I know the teacher, it turns out, he's just graduated. He's a tornado chaser. Someone in a Vuarnet t-shirt walks by, and I think about 1989. Later the DMV worker tells me about how she got pulled over for speeding once but got off with a warning because of her big boobs. And you know, as much as I try, it's impossible to picture a Massachusetts DMV agent discussing her big boobs.

the writers try to be astronomers

Tonight, after the reading, we walk over to the Kirkwood observatory. The stairs are rickety but we climb them; the upstairs floor is a dark wood, the cracks between planks barely visible. David Lazar wears a shiny black shirt and black leather shoes with white stitching: a cross between Lou Reed and Foucault. He is slight and his shirt picks up the light. Because of this he looks a little like a stingray. Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni leads us, her jeweled bindi also twinkling, and in her excitement, the rest of her is twinkling too, and so between them, Chitra and David, it is as though we are bringing the constellations with us to look at the stars. There are a dozen of us, or so, and we take up all of the octagonal room. Nadine asks about the history of the building; I slip outside to watch the clouds move over the sky from the circular deck. The banister is ornamented. It distracts a bit from the view. Inside again I take my turn at the telescope. There in the scope is Saturn, a pale yellow marble, striated with gold. A runny egg. As I search for the fourth moon, Martha Rhodes begins to sing, “When the moon is in the Seventh House/And Jupiter aligns with Mars/Then peace will guide the planets/And love will steer the stars.” I turn away, back into the intimate crowd. This would be a good place to hold a small dance party. A waltz night. Couples turning, the roof turning, and, above, the heavens in rotation as well. Maybe someday I will write about all of this more, better. The writers looking at the stars, how Martha jokes that the poets just gaze while the fiction writers ask questions, how this fact is a secret revealed. Revealed here. In the woods of Indiana. It is a small secret, I think, like turning up a rock and finding, underneath, a snail shell.

on the bike ride

Lilac, burnt rubber, manure. A motorcycle pulling something in its wake: a casket. Neither rider seems to be in mourning.

television oddities

I don't watch that much TV. Really I don't. But in the last month I've seen three people I know on television. Is this one of those odd consequences of getting older, that one's circle becomes wider, that its components become more widely known?

1. Bloomington Cable Access shows $100 and a T-shirt about the Portland Zine scene. And there was Eleanor, and there was IPRC, and I tried to open the door on the screen into the next room where the WRAP offices were. I thought, oh, that's the photocopier I used to generate poems to discuss in workshop. Oh, there's the letterpress machine where I made my first project, a bookmark with Piercy's quote, "the real writer is one who really writes." I miss you all, Portland, and it was wonderful somehow to see a piece of you on Bloomington CAT.

2. Another Cable Access sighting. Soft focus, fuzzy lighting, a clearly staged scene around a kitchen table, a fireplace in the background, some fake flowers in a vase. A woman is reading from a book and I pause long enough to hear that it's the Bible. Something about the man beside her, the mop of dark curly hair, must have caught my eye, because no sooner do I change the channel than I change it back. And I have to watch for a while, because the man won't turn his head to me; he stares engrossed with the blonde woman, as if transfixed by her piety. I will him to talk because now I'm certain it's him. And finally, he turns his head and reads, yes, from Science and Health and it is him, he of Big Blue Earth and Words for the World, that children's-theater-voiced art director from MBEL who provided the voice of the owl on the Quest Adventure Game, "Ho, ho! Welcome to Spirit Mountain!" Why is he reading Bible verses in a dating-ad-style vignette on my public access?

3. BookTV on C-Span, basic cable's blessing. A panel of young editors at the New York City Book Expo. In the middle of wondering why one of the young editors' names is so familiar, I suddenly realize that another editor is that girl, Kate, from Bard. From my poetry workshop. Kate of the wonderful poem about the woman with loaves of bread under her arms like wings. She looks older, so much older, and I wonder, do I look that much older too? I must. I don't know what more to say about that, only that it's nice to see someone from that time not famous, not like the Nick Zinners of the world, but, well, clearly successful, working, trying to get people to read more books. Godspeed, Kate.

Barbra Streisand Roses

My Uncle Pat has collected Streisand memorabilia for some time now. I didn't know the extent of the hobby until I visited his new house and was given a tour of the Streisand room, which includes a dress from one of her movies, a hat from another, tickets from the Millenium concert. More items than I can remember. On this trip my Aunt Sharon met us at the restaurant with a present for my grandmother: roses from her garden in a small glass vase. I held them while we waited for our table. The insides were a mauve that shaded to fushia, then maroon. Sharon said they were Streisand roses, she'd designed them. When the first bloom they're red, then they turn pink, then purple from the inside out. When the horticulturists first presented them to Streisand, they had no smell. Barbra would never put her name on a scentless rose, so she worked until they got it right. Dipping my nose into the heart of a rose, I am overpowered by the smell. It's like a distillation of "rose," the platonic smell. Like rosewater, and I have to remind myself I'm holding something living, organic, from the earth.

nasturtiums

are not proliferating yet, but the small yellow and purple flowers in my salad mix are quite lovely anyhow.

