Book Seven 2012: Townie by Andre Dubus III

Townie by Andre Dubus III is the kind of book you can't help thinking about when you aren't reading it.  You live in its scenes while you are eating dinner with your kids or riding in the car, thinking about the narrator, wondering what is going to happen next, considering the plot development and the foreshadowing and how successfully the author ends chapters.  You find yourself missing what your husband said because you are still lost in the mill town bar fights, the father/son storyline, and the coming-of-age hunt for identity.

I was hooked from beginning to end, couldn't fall asleep last night until I finished it off.  What a book.

On top of the thrill of a great read, Dubus is going to be here for the Ashland University summer residency at the end of July.  And, a piece by him about writing memoir will be included in the next issue of River Teeth. I am one lucky gal.

I'm not sure what I'm reading next off of my 30th year book list.  After reading such a great book, it is hard to jump into another memoir, so I think I'm going to read some poetry for a bit.  I'm also reading a manuscript for a friend and want to dedicate some time to it this week while I am off of work. 

In the back of my mind is the hope that I'll also find time to write this week, maybe in the evenings after the kids are in bed, but I'm also aware of the kids laughing in the backyard pool, painting projects here and elsewhere, and the need to clean - laundry, dusting, bathrooms and all of the other chores that fall to the wayside for too long.  At the end of the week, BW and I are going out of town for a weekend, alone, by ourselves, without children.  Maybe then?  Probably not.  I have plenty of other things in mind for a weekend alone with my husband.

I might not be able to get the words on the page this week, but I am promising myself to at least think about the next essay, and maybe jump in next week, when we're back to the normal schedule.

For now, I'm going outside in my bathing suit with the kids to enjoy the non-writing hours.

Corrective Lenses and Parenting

I have been cranky all night and the peanut butter and banana plus chocolate dessert is not helping. It is a shame, too, because it’s just about as perfect of a night as there could be in mid-June. It is still light at 8:30 and the neighborhood is milking every last second of daylight. The night air is active with dogs and motorcycles, laughing children up later than mine, the hum of the air-conditioner kicking on, several different birds chirping. There’s nothing quiet about sitting outside right now. It’s downright noisy.

I don’t know why I’m such a grump tonight. When Elvis ran his front wheel up the back of Lydia’s Big Wheel and fell over onto the sidewalk crying, I checked his knee for blood and told him to stop running into her and that won’t happen. Oh, and are you okay? Want me to kiss it? You’re alright, get back on your bike.

And Lydia is talking back. But I don’t want to eat my sweet potato. But I want to go to the Seminary Park. But I don’t want to read that book. But but but but I don’t freaking care what you want I want ice cream and silence and you all to do what I want you to do right this instant. Now!

Sigh. This is a bad parenting night for me. I’ll own it, especially now that everyone is in bed and I’m trying to enjoy the cool night with all of its chatter and buzzing. I think I can even hear the highway, and it is miles away. Go away, cars! Go away, people! Go away, stupid happy chirping birds!

Maybe it is because the day started off with a baby poop explosion that made me late for my vision exam.  I found out that my near-sightedness got worse and that my prescription is such that I am ineligible for laser eye surgery.  Usually I can roll with these things, though, so I don't know what it is about this particular day that's got me all twisted in knots.  Plenty of good things happened, too, but I've been too busy scrunching up my nose and grumbling to pay much attention to those.

The kids are in Vacation Bible School this week, and of course they are learning about God things, so today after work in the midst of my crankiness, Lydia asked me if I had a “God sighting” today.

I chuckled—joke’s on me, eh God?—and looked about for some kind of a God sighting because I sure hadn’t put on any sort of spiritual lenses today. I said something about how the flowers growing made me think of God, which was a total cop-out response given that our backyard is in full bloom while I’m feeling like six feet of snow.

If I had any eyes to see today, though, I am sure I would have seen God shaking his head at my need to control my kids, to manipulate their eating habits, to force them to behave exactly how I’d have them behave when I’d like them to behave. I turned parenting into a performance in which I am the director and my kids are the cast. Play your part, children, or the director will cut you and call up the understudy.

