Home from travels.

It's been, as the kids say, a minute. Well, I lived my life, I did what I did, and now I'm sleeping in my own bed again--sleeping well, it must be said, which, at this late date in my life, is not nothing, I tell you, in fact sometimes it feels like everything.

We got home from Scotland, dazed from everything we'd experienced.

"Remember when we went to Ireland, then England, then Scotland? Remember when we were gone for weeks and weeks?" I say to the historian. He does remember. We remember everything.

We've seen my folks again, several times. I've gone to Pilates and the gym and to HIGH Fitness. We've eaten enchiladas. We've seen a few movies. I've been back to my writing group. I've written and delivered a poem at Convocation. I've had breakfast and lunch and coffee with my friends.

When we planned this trip, I wanted to be gone long enough, gone thoroughly enough, to feel like I was not on a vacation, rather living my life in other places. And I did feel that. I felt at home in the world. Of course it was still in a sense a vacation--a leaving of one's ordinary life to experience extraordinary things. This trip delivered that, and in spades. But what I really cherish is a feeling that I could do--could be--anywhere, and live my life.

I'm back now. And I want to see if I can sustain at least that dimension of our epic travels. We'll see.

During this sabbatical, when I am writing and also undertaking a substantial project that I'll talk, I'm sure, more about later, I want to use this blog as a space to keep a record, to talk about what's happening. It will be another space to be, to do, to live my life.




The future

Imagine a shore, says the clairvoyant, when I ask

about the future. Imagine a river emptying itself 

into the sea. It’s dusk, she goes on, but light enough 

that you can see the river moving out, its direction sure. 

I can see it, in fact I’ve been there recently. Overhead,

terns wheel and cry. Walk downshore, where the sea

moves in, the salt giving it greater weight. The slap

and churn, cold and immediate, of this meeting

of waters is an inevitability. I watch the sun fall, 

its theater of blaze. I’ve come to her to ask 

about the future and its brightness, by what measure 

we might predict or calibrate it. I’ve come to believe 

that everything depends on this, so when she replies, 

Imagine you’re at altitude, flying across an ocean from 

one continent to another, I’m impatient, but I do it,

depart the shore, see myself in a metal capsule, 

at a window that frames nothing but sky upon 

more sky, and in my mind, we’re in it and of it 

and above it, somehow, and also drowning in it, 

perhaps swimming to a far-off shore—l even hear 

the voice of the cabin attendant intoning in 

the unlikely event of an emergency landing, and outside 

the imagined window, the firmament dissolves

into blue mist, diffracted light, a structure made 

for holding nothing but its own airy figment:

I look again, and the clouds fissure into a sheet 

of ice, floes adrift, more and more water. I want

to believe in a better ending, to believe that we tilt

toward hope. I fret in the near-silent alcove

where this oracular stranger tells me, in figures,

what can be made of this moment, this now,

deposited like river matter, the dregs of the past.

The coins to pay her clink in my pocket. I should not 

have asked about the world, or the future, at least 

not directly. I should have asked her, is there form 

or efficacy, or beauty, still to be made in this world? 

Even though I already know the answer: yes and no, 

the sea roars in salt and the river meets it, its sediments

suspended and dazzling. A plane flies miles above 

earth, combustible device, and in so doing plunders 

the air. The wreck of an old fishing boat, there, 

in the mud, is the past, falling apart now and for years

to come. The inexorable silt the river carries makes 

and undoes this estuary. When the harbor seal bobs up 

to inspect me, that’s the now and also the future: 

we are momentary peers, investigating one another, 

as I disturb his habitat. When I paint the future, 

it is luminous but with a wash of gray, 

and when I spell out its sentence, it is an anagram 

for insurmountable. That’s not quite right: 

the anagram is made of reckoning. I say 

to the clairvoyant, The world is on fire, which is not 

a question, and she replies, but the world 

has always burned. This answers nothing, though I know 

it is a kind of truth, yet devoid of the particulars 

that lend a divination its requisite weight. 

The world is burning now, I say. She doesn’t need 

to repeat it: it has always burned, but at least I know

this blaze has history, and that I must learn it.

From that shore I might pick up two stones: one 

for ballast, and one to remind me of the past, 

already here, as I go forward, and that, 

in a burning world, we’d better be prepared 

to carry water.

Searches.

Ten minutes ago, I was wading hip deep in my gmail, looking for a message from a friend from awhile back. I thought it was an email, a message that he had actually written. As I read this message and that, one after another, I started to suspect that the message had actually been delivered in person,   bodily, a person in a place, speaking in a voice and a let me show you.

It was sort of like on Monday, when I was looking for a particular sweater, now that the weather is changing and perhaps sweaters are called for, or will be called for, on a regular basis. And I couldn't find it, which made me briefly panic. And then I remembered the other box of sweaters.

Except in this case, what I remembered was an afternoon at the end of the week a few years ago, when my friend came to my office to show me how he had made a little time-lapse video out of stills
--how he captured the stills using an intervalometer, a timer, and then how to edit them.

Now I remember it was a YouTube video, and I was searching for it in the wrong way--looking for a video about the timer, and not about the editing. Just as my memory was of an email and not of a Friday afternoon, a conversation with a person.

I found the sweater. I'll wear it later. And I found the video, too, although not the email, because it was never an email. But the emails I found--those reminded me of my friend, whom I haven't spoken to in awhile, and of a time when I used to make little movies, and the intense absorption in those projects, the surges of invention.

Here's to the video I hope to make over the next couple of weeks. Here's to memory, getting it wrong and then getting it right, and here's to what you find in between.

And a chaser of Apple Jacks.

