Bona fide

I have learned early that being published is not everything it’s cracked up to be. I don’t say this because I’ve been published, but I say this because I felt being published would make me feel more like a writer. But I’ve been reading and learning a great deal these past few months about myself and why I haven’t really felt like a writer and why I’ve let other people make me feel that way and I realized that to be a writer and to feel like a writer you have to write. TA-DA!

Not that I wasn’t getting up every morning to do such things – because I was and still am – but I suppose my purpose for getting up was to get published and not for the writing itself – not for the exploration and the process. It made me panic that it wasn’t happening or happening fast enough. It made me doubt myself. It made me uncomfortable in my own skin. I was getting ahead of myself and going to the end result when in fact it’s the twisty, dim-lit road to get there that’s worth everything. Taking that road is what being a writer means, it’s how you will feel like a writer, it’s how you will become a writer, it’s where all the magic (as they say) happens.

I also say this because I just got another rejection on a story and it makes me feel a little better, but I really do believe it. And this realization has solidified for me that I am in fact a bona fide writer and that I always will be – published or not.

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Beckoning

At night I crack open my ribs. stretch. breast meat. like tearing chicken in half. I sit hunched. over a desk. sharp pencils. stuck to the sides. write this and that. no. I’ll curl up. hunch-backed like the old lady walking by every day. lungs sucked of air. only cigarette breath. to breath. Open your ribs. your beating heart. crack the back of you. extend each succulent section of spine. like tangerine slivers. juicy. taste it. life beckoning in work.

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Take that

I haven’t eaten animal crackers since I was littler – not a little girl – just littler than I am now, but I bought some last night at the store. A big bag, not the little lunch box train car box you can get. can you still get those?

But now that I’m an adult I can take the lion, the seal, the llama, the giraffe – bite their heads off and actually mean it this time. That’s what it means to grow older – and then not apologize.

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“The feeling you get [when you hear me sing], I get first,” Lauryn Hill

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Dream

I had dreams last night of poems. not words, not dreaming in poems or streaming words, but of solid beings and tangible beings. It woke me up in the middle of the night, but I couldn’t remember the words. Sharon Olds was there because we are friends. In my heart at least. I was dizzy with them and asleep with them. They were wind poems and water poems. That’s what they felt like to me – things that go through you. Don’t look at what makes them – pick them apart – look at the whole things for what it is. It’s not the molecules, but the water itself. As I fell back asleep, I knew I needed to hold on to something, but how do you hold wind and water? You turn it into something else – you capture it.

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You never know if there’s a singer in the crowd next to you

Thanks for sharing, Grandma!

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Wooden Heart

I think the cello is a wooden heart with strings. Can’t it say things in sounds and tones we could never say with words? An extension of the body, I wish I could play. Deep and broken and wooded like thick oak trees. Moaning and sweet like willow leaves.

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The pink tricycle

A little girl peddles her pink tricycle down the street. Over chunks of broken concrete, she peddles hard. She has yellow shoes with flowers on them. She looks straight ahead, determined. Over the cracks, over the weeds poking out like tufts of hair in an old man’s ear. She doesn’t notice her mother’s hand attached to a big plastic crutch sticking out behind her. She doesn’t notice her mother pushing her. She just keeps peddling.

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Blast from the past

I took my cup of coffee, buttered bagel and journal to a blue and white covered gazebo jutting out into Penn Lake. I was the first one up – it’s how I like it sometimes, nothing but me and the morning and my thoughts. I reread a letter I had just received from my high school creative writing teacher whom I hadn’t talked to in 5 or 6 years. She said as much time has gone by, she still believed that people who have a connection will always have a connection; what must never change is my passion and drive and hunger.

I told her of my journey to finding a home and comfort within myself; she wrote back that “most don’t have a self that is not defined by others.”

She is a wickedly smart woman; a woman who helped me shape my voice in high school to be a louder, unique, fierce voice. Break away from the banal imitators. She was brutally honest when my writing was “teen angst” and I am forever grateful. Of course, at the time, I wanted to throw rotten mangoes at her, but she was right and it’s why I’ve asked her to read a draft of my “almostmemoir” through poems. But first I need to polish it again because it makes me nervous and it’s not done and I have to tell myself that anything she says will make it better even if it hurts. It’s why I wrote to her in the first place – because she won’t hold back and I don’t want her to. And we need people like that in our lives, don’t we?