Tonight I boxed in my kids, more than usual, forced them to acquiesce to what I wanted, and when they didn’t care for that plan, I was quick to bark orders and cancel rewards. On better parenting days, my hope is that I teach them about the right decisions and then let them choose into those, and if they choose into something else, then depending on the outcome I’ll respond accordingly, with mercy and grace instead of fast justice and snappy discipline.

Maybe then my God sighting will be acknowledging the beauty in the chaos of the night.  Or thanking God that I live in an age that has developed corrective lenses, since during any other time in history, I'd be considered legally blind.  Me and Milton, you know.  Or that it was warm and sunny and I ate a delicious salad on our patio with my family at lunch and then walked around the block after dinner. 

Now, after I've carried my laptop back into the house, I am sure that God is in the silence and the churning of my thoughts, listening to the hum and click of the computer, waiting for me to quit my belly-aching and acknowledge the stillness, sit in it and wait and know.

Family Vacations, Then and Now

This weekend marked the first family vacation with my side of the family since the Great Myrtle Beach Thanksgiving Vacation Disaster of 2007. None of us said anything to reference it, but as we set up our campers at the state park on Friday night, cold wind whipping across the lake and blowing in heavy bursts of rain, I'm sure we were all thinking of it.

Back in 2007, my husband and my mom set out around 8 p.m. on the weekend before Thanksgiving with the hopes that our potty training 18-month-old daughter and 3-month-old son would drift off to sleep shortly after leaving, and they could drive through the night, arriving in the sunny Carolinas around breakfast, a bright November sun burning off the fog in the foothills, and two well-rested children slowly stirring in the back seat.

Instead, the two kids took turns keeping the other one awake, Lydia crying every time they drove under a row of streetlights or caught the headlights of oncoming drivers heading back the way they came.  Brandon and my mom took turns trying to pin clothes to the window to block the lights, played music, didn't play music, sung, gave bottles over the back seat, anything, anything to get them to sleep.

Meanwhile, I was at home, sleeping soundly in my empty house and bed after spending most of the night painting the living room red.  I stayed behind because I had just started my job at the University that fall and for some reason I decided that my five vacation days that year would be best used some other time.  I would work the first two days of the week and then just fly down on Wednesday.  No big deal.

The family van rolled into Myrtle Beach on Sunday, alive.  I flew down to Wilmington from Columbus and arrived at the airport, ready to see my happy family at the beach for a long weekend.  Utopian dreams of previous vacations drifted in my brain, full weeks spent wandering the beach and strolling about with both my side of the family and his, smiling, sunset gazing, sandcastle building, everyone jolly and hugging and wishing it would never end. 

My phone rang as I got off the plane.  It was Brandon.  A deer ran out in front of the van on his way to the airport and the van was undriveable.  A tow truck was on its way.  You'll have to rent a van, he said, we'll get this one repaired and pick it up on our way back out of town. 

Only no mechanics work the week of Thanksgiving.  We'd have to come back for it.

The two of us rolled in to the condo and slipped as quiet as possible into the bedroom, under the blankets, the bed creaking just enough to wake up Lydia.  Mommy?  And then four hours of children awake.

Thus began our Thanksgiving vacation at the beach.  Dad and the boys arrived about the same time as I did on Wednesday and we ate our Thanksgiving dinner together in the condo.  We wrapped up the weekend with a family blow-out and a one-way rental back to Ohio. 

And now.  We huddled around the campfire started with lighter fluid between the two campers, hoods up over our ears to block the wind gusts, and grumbled about the weather with my brother and his wife and my parents while the kids slept in the camper.  Lydia is now six, Elvis almost five and Henry just over a year old. 

In the morning, we cooked eggs and bacon over the fire, still battling the chilly wind.  This figures! I muttered.  Can't plan anything.  We took the kids to the playground, wobbled over the limestone boulders down to the lake side so the kids could throw in sticks, and at lunch we moved the campers to another less windy part of the park.  And then, then it was like the old days - the really old days - of fishing and cooking and roasting marshmallows and cooking hobo pie and riding bikes and making fast friends from the campsite across the way (hello, Lisa).

