well. I flopped on the bed. Opened Horse Heaven which was bookmarked with a thank you note from a HS grad. started to read to figure out where I had left off. Didn’t get what was happening, so upped another paragraph to get the context, and coudn’t quite read the words because a scorpion was crawling down that paragraph.

I hopped up pretty damn quick. Closing the book on him lightly so he would neither be squashed nor escape onto me, I carried him outside. Came back in. Reread the same damn page to see if there was something of significance that i need the universe to point out to me with a scorpion. Page 398.

but you know there’s no significance. some years have surgeries and deaths and mistakes. Some have new loves and accomplishment and new babies and gratifying recognition. Some days, a scorpion walks down your book. Sometimes the good years are as stressful as the bad.

The other day, I was stopped mid-run by two dung beetles and their sphere, no longer spherical, all squashed to two dimensions by a car. One black beetle on the flat circle, the other on the perimeter, reduced from 4 dimensions to two for me to observe. A male, a female, their progeny, and I guess whatever hopes 2 dung beetles might have. Ended at this point here on this asphalt street. And i haven’t shaken it yet.

There’s ecstasy and beauty and terror and vision and connection in the 5th dimension. But there’s a peace and simplicity, sometimes just cardboard dullness, sometimes death, in two dimensions.

My brain clicks. When i was home helping out after my father’s surgery, they had a book of National Geographic photos on the counter. The picture i remember is of the skeleton of a toddler, with a woman curved around the baby as though to protect it, and a man curved around them both. A circle. From another plane of the spiral, centuries past. Whatever hopes a man and woman might have, ended by Vesuvius.

Bones.

i feel ineffable sorrow.

and is there less sorrow when we find significance?

‘The only living boy in New York.

Here I am.’
[Paul Simon]

Making too much of this. Taking the 2-dimensional beetles and 2-dimensional photo into the 5th where a cigar is never just a cigar, a scorpion never just a scorpion.

Monday evening, I was early for yoga. As I waited in the room next to the gym, the room with the vending machine and tables and chairs, a boy sweet-faced and slightly chubby looked up at me and asked, you want to see a magic trick? I said, sure, and pulled my chair over to his table, which still had a chair or two upended on the top.

He showed me a small brass container, let me hold it a moment, look at it, ascertain that it was empty. Then, he flipped it upside down, tapped it, and out dropped five quarters. He did it fast and smoothly and I was intrigued, not so much by the container whose cap had some sort of hidden compartment, but that he’d approached me at all, and wanted to impress me. That the magic in him was not so much the trick, but the companionable ease he showed with a stranger who on the surface had little in common with him.

We talked about what other magic he could do, and he spoke of levitation and guilelessly explained how it and his other tricks worked. I told him I’d just read a book called The Magician’s Assistant. It did feel a little odd for a magician to just show up so soon after reading the book.

A short, grubby, genial man in bare feet and tae-kwan-do pajamas drifted by and grabbed the brass container, held it in the palm of his hand, waved the other hand over it and poof it disappeared. Then, with no pretense to magic, he handed it back to the boy and left the room. I asked the boy, you know that man? And he said, that’s my father. And we both laughed.

That perhaps i’d assumed i’d known the boy longer than he’d known his father.

You always underestimated, didn’t you, how it hurt a horse to feel lonely and isolated...A horse didn’t like to be by herself year after year, with only her stuff around, thinking her isolated thoughts. A horse didn’t like to have only one friend. A horse didn’t like never to be touched--nibbled over the withers and nipped on the cheek. A horse didn’t like to go for months without entwining her neck around the neck of a friend. A horse didn’t like to graze alone day after day, with no one to switch the flies off her chest for her. A horse didn’t like to stand off in the corner of the pasture by herself, looking at the others and wishing to be with them but afraid of it. That sort of behavior made a horse think too much, ponder every decision too carefully.

Jane Smiley
Horse Heaven

...she and I both have aged more than one year this year. Head low, shabby coat streaked through with white. She moved as though arthritic. Though we hadn’t much of a relationship, I felt for her.

I took one of the bones, carried it out with me, and spoke to her as I had the year before, using the same words, emphasizing ‘bone’ and ‘Shebita’ as sweetly as I could, but finding other business to occupy me so that she wouldn’t know I was wooing her, wouldn’t be spooked by my interest. She shambled up to me, took the bone, and slunk away with it under the trees.

The next day, she came to me to get the bone. She took it in her mouth. I didn’t let go. With my free hand, rubbed her right collarbone, the first time I ever touched her.