In the meantime, I’ll coat my heart with a thick, leathery armor and try to clean up the frayed edges of unfinished poems – just in time for her to unravel them all over again. I’m still in a process of learning and hope always to be.

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Summer photos

Cat naps and laundry in the breeze

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The Sweet Pea

I kill plants. Not on purpose, of course, but I tend to fret over them and over-water them, drowning their roots because I’m too afraid that I’m going to dry out their roots. My boyfriend makes fun of me for this because I keep trying to grow things even though I inevitably kill them. The truth is is that I like watching plants start from a tiny speck of a seed, uncurl like a tadpole hatching, stretch their little green fingers and stand up in the dirt. It makes me happy and so, despite my failures at keeping things alive, I’m pretty damn good at making things sprout – it’s after that that things get a little rocky. Over the winter I tried to grow grass and lavender in a big yellow pot. “Why are you trying to grow something in the dead of winter,” Pat said to me. I didn’t have an answer for him, other than I wanted to. Guess what? It died. For a long time we had the pot of dirt sitting in the house with the lifeless shells of what used to be plant matter in the middle of it. We used it as a doorstop. I just threw it away last weekend.

About a month ago, I planted some sweet peas. I’ve always loved sweet peas. My dad’s dog was named sweet pea – a huge great dane/st. bernard mix. She was really a big sweet pea. And my mom always grew sweet peas in our backyard in California. They remind me of summer and of home. She sectioned off a part of the garden just for them. A green field that sprouted into purples, hard pinks, soft pinks and reds. They looked like a million butterfly wings.

I loved the sweet peas and I loved the snap dragons we had too. What I loved most about them as a girl, though, was the snap dragon’s small mouths. I’d wander around pinching their plump little heads and pretend they were talking. They were fierce and soft at the same time. My mother’s garden was alive.

I don’t have a garden, but I hope to soon. The only things I can grow lives in pots or sometimes don’t live very well with my track record. So when I planted my latest project, I wasn’t expecting much. But I got a little kit at Target and planted them in the tin can it came in, watered them diligently for the first week and then we went on vacation for a long weekend and I forgot about them. And then a week later, I remembered that I had forgotten them and knew it was too late. I went to the back porch expecting to see their beautiful green sprouts curled up like shriveled old ladies – dead.

But they weren’t! They were still alive and larger than I’ve been able to grow anything from a seed before. So far I’ve kept them in the sun, saw one leaf turn yellow and fall off. I quickly threw it away so they other plants wouldn’t be frightened. Keep growing, I tell them, keep growing! The hardest part for me is to not over water them. It’s like an itch I can’t scratch. I try so hard not to kill them and water is the only part of the process I can control and I nurture them too much. But so far, so good. When I think about watering them, I don’t. And then do it the next day or so. I let them be and I think that’s what made them grow so tall in the first place.

It’s fun to watch them grow up. What I’ve noticed about them in particular is how they cling to each other. They all started as single plants stuck in the dirt, they wobbled at times and I put a stick in to help them stand up tall. And the next day, I saw their little green fingers clinging to that stick for dear life. How do they know how to do that? They are just plants after all, yet something in their nature tells them to hang on. And now as I look at them, they have started to cling to each other like a family or like friends. I’ve started to wonder if maybe sweet peas are more like people. Or perhaps people are more like sweet peas. Either way, we all need support and a hand to hold to keep us upright.

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A happy home

I was happy for a house today. Is that strange to feel all warm and fuzzy for an inanimate object? Either way, I felt it walking by on my way to the river and walking by on my way back from the river. Double the happiness.

This house is down the street from me and has been for sale for quite some time. It’s a large 3 story green and cream Pennsylvania home. Stained-glass windows let an array of colored light in from either side; the porch is a little worn and may need to be replaced; and the front door is surrounded in an odd mosaic – a mishmash of colored triangles of glass. It’s not something I would want around my front door per-say, but it gives the house a bit of character – like a whole lotta glitter on someone’s eye lid. It just wouldn’t work for me.

