we <heart> club lucky.
late lunch/early dinner
what to say?
this has become a sad, verbally sparse little “blog”, hasn’t it?
oh, believe me, I know.
there’s this irksome compulsion to at least try to be moderately entertaining, insightful or at minimum diverting–and for the life of me these days I’m finding it hard to find faith in my own capacity to do/be so…
and, voila, object lesson in the problem: there the writing goes again drifting into GLUM just like a handful of other false starts over the last several months. by golly, as much as this doggone post wants to drift there, too, I won’t LET it.
(getting an inkling of why other vox neighbors resort to lists of things to be grateful for)
…
and, thus, reticence until I can come up with something better.
up close and personal
my beautiful, beautiful ring– pretty pictures taken by my darlin’.
It’s official
the love/hate, in all its degrees
I know one day I’ll look back and miss the cute puppyhood, but right now floyd is getting on my every last nerve– and I’m kind of looking forward to the middle-aged lap dog he’ll be.
I expect it to be an occasionally similar thing with kids– not-as-young-as-they-might-be parents kind of daydreaming of one day being emptynesters. I expect kids, if I ever have them, to kick my ass. it’s one ass-kicking I welcome, and it pretty much terrifies me.
ah, that thrill ride of caring a lot, about people, things, the work we do in this world, whatever.
I am absolutely hating being kind-of indifferent to the work I do daily. it’s not even the days that make me crazy that make me crazy– ultimately it’s simply not caring enough. I really miss feeling like I was in a position to effect the way forward in substantive ways. wouldn’t it even be nice to find one’s work meaningful? well, there’s reaching for the stars… but, concretely, I miss the high tech world and working in teams of targeted aptitudes. I miss intelligent organization and management. I miss california and north carolina for those things, and some other things.
which leads to nostalgia and the oh-so-long list of the things missed for various reasons– things, of course, from the past, rendered seemingly tame in retrospect.
the present has these intense pockets of authentic feeling and then stretches of … caring less.
I want to care more, I want more. and I stop myself continually in a hundred different ways out of the fear of change and the unknown. I’m not so much afraid of feeling a lot. I am learning that I fear being and appearing stupid (there is ego in it). and I have a concrete fear of being downright dumb. not trusting myself not to render disasters. I feel I have wrought them. the mistakes I’ve made have been rather doozies. I guess it’s the risk you run.
who wouldn’t like to be smarter and more skillful? better liked? charmed and charming? though I’ve seen those with silver spoons choke themselves with them. the risk they run.
we work with the tools we have– or we muffle our own hands with hesitation.
the hats of christmas
handmade by my sister with hand-spun and -dyed yarn
glamorous sort-of hat thingy from chris’s aunt barb
and an original creation by my love, concocted from materials onhand
ho ho holiday
spent xmas with the future inlaws (which sounds totally scifi) in the south burbs. this holiday already has been most relaxing, welcoming and familial: full of tasty eats made by several different sets of beloved hands; a new stocking with “floyd” glitterscript by “grandma”; cards and packages by post including little schoolboy cookies, a cheese-making kit, and a hand-spun, -dyed, and -knitted hat from my sister. we welcome a new learning guitar into the house for the shower crooner. watched “julia and julie” this afternoon and identified so much with its chaotic women and their quietly brilliant men.
[interlude: at the moment floyd is giving the toy some love in a fashion that feels utterly wrong to us to witness.]
ten. daaaaaays. without any work schedule. open air and wide open space. we’re planning a couple of mini-adventures, getting out and about, packing cameras and setting out to discover fragile dilapidations or inspiring conglomeroddities out along the Somewheres Roadside. we’ll see what turns up, which is the point. and I’m booking some playtable time, for sure– got a start xmas eve eve– started out with wrapping and kind of took off. glue now sits drying, ideas jelling amid cluttered and resifted cutouts. I foresee several cups of cocoa, cups of tea, glasses of wine in the days ahead. this is the friday night of the long holiday stretch. staring down the double barrel of 2010 and 43– out of the aughts we go!