Lawrenceburg

Inventory of the trip:

• two cemetaries in cornfields, trussed up with memorial day flowers
  
• three roadkill pets, one roadkill deer
  
• three parking lots toured: two casinos, one Wal-mart (just want to show you how busy it gets)
• two visits to Bob Evans, one visit to Frisch's Big Boy
• eight times past the distillery, every time with the window rolled down to let in the fermenting grain alcohol smell, one of my earliest olefactory memories
• several lengthy stories about shoddy construction work, one lengthy story about asbestos at Fernald nuclear power plant, a moment of silence for Aunt Margaret and Uncle Paul
  
• one amazing story about proposing to grandma: "will you cook chilli for me for the rest of my life?"
• one cemetary; six graves of loved ones, seven if you count the unfilled plot that will someday house my grandparents
• one trip to Rising Sun, past the harp store that ships harps from the valley out across the world
  
• early morning fog rolling in, sunset over Tanner's Creek, the levee segretating the brown girth of the Ohio from the garish fireworks stands that speckle route 50
  

last love song at the valentine

"Then we walked across town to the Valentine Drive-In Theater, where the marquee read CLOSED FOR THE SEASON. The lightbulbs had been unscrewed and the trailer was empty. Harmon and Nina were climbing a glacier in Manitoba." -- Mark Winegardner.

Indiana has 23 drive-ins, down from 120. More major highways intersect in the state than any other, so picture the pull-offs, the tired travelers, the white posts spread out in the remains of corn fields.

We meant to go to the Star-Lite, which we later learned is only five miles south of Bloomington, but we ended up at the Holiday, a 45 minute drive. What's wonderful is that we could set out, on a clear night in the Midwest, driving with the windows down, the sun blushing the clouds on our right, that we could pass limestone factories and giant boots and 24-hour diners, thinking we were headed for one drive-in and end up, anyway, without turning or adjusting, at another. That alternate universe feeling. We let the mulchy fresh air in and watched the little girls prance, as I did once, in pretty pink ruffled nightgowns. We watched kids dance in the back of pick-up trucks and families toss footballs in elliptical arcs over the screen. We asked the enormous vehicles not to settle in front of us please, and tried to guess the date of the concession stand commercials. Earlier that morning, I had navigated the longest underground river in the States, ducked my head under stalactites the color of clay and strained my eyes for the blind crayfish. On the way home, leaning to the window to measure the quantity of stars, the two experiences seemed to balance each other out.

Movies I've Seen at the Drive-In (A Beginning)
Snow White
Sleeping Beauty
Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid
Terminator II
Sommersby
Water World
The Matrix

tracy and i are going to start playing with the prose poem and this is a throat clearing

Jimmy Martin, King of Bluegrass

Today I am wearing on my shirt the face of a musician who is dead. I have never heard the invisible chords of his blue grass break sound into the new word, which means joy in sadness or sadness in joy. A displaced ancestor falls from the family tree, his love of banjo imprinted on a gene now notated, unalterably, in the pattern of my body. The air vibrates. On my shirt the musician's face is a negative, his sensory organs gently blank. His undepicted fingers pluck until outside thunder bursts like a rolling barrel in the sky, and the song becomes rain that washes everything away. The bright flash of lightning is electricity halting the car on its way to Boulder; is the tornado warning crackling in the gulley between two towns named for long-dead settlers; is the white light of the afterlife; is the sharpened knife-gleam of forgetting I carry in my mind from break-of-day to fizzle. Is itself: lightning, illuminating the Bloomington sky. My hand goes to my heart, conceals the musician's face. Presses him into my chest as if to mark my skin. To record imagined music, memory that never was.

along the creek path

1. Ants are tenacious. Especially the little ones, holding fast to the stamen of a voluptuous white flower that fell from a flowering tree hidden from view. And though the flower desperately wants to be tucked behind an ear, ants do not mix well with human hair.

2. A lifeguard t-shirt is strangely out of place in the prairie, its wearer keeping watch over a sea of green.

3. Empty shoes next to a shallow creek are not necessarily an ominous sign. The water ripples gently over protruding rocks. The owner is nowhere in sight. The owner's socks are of the tiny white ankle variety.

4. Toddlers are the only ones who can look sweet holding their bums while shuffling across a field.

Shh...