Only this time, it was me and my family giving it to the kids, my brother teaching them to fish, my husband playing catch with the older two and chasing Henry across the grass, all of us cooking and singing and drinking and eating, and me, grinning like I just caught my first bluegill by the water.

Book 6, 2012: Beautiful and Pointless by David Orr

I just finished Beautiful & Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry by David Orr, and now I am sad.  It isn't often that I come across a person who cares so much about poetry but is equally as honest about the state of contemporary poetry, and that willingness to illuminate the reality of modern poetry and call it like it is was refreshing, humbling, and entertaining.  I'm not sad because of his honesty or the bleak portrait of modern poetry.  I'm sad because he was light, funny, and accessible, and now it is over, and now I must go back to actually reading contemporary poetry (ha ha ha).

Y'all know that I love poetry (really, I love poetry, not just like).  I come to poetry mostly from Dr. Seuss and Shel Silverstein and the simple pleasure of the way words felt in my mouth as I learned to read.  The music of poetry and the written word is unlike lyrics in that the rhythm resides solely in the words-- it cannot be buttressed by notes and chords, by percussion or strings.  That's where my love of poetry starts-- in play and in joy.  Plus, I am tone deaf, and while I will sing (badly), singing is a distinctly different kind of pleasure that involves high notes, low notes and all that fall between, while one focus of poetry is on the way the words rub up against each other, in stresses and unstressed syllables, in alliterations and rhyme. It sings without vocal range (thank God for that).

Next I find the poems I like most offer a magnified glimpse.  At something.  Anything, really.  Like a photographer, the poet zooms in and says, look what I found.  Or, listen to this experience I had once.  Or, doesn't this remind you of this other thing?  I love the metaphor.  I love the hidden truth revealed.  I love the "ah ha!" moment when I discover what the writer discovered, and I love to be on the writing end of that "ah ha!" moment, experiencing the surprise, too.  I like poems that invite me over for a cup of tea.

But I also like poems with depth and feeling, poems that struggle with questions-- big and little ones--poems that make demands, poems that are so personal they fold in on themselves and become universal.  I love poems rich in detail and rooted in scene.  I love storytelling and narrative, form and freeverse.  I even love the poems that require several run-throughs before the meaning reveals itself, if at all, poems with complex syntax that I have to cut into small pieces and digest slowly before I have any idea what's really going on besides initial awe.

So these are some of the reasons why I love poetry.  What is brilliant about Beautiful & Pointless is that Orr does not set out to defend poetry as the Art of Arts.  He shares with the reader a panoramic shot of the world of modern poetry, and he nails it, all of it-- the ego, the rubbing of elbows, the academic world, the private world, the public poet, the business of endorsements, the poem about the poem, and, most importantly, the reality that is so often forgotten in poetic circles, the fact that all of the people who actually read and value poetry could comfortably fit into one large athletic complex. 

This reality, for me, isn't discouraging.  There are plenty of niche groups in the world who are passionate about interests I have no desire to pursue (i.e., Star Trek. Basket Weaving. Hot Air Ballooning. Rowing. Etc.), and none of them are bemoaning the state of the world, the general neglect of their Art, or why collecting stamps hasn't entered the realm of popular culture. 

At the end of the century, maybe a dozen dead poets will find their work in the Norton Anthology tortured college freshman will read and be confused by.  The likelihood that I am one of those dead poets by 2100 is pretty, pretty slim (the likelihood that I AM a dead poet by 2100 is almost guaranteed, unless I live to be 118), SO, I think I will write whatever the heck I want to write, however the heck I want to write it, and I better darn well have a good time doing it, because chances are me and a handful of my closest friends and family will read the things, and then just two or three will actually care, so if I'm not having fun along the way, then why, why keep it up? 

I love poetry.

Read Beautiful & Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry by David Orr.  You might not walk away wanting to jump into the latest issue of Poetry Magazine or jump online to order a subscription for Rattle, but you will have a fresh perspective on the wild and crazy world of the contemporary poet, you will laugh a little-- mostly at yourself, if you are a poet.