I have been remembering to articulate the need for TIME. just to be, time without feeling rushed or late for or behind on one thing or another. really I have missed timelessness. to have it, even in small sputtering doses and within a confined space before returning to whatever ordinary routine, defined of course in part by having a routine to return to– this feels like such a gift just now.
and quiet deeply craved… tho my inner mouth yearns to say “craven”, just all kinds of wrong meaning, obstinately meaning-full language. logic foiling the tastiness of the straight and curly sound of things. a frequent trouble in my poetry days– I’d let myself go traipsing down some nonsense for the pure auditory seduction in words, of letters thrown together in loving hodge-podge, and then wind up amounting to what, exactly? ah, yeoldesaga of sarah’s tumultuous relationship with writing– fraught with long silences and adverbial clot, the struggles with and hellyeah against meaning.
o, hello, quiet to listen through all this hubbub, the engine-starting, throat-clearing first paragraphs of getting down into the underneath and moving it forward. by gum and golly. Ima be moving it forward. that’s the deal. into the fear. right into the jaws of a host of discomforts. toward the other side, up over the wall.
of manatees and a book called _see_
there’s a gathering down at a friend’s family place in georgia or louisiana, a reunion of sort of generations of good girlfriends long parted organized around a marriage or some other event. there are myriad sweet and homely activities around about the house, both specifically preparing and also just for savoring. I go down to the swampy waterside with one of the older women and sit on the dock where we’re visited by manatees who thrust their short elephant snout fingers up through the water to investigate us newcomers. then there are odd and comical ground foul running through the brush who have scattered-looking downy, sunset-colored plumage with bright orange stripes running down their breasts. I ask my companion what they are, and she says some ridiculous name that marks their derivation from both wombats and something else silly, nonsensically two land mammals, and that someone introduced them to the area from australia years ago.
back at the house we’re exploring and trying to reproduce a whole host of arts and crafts produced by the women and girls of the family over years and years. there are tracings of some kind on old table and bed linens (ironed crisp) of vintage ad imagery. I’m dashing around with chalk and crayons, an electric iron, a stack of newspapers, and a crumbling tome with yellowed pages falling out, conducting experiments, partially on the sly out of fear of making mistakes and ruining something.
later on (possibly a separate dream altogether) I’m sitting outside beneath the arcing branches of an enormous ancient tree with thisbe and her husband and laurel and, for part of it, thisbe’s mom, who has begun the slow and painful process of dying and is being handled carefully and cradled quietly with both arms and words– and we’re having a gentle conversation that feels very real about dying and childbirth and the parallels between the two. then the others are discussing and telling me about a beautiful book they’ve all read called see. I’m listening and marveling and overcome by gratitutde for these people and all the love surrounding me.
insufficiently caffienated, or something.
rattled this morning, set coffee cup on top of car while lifting floyd up and in. drove to work in grey funk. pulled into parking lot, killed engine, and suddenly remembered coffee. got out, and voila, cup on its side, trapped by luggage rack– with still a couple of sips of (now iced) coffee inside!
slipping house and found dress
I enter a house hanging on the edge of a cliff to rescue a tin box of letters and papers. the ocean has come up over the lip of the cliff and covered the grass where we were formerly sitting. an older man (our teacher? the descendant?) and I have taken off our shoes to go retrieve what’s left. the old house is tippy, precarious, and our added weight causes it to shift alarmingly, so we step back across the old wood floor gingerly– I find the letters, though they’re somewhat scattered. mostly they seem to be innocuous and not much worth the effort of saving– routine classmate valentines and such– there’s a good deal I may just throw away– the at the bottom are a few pieces that seem more meaningful– there’s a sheaf with handwritten messages from all my friends, expressing concern and care over my dark mood, and then there’s a folded-up piece of my own writing– I stuff it all back into the box and resolve to review it later on outside the tipping, sliding house. my companion is still working on his own search, so I poke around a little and discover an old handbag belonging to the former tenant– it hales from another era and seems to me to be redolent of history and character– it’s a large satchel type bag, and I’m imagining its owner, thinking how it’s just the sort of bag a lady might use to carry a shawl in, and lo and behold, I reach inside and pull out a length of fabric– which turns out instead to be a dress of deep blue and fascinating cut. the other guy has come over to see what I’ve found (there’s the sense he has prior claim on the house’s contents), and I hold up the dress to show him. I’m thinking I might be able to wear it, as the fabric is stretchy even though it at first appears quite narrow-waisted– but he gives me a dismissive look, and I feel quite horrible suddenly, though I play it off and offer the dress to him, telling him it would make an intriguing piece of art hung on a wooden hander on the wall.