After over ten years, she let me touch her.

Not just touch her. Once she caved, she gave in all the way. I spent half an hour pulling tufts of winter fur that made her look so ghastly. She let me use my hands to groom her back, her belly, the sensitive parts of the legs. She stood still, as though absorbing every touch. She moved only when I’d stop to set down the ball of hair in my fist, turning her head to see if i were still there. Her face looked grateful, and embarrassed, to be letting a stray human touch her like this, to be so needy. I embraced her around the neck, rested my forehead against her. To give freely to someone.

She shed enough fur to fill two pillowslips.

I walked home coated with fur, smell, and mosquito bites--happy.

Yesterday was the last day. Her owners would be returning from Las Vegas. I awakened her with my arrival. She seemed disoriented, her eyes startled, unseeing, as though disturbed while dreaming. i brought a brush with me. Filled a garbage can half full with Shebita hair. She licked my bare arm, the right side of my face, and stared at me fully in the eyes as I worked. Then, i was done. I got her a second bone. She accepted it in her mouth carefully, as though to tell me she understood this unexpected gift, and i left. i turned back, and she was prancing like a puppy, carrying the bone to her spot under the oaks.

There are only a few times in my life I have felt so loved, and i don’t know what to say about that.

My body is telling me, Enough!

Morning is here, mourning is over. There’s a fawn curled up and snoozing in the sunshine. Hard to grieve.

I, who have been shooting baskets to get through the evenings, was 3 for 3 in the 3-point range during halftime of the Spurs-Nets game last night. No. Not in New Jersey. In our driveway.

Hey! as fun as watching a championship game is, it’s more fun to play.

The play’s the thing, the play is over, the Drama Queen has left the building, Hamlet may have the stage. Ophelia is dead.

i AM the jester.

I’m taking the streets.

Went to church today.

Little, friendly suburban presbyterian church I have sometimes loved.

I almost got up and left i got so restive.

but my boys and hubby might have made a todo.

it started with the first hymn, a conquer the earth with jesus’s name sort of thing.

that, and the forced cheer.

It was not an honest place this morning.

a head cold and 4 hours sleep doesn’t improve one’s tolerance.

I focused on the young tree fluttering in the wind outside, on the patterned glass of gold and red in the upper windows.

I flirt with church every now and again, especially when lost.
I am still lost but less lost than when i started out this morning because I know one place i don’t belong. That church. Those nice people. I feel like a toxin in the suburban community. Faith and delusion, i want to yell. two sides of the same coin. If it sells, it’s faith. If it don’t, it’s delusion.

The answer is not there.

but really. where shall i go? where do i belong? it’s no longer here. i fit nowhere.

I swear, by the last hymn, i was thinking, new York. I’ll move to new york.

A crowd in the room.
The phony urgency of the voice of an announcer on TV.
The house shrinks.
Saturdays.

From the window I see a fox skirt the edge of the back yard.

I see a doe out my window.
I see a cardinal--red, red bird.
A rim of pale gray light at the horizon above the hills.
The dome of the sky is dark.
I see the arms of the oaks bending in the wind.
The grass green and wet with moisture.
I hear the growling pulse of a jet.
Rises and fades.
I see the slats of venetian blinds.
Bird feeders swinging and swaying
inexplicably feminine
inexplicably sensual.
I hear the chuk chuk of a woodpecker
the Mozart of a Bewick’s wren
I smell sorrow on the palm of my left hand
salty sour and sexual
I see pale green leaves, new growth
whirling fan blades
crumpled bed clothes
Electrical outlets
the rim of my glasses.
the end of my nose.
One bare foot.

I thought to write about a ficus that I bought from state hospital patients twenty years ago. I thought to write she who speaks truth is casually crucified. I thought to write about faith when branches are bare and friends are silent. About Jesus on the cross asking, why oh why have you forsaken me? When his father did not relieve his pain, did he wonder if his lifelong obsession with God had been delusion. I thought to write about Loretta, the smartest dog in big country, may she rest in peace. A depressed father who behaved, and a depressed father who left a stray kitten at every port. I thought to write about a grave yard in Breaux Bridge in April. A CD on a long trip home.

Did you know they teach psychologists to ask, do you think songs on the radio are about you?

I listen to jesters and six-year-old children.

The rain is pouring down, and it is dark, and my mind is in confusion.

I was awakened at 4:44 this morning by the quiet voice that’s now silent in the day.