(Chiseling away at my book goal for 2012! Have you read any good poets lately?  Or good books about poetry?)

Memorial Day Mulch and More

What a great weekend!  The brick patio is finished, I (re)planted a holly bush destroyed by the dog-that-no-longer-lives-here and planted some Russian sage and dianthus annuals, and then mulched the yard.  A mulched and landscaped yard is so satisfying, maybe as satisfying as harvesting vegetables from my garden.  Maybe.  Okay, a tie then.

Here's what I get to enjoy now:

When we weren't working in the yard, here's what the kids were up to:

Also, I received the proof of the cover of my new poetry book!  I was worried about this part of the process because I work with every step of production including cover design for Ashland, and my contract for this book said the design is entirely up to the publisher.  This made me a little nervous but I figured their other books are very attractive.  All worries disappeared, though, because I love the cover and couldn't have selected anything better.  The cover design prompted me to start a Facebook page for myself, the author (lol).  So, go ahead, "like" me.  Please. :)

I am daily discovering new things about Google and the web that fascinate me.  I consider myself to be a tech-savvy gal, but this whole phone-connected-to-Facebook-connected-to-blogger-connected-to-Google+-connected-to-camera-connected-to-email thing just blows me away.  Now I can upload photos directly from my phone to the blog using Google+.  This is amazing.  Before, I had to download my photos from my camera to my computer and then upload them to blogger.  Or to Facebook.  Not anymore!  And I'm still amazed that Gmail asks me whether I meant to attach something to my email if I said "attached" - and almost always I meant to attach something and forgot.  Woah.  Craziness.

It's BW's birthday today and he's at the doc, hopefully just diagnosed with seasonal allergies and prescribed a heavy-duty allergy medicine.  We're making steaks for dinner in his honor and then celebrating with some friends later on.  His birthday gift to himself was a basketball hoop in our driveway.

Time to head back to work. 

May Days

The River Teeth Nonfiction Conference wrapped up nicely this weekend.  I don't think we could have asked for a better experience (save for, perhaps, the mice... I could have done without the mice incident).  For a taste of what happened, visit the River Teeth website, where I've posted a few videos from the panels and presentations.  I didn't know how to zoom in as I was operating the camera (boooo) but the audio is what people care about anyway, right?

This last week, Henry has started to nod yes and shake his head no, indiscriminately.  He has also started to point.  This is a step up in the communication department for him, even if he says yes and no to anything you ask, and it is so entertaining to ask him questions.  He understands that something is being asked of him and he ought to reply.  Such a delight, he is. 

Our patio project is progressing - we now have the paver sand tamped and started to lay down bricks, except, like last time, we forgot that the square bricks are about a third less thick than the rectangular bricks, which means we need to fill in the spots where the square bricks go with a little more paver sand.  It's a tedious process, but it's better than spending the next five years stubbing our toes on bricks that protrude from the patio.

Lydia and Elvis wrap up the school year this coming week - we are all looking forward to summer and the freedom to come and go and stay up later and sleep in (ha).  I started running again the other day and hope to work my way back up to the Ashland Balloonfest 5K.  I did two miles at a horribly slow pace, mostly because I'm still nervous about my knee and its tendency to ache afterward, but it wasn't too bad. 

The good news I have to share is that my essay, "Those Summers, These Days," which appeared in Ascent, will be listed as a notable essay in this year's Best American Essays.  Woo hoo!  I'm still beaming about this news.  I have another essay I've just started that could prove to be a real challenge, on self-image, insecurity, boys/men, daughters, and lots more.  I made a bulleted list of topics I think could fit in this essay.  Now I just need to write it.  Just.

Turning Over Earth

I am woefully behind on my 30th year goal to blog once a week.  To recap since April, poem-a-day went fairly well and generated a good chunk of material plus an essay I'm excited about, Brandon traveled a lot for work, I worked a lot for work, Henry turned one, Lydia turned six, we celebrated all over the place, soccer is almost over with no horribly embarrassing mom-fail moments, t-ball has begun, and summer hours are back. Whew!