The Daily Write: It's all a blur (May 31, 2013)

Writing Prompt: It's all a blur

There are few things that send me into weeping and anxiety than the passage of time. I console myself by remembering that not all societies experience time the same way. Perhaps this means that life and death are also experienced differently. I'm not talking about beliefs now, not about religion, or dogma, or the cannon. I'm not talking about the way one was raised up to think of god a certain way, or the chants one might practice both in public and private. I'm not even talking about karma, the sacred lotus, or be here now. Well, maybe be here now, but not the rest.

In my culture, time is a moving train on a one-way track. It's a trajectory from take off until landing in the unknown beyond. Time is a series of long moments that all come to an end far earlier than when one is ready. Time is marked by birthdays, holidays, school years past, the hungry twenties, the making a family 30s, the watching the kids grow 40s. Time is the anticipation of what is to come. It's the beautiful present unopened under the tree. It's looking at your baby in the hospital hooked into machines that measure his heart beat, pump food into his belly, provide him morphine for the pain of the chest tube and consoling oneself with the knowledge that it will all be over soon, just a blur.

And sure enough, that's exactly what happens. His tubes come out, his eating improves, his pain subsides. He grows, he learns to move his feet, wiggle his toes, turn himself over. He loves turning over so much that he rolls and rolls, from one end of the small house to the other. We laugh and delight in this baby torpedo who gets places in a most unconventional way. And then he starts crawling. At the UC center where they test the cognitive development of babies, the doctor says he has never seen  a baby crawl so fast. It's true, we race him against another baby crawler in the hallways and mirthfully enjoy the sprint. But even so, it's clear, this baby won't remain a crawler for long. He's on his way to cruising, holding onto the edge of the coffee table where his mother had her first and second birthday cakes, grasping the dog, the edge of the TV stand, the couch. And from cruising he will go to walking.

It's so clear looking at this toddler who was once a baby that time will pass too quickly. You can see your future and his right there, until you pull yourself back, "be here now" you say in your head. But being here now doesn't stop the march forward. And now, because time is of the essence, you reflect on the fact that he will be going to 6th grade in just a few months. Those months seem like long stretches now, except you've lived long enough to know that each anticipated gift will be opened, the wrapping crumpled up, the ribbons put first on your head like accessories, then thrown in the garbage. And then there will be no more presents, nothing more to unwrap. Vacation will be over, summer will be gone, and he will be growing up some more.

I wonder what it is like to experience time as circular. Does it make the hastening of death less absolute? Does it keep aging at bay?

Be here now. As if.

The Daily Write: Photo #3 (May 22, 2013)

Writing Prompt: Photo #3 (note, this is a visual prompt, an image from my writing teacher, which I can't show so you'll just have to imagine: a woman's body filled with flowers).

"Her body contained worlds of pain, enough to suffocate her from the inside out. She looked in the mirror one last time, picked up the carefully placed Wustoff knife with the trident stamped into the handle and raised it to her throat. They say that women don't kill themselves as violently as men, but what they don't mention is the women who far surpass men in the inflicting of self-mutilating wounds. It's simply too hard to grasp the woman as life-giving vessel with the furious Kali reversing her own birth.

She didn't flinch as the tip of the knife pierced her skin, didn't move at all, in fact, when the blood came down like a waterfall on alabaster."

"Okay, that's enough, I can't take it." Stephanie's brow was clinched up into a rose of worry. What was wrong with her best friend? Who the hell wrote this kind of stuff?

"What?" Deirdre laughed derisively. You read Stephen King like he's going out of style. You watch shows that are more graphic than anything I can even imagine. What exactly is the problem?"

Stephanie looked at the red velvet curtain flapping against the open window. A big summer storm was coming in according to Two Weather Mike. He wasn't usually wrong. God, she wished she was hanging out with him now instead of her suddenly macabre best friend.

"I don't know Dierd. It's just..." She couldn't say it. They both knew what she was thinking. Ever since the abortion, nothing had been right.

Deirdre's eyes hardened her expression as she looked over Stephanie's head.

The rain began suddenly, pelting the open panel of the warehouse window. Neither woman got up to close it. They both loved storms, one of the many things that had drawn them together that first awkward year in college.

"You're right, of course," Stephanie acquiesced. She couldn't stand for Deirdre to be mad at her, and couldn't blame her for her character's turn toward self-destruction. Better for her to write it out than to act on her pain.

She lifted the bottle from the middle of the table, poured them both another shot and they toasted the lightning as it broke across the sky.

The Daily Write: Beach, sand, ocean, tide (May 13, 2013)

Writing Prompt: Beach, sand, ocean, tide

I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to come up with the perfect name for my very own retail boutique, finally settling on Wind, Sun, Stars. Or maybe it was Wind, Rain, Dirt. Perhaps it was just Dirt. No, this was years ago. Dirt is far too now to have been then. Come to think of it, it was the early 2000s, so there must've been a moon in there somewhere.

Before that I worked on band names finally settling on Whoremoan. Stupid, yes. Original? Perhaps if you lived somewhere other than the self conscious S/M Bay Area in the 90s. Or if you didn't go to grad school self conscious of your lack of interest or acumen with dialectics and Lacanian lack. Maybe if you didn't live up the street from El Rio, or forgo curtains because you figured the neighbors deserved the show if they were looking through your illegal mother-in-law studio at the bottom of a house on stilts on the  north side of Bernal.