But I was happy because through the long winter that that house had been empty, no one really took care of it. The plants had died, the grass looked anemic and it just seemed stuck in a state of disrepair.

As I walked by this morning it was like seeing a little orphan girl in a new dress. Crisp black mulch was laid out in the flowers beds surrounded by lilies, geraniums and little tufts of green shrubs not yet blooming into the world. I hadn’t know the house had been sold, but I could tell immediately that finally someone cared, someone had decided to set up shop and put all their love into a home. And I felt glad for what was this poor little house, whose eaves now hung with pansies and soon-to-be budding plants. Inside, through the open window, I even saw a big brown ladder waiting for someone to start the next repairs.

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Ordinary Life

My parents and I were walking along the Susquehanna River yesterday, the water glittering like a jeweler had laid out a million diamonds for us to look at; geese flying low to the water to save their energy; bugs out, birds out, people out riding bikes and walking their dogs. It was only 9:30 in the morning and already the sun was set on high. We were sweating and out along the water the air had a light haze to it. It was an ordinary summer day.

My step-dad trucked along ahead of us unsatisfied with our leisurely pace, and we let him go. Who are we to stop him? And it was nice having my mom beside me, my twin in the world, my like-minded soul mate who has already been through some of the harder parts of life. I am a sprout of her, a pedal, a dandylion seed she cast out on the wind. I will always carry a part of her in me, yet she tells me always that I do these things on my own. I’m not so sure I believe her, but it’s nice to hear.

We started talking about life – naturally, what else is there to talk about? She mentioned a Garrison Keillor quote she had heard on NPR or somewhere: “The urgency was just mine entirely. I didn’t have any interviews I couldn’t postpone. But I was 24. I was a graduate student in English, floundering. Liable to be drafted to Vietnam. Wondering what that would be like. Fearful. And one of the things I was most fearful of was living an ordinary life. And I had to come to New York to find a way out of that. … I was afraid of an ordinary life. And I came to New York and realized that is what we all get. We all get an ordinary life. And it’s good enough. It’s good enough.”

He went on to say (according to my mom) that once he had talked to a man in Africa whose goal in life was to provide for his family, be able to feed them and to buy a goat.

Growing up in this country, those are rights we all feel we are born with. Right this second if I wanted to go buy a goat, I would have the means to do so. I don’t have a family in the traditional sense of having a family. I don’t have children to take care of, but I have myself and my boyfriend and my cat and my friends. They are my family right now and if I needed to take care of them – make them dinner or buy them coffee; get a new bag of cat food for the cat – I would have no problems doing so. Something that man will work toward his entire life – his dream – I could take care of in a day if I really wanted to.

It made me wonder what we as Americans dream about then? Money? Cars? Changing the world, so people like that man in Africa can have a goat? What do we expect of ourselves and our lives?

I told my mom that maybe that’s why we are all so unsatisfied in our lives. We have our basic needs pretty much taken care of – well most of us – but maybe that’s why we expect more and more and more. Maybe it makes us greedy and existentially guilty? Maybe that’s why so many of us find it hard to go to work everyday, do the same thing, come home and do it all over again without feeling like we’ve made a difference in the world. I know it makes it hard for me sometimes.

But it’s true. We all live ordinary lives because we all live. We all work for something, we all love, hate, make dinner, buy apples, tie our shoes. We are all desperately trying to stand out in a world full of so many other people.

We may have these grand ideas and dreams of how life is supposed to be when we are younger. And there’s nothing wrong with dreams. I love dreams. But even movie stars whose dreams have come alive still need to wash clothes. True, they may be able to pay someone to do it for them, but in the end – they too are living an ordinary life, a human life.

But I still dream about standing out, maybe in my art, my writing or simply in the way that I love those around me. But in the end what I want is happiness and I think it’s the same thing that man in Africa wanted. In the end, happiness becomes a pretty ordinary thing wanted by a lot of ordinary people.

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