Faith or delusion----

Feelings, with no socially accepted outlet, warp behavior.

After weeks of punishing heat, a storm tore through yesterday, unforecast, shredding clouds with erratic winds. Temperature dropped from 97 to 72. Ozone jazzing the brain. Sky roiling green and gray pink with ripped atoms. An inch of rain that arrived in horizontal sheets syncopated by lightning.

After the storm, I offered a ride to a woman with fair red hair some 15 years my junior whose car was moored in the wet ground. I drove her down the creek road, away from town. She talked and talked, she likes to talk. She looked at my CDs in the car and said with a touch of surprise that she has all of them. Michelle Shocked, Revolver, Division Bell. Did she have the Cody Hubach one? I doubt it, but anyway.

She told me details of her life, pets to r ock and roll papa. I stopped to let her out at her house. She talked as though to herself now of the man she loves and who she knows loves her. She got out of the car. How they have been friends 14 years, how she’s known she loves him for at least seven, knows that he’ll some day figure it out too, that he loves her. That he’s a Libra with Pisces rising, and her father is a Pisces with Libra rising. Isn’t that funny?

I wouldn’t know.

I turned off the car engine, seeing how she was not through. This 34-year-old woman, her voice like that of a child, tells me the man who will one day see the light is an opera singer, and does not realize he can have it all. The travel, the music, the love. Tells how two days ago, she mustered up to say that if ever he were ready to settle, to let her know. That she was there. She says he looked at her, blinked.

She knows he’ll finally see.

I sat frozen by her story. Finally, I spoke.

How very brave she was. To be honest.

She looked at me through the car window and said she cried all the next day. And I saw her face was gaunt, pale as moonlight, how, if I’d bothered to look, the evidence was all over her.

I was a witness to faith. Simple faith.

Or delusion.

I wouldn’t know.

And i drove back down the empty road, in the dusky light and clean air, new moon hanging in the west, earthshine glowing, blue bright. Windows open. Could hear the burgeoning of life after a storm--frogs and cicadas. Frogs croaking everywhere, frogs sure to take adv antage of this night to mate. I wondered at the pathos and beauty of humans who sit without a clue how to proceed for 14 years.

Wondered how this story came to fall in my lap, and in my compassion for this woman, found compassion for human beings, not excluding myself.

dream
I am sitting. There is an object on my lap, like a binder or a pack, made of man-made fabric, like that solar screen nylon--black. Someone flings a small ember into the pack, just as I’m sealing it up. Surely the ember will die without oxygen. But as I hold it, sealed on my lap, the thing bursts into flame. I am terrified.
====
If Ginsburg hadn’t already written HOWL, I would have written it this year.

Only my version would be one word long..

There are times I don’t know what’s going on.

This is a time i don’t know what is going on.

After going in circles for years. A mom. A pourer of juice. A wielder of toothbrushes and damp cloths. A stern eye. A comforter.

Unpacking boxes from last year’s house renovation I came across a spiral writing notebook over ten years old. There in my horrific erratic hand are sentences, pieces of poem and song, describing the same desires that feel so freshly uncovered of late, described in essentially the same words.

Then, I was trying to put on the brakes.

Now, I am froth on a wave, with as much power or design.

Change has come to find me whether I’m ready or not.

Once when the kids were younger, perhaps during the year of the notebook, we found a monarch caterpillar under the leaves of the milkweed in the neighborhood. We kept the caterpillar in a vented jar. We named her something--something with Silver or Rose in the name? She ate voraciously for many days, grew enormously. There was an erotic quality to her appetite and growth. Then she slowed. I felt sorry for her. Life as she knew it was coming to an end. No more of the cheerful lust for exploring and eating. For several days, she moved little, and then stopped.

They call it metamorphosis. And I still didn’t see what I saw. She was a caterpillar, hanging on to a stem, and then, she wasn’t a caterpillar at all, but something else, pulsing and new, the chrysallis--a bright green bud holding who knew what form of life.

I missed the butterfly emerging. As it birthed, wings half unfurled, it dropped into the baby food jar of water that kept the milkweed fresh. It drowned.

This was a stunning hurt to our household.

But, lo, in cleaning out the jar, we discovered another tiny striped caterpillar we had missed, foraging on the leaves, and this one, to which we formed less of an emotional bond, did survive the whole process. We gave him a name as well, which I no longer recall. We watched him spend a morning drying out on the leaves of the pyracantha in the patio. We watched him fly.{