When I was even younger, I tried to come up with a nick name for me that didn't involve the words "burger" "lard ass" or "shake it, don't break it." I settled on Fir, since it was sort of part of my name. My dad, however, wanting to protect me in some perverse and extremely uncomfortable way second only to the articles he left on my bed about the dangers of Paraquat, told me that "fir" was shorthand for pubic hair. So I settled on Pepper, even though I didn't like pepperoni.

When I was much smaller I fantasized about names for my future children. My favorite was a combination of an exotic flower I had never seen, but was familiar to Buddha, and the Northern Lights. It wasn't about the beautiful name as much as the need for my specialness, my uniqueness, my misunderstood past and invisible mother.

As it turns out, I'm not the one who names people or animals in the family. My partner never likes the ones I come up with and I end up so self conscious and superstitious, I'm just glad to hand off the responsibility to someone else.

Ocean Blue. That would be a nice name. Or Balcony. People don't spend enough time appreciating nouns as names.

The Daily Write: Photo #2 (May 15, 2013)

Writing Prompt: Photo #2

When I was five I went to "zoo school" at the Portland zoo. It must've been during the summer when my mom was in the Teacher Corps. I say that because besides us living in Portland in an apartment on the second story of a house when she did that, I didn't normally go to summer camp. I can only think she signed me up because she had things to do. Or maybe I begged her. It was only a week but zoo school made a lasting impression on my psyche.

My primary memory? Riding in the small open train cars and looking up at the huge deciduous trees singing Puff the Magic Dragon and looking for him between the negative spaces made by the leaves and branches. The teachers said they could see him and I believed them. Always a sucker. Naive. Gullible. Easily swayed. Then I felt the frustration of searching for a creature I could not see, trying to believe that I did.

As an aside, this also happened to me when I walked barefoot in the rain, scraggly hair and wet clothes, into a church with one of my summer best friends. They had us stand in a circle holding hands with the clean cut gawking but not unkind children and accept Jesus into our hearts. It scared me. Who was this "Jesus" and how was he going to get into my heart? The grownups all smiled so benevolently, and the children seemed perfectly mellow. So we sang, prayed and I waited for someone to materialize and walk inside my chest. Never happened, but I did get free cookies. I've always been a sucker for cookies.

In fact, this trend of looking for creatures where they didn't seem to exist continued into college when my friend Gretchen The Purple and I were convinced by a middle age new agey white woman with straight brown hair and big beads that we could go to some land south of Olympia and see little people. Like really little people. You know, Irish-type little people. Naturally we went and tripped around the place. It was beautiful, lush green Salal, ferns, the undergrowth of a wet Northwest rain forest. But did I find little people or fairies? No. Of course, Gretchen did which made me feel wholly inadequate and jealous.

Don't even get me started on my aunt's guru, whose head I was often fearful to find laughing at me in a disembodied state in the linen closet on top of a pile of folded cotton towels.

Do you see that face in the wood? It's totally looking at you.

The Daily Write: Mother's Day (May 14, 2013)

Writing Prompt: Mother's Day

Once I said hello
Then awkward introduction
Is your mother dead?

I didn't know her
Kimiko, teen musician
I should have said hi

I am not polite
Is "foible" my middle name?
It would seem that way

At the bus stop once
I approached  dressed up strangers
Clothes from Pakistan

How was I to know
Entitled stupid white girl
They weren't wedding bound?

So her mother lives
I'm so relieved to know that
But can I save face?

The Daily Write: Right in front of me (May 11, 2013)

Writing Prompt: Right in front of me

I live with synchronized swimmers, which is excellent, since when I was little in the late 60s, I was enamoured with Esther Williams and her underwater ballets. I thought the way she and the other women looked like flowers in the water was absolutely enchanting. Like the halvah my mom got me once at a deli on 25th in Potrero Hill, the memory of Esther stayed with me, even though for years I didn't know who she was and couldn't get anyone else to confirm her existence.

Now there are Gunny and Sak, the ridiculous litter mate brother dogs that live in our house. I swear to you, they are connected by an invisible line, or perhaps a magnet. One one moves, so does the other. When one sleeps at the end of the bed as I'm laying across it sideways crooking my neck to type, the other matches his position exactly. They lift their heads together, stretch their paws the same. Today at the dog park, they even pooped in tandem, head to head, like a yin/yang!

Gunny is more of a scardie dog than Sak. Not sure why since they ostensibly shared all the same experiences, enough to make them read each other's minds and do the same things. Sak, however, will go along with Gunny which means a lot of loud barking for such relatively small creatures. I've been told by the grumpy bull dyke dog groomer (my favorite kind) that they are Jack Russell Rough Coat/Broken Coat. You may be imagining the regular Jack Russell in your mind, but these are more like shaggy dogs - Gunny with the black and white markings of a nice Jersey cow, and Sak white with some subtle yellow spots that are almost impossible to see except in the right light.

When our dog Massey died right before Thanksgiving two years ago we grieved. I thought we would take a break, maybe even for as long as a year, but when you are used to having four footed companions, as much of a pain in the ass as they are, it's hard to go without. I wanted two dogs so they could keep each other company. Little did I know that would actually translate in dog language as "egg each other on." The little rascals have ripped down a dog door, bitten through a plugged in cord causing half the electricity in the house to go off, eaten shoes, and left "presents" all over the house. We now have child gates everywhere which we think is perfectly normal until a new kid comes over to play and looks at us quizzically while trying, like Houdini, to figure out how to open the latch.

You'd never know from looking at them just what rascals they are. You would, however, be amazed at their ability to run in tandem.