There's a box of Apple Jacks in my cupboard, hanging out with the more sober cereals, as well as a slumped bag of frosted flakes that are out the door, come to think of it, as soon as I write this blog post. The Apple Jacks have almost concluded their performance. Which is to say, when I had a small bowl tonight, dessert-like, after dinner, and then a judicious sprinkling more to finish up the milk, I thought, they're almost gone, thank God, and then felt a small pang because they're almost gone.

But let me start at the beginning.

Tonight, I had my first two online orientation sessions of the semester. I logged in, clicked Share My Screen and let Adobe Connect do its fiddly little thing, uploaded my pdfs, and waited. I waited, and went to the inbox and refreshed it to see if there were messages--none--and went back to the chatroom. No one. So I checked this and that, read a great article about Serena Williams by Claudia Rankine, and another great article from The Guardian about the North Coast 500, a road along the northerly coast of Scotland, which sounds like I better do it. And another article about how if you eat late at night--which they defined, variously, as after 3 p.m. (! what?) and 4:30 p.m. (come on!)--you are basically doomed. Well, anyway, that's what I got out of it.

I refreshed. Nothing. Chatroom? No one.

Until about halfway through the putative session at which no one was in attendance, or so I thought. Then, I got two messages from different students that were all, Hey, we're in the chatroom--where are you?

Adobe Connect! Your fiddly business!

I should have closed and reloaded. Live and learn. Anyway, I hustled over to the chatroom where the students were, and we had a highly efficient orientation. I scrolled back through the chat--they had been talking about the favorite authors! What good students!

While I was refreshing and checking on the no one that was in my chatroom, whilst the everyone was elsewhere, that was when I got up and got that bowl of Apple Jacks. I finished it before I realized what was what with my chatroom fail, which, good thing, because once I had to hustle to the real chatroom and start orienting, I needed both of my hands and also my mouth. I had no time for Apple Jacks!

Why do I have Apple Jacks at my house? Because when my son and his family were here this summer, we had some Apple Jacks. I bought a box because it would remind me of summer and childhood and the mornings when children at breakfast at my table, when sweet cereal tasted like freedom.

Dear Linda Ronstadt,

Tonight I had to drive downtown to a meeting. All the way downtown. Past the downtown Target, that's how far downtown. North of downtown, which meant that I had some listening time in the offing.

That could have been NPR time, or PRI time, or Q time, but I have to tell you, Linda, that none of that was cutting it for me. It's October, well into autumn now, and for autumn, you need a soundtrack for melancholy. That's just how it is. Those bright days fading to an earlier night: this calls for the music of your youth. Which brings me to you.

I remember driving around town in my folks' station wagon. These were the days, the seventies, when AM radio had music programming. It was the South Bay, Los Angeles, it was the summer before my senior year. I had a serious crush on a boy and that crush was always and forever going to be mostly unrequited. That was the year of your hit "You're No Good," which I liked to sing at the top of my lungs while driving. I liked to pretend that song was me singing to the boy, even though the boy was good. It still made me feel better.

I had the LP and I had the sheet music. I could play and sing the songs on the piano. You didn't write any of them, but your big, generous voice made the songs yours even so.

A couple of years ago I had a hankering to hear the songs again, so I downloaded the album. And a few weeks ago, I read somewhere that you really can't sing anymore--you've lost your voice because of Parkinson's. I don't know how that makes you feel. But tonight, driving north and then home again, I remembered how I felt when your music spoke for me, made the soundtrack to my summer, my teenage heartbreak, and my memories of a gorgeous time when the ocean gleamed on the horizon, my life was ahead of me, and the car radio played songs like yours.

I won't forget you,

htms


 how

The archives.

Today, around 11 a.m., I was driving along 5600 West, from West Valley City through Kearns to West Jordan. During one part of my life, I drove along that road a lot--for soccer games, especially, and for a few blocks, it was also the westernmost leg of my daily walk. One year, there was a huge migration of tiny orange butterflies, and we saw them, in flight and grounded, all along this road

Like every other place in the valley, lots of things along this road are still recognizable, and many things have changed. When we lived out there, our subdivision was called "Oquirrh Shadows," because the Oquirrhs loomed to the west. The wind blew fierce and wild. The road still feels like a wide, windy corridor. All the shapes of the houses seem familiar, except for the new ones built in big developments to the west, in what were once fields.

There was a new building, a plain boxy structure built of some kind of beige brick, not a single frill or ornament, except the letters spelling out SALT LAKE COUNTY ARCHIVES. I wondered briefly what might be archived there. Wondered if maybe something fanciful, or scandalous. Probably not--probably just minutes and records.

Early this morning, my daughter left. Her flight was at 5 a.m., which meant she left the house at 3. I got up to give her a kiss and a hug goodbye. All day, I've been in a little haze--of interrupted sleep, of the end (almost) of the holiday visits--and thinking about the new year, what I want, how to focus my efforts to those ends.

I have a document called "Daily Writing" that I have been keeping--not daily--for a few years now. So when I turn my attention back to writing, I usually start there. Sometimes I look through it. Does it create momentum or drag, to look back at what I've composed there? What is this activity, anyway--recovering pieces of memory from the shred of a voice, a little note, an old poem or part of a poem?

In my archives--it is an unsystematic archives, it is unstable, it has no specific focus, it is copious and diffuse, it is unsearchable by any method but the delve--there are old journal articles, college papers, drafts of poems by myself and others, letters, drawings by my children, immunization records (although I cannot be asked at this point to find them at any point when they might be of use), certificates, photographs. Sometimes I think it is time to get rid of all, or most of it. That prospect overwhelms me. Periodically, I will find myself in a ruthless mood, and will just toss things with very little examination of the specific things I'm getting rid of.

Would a complete purge constitute a clean slate? Sometimes I think so, but mostly I do not. The deep structure of the archive, as it turns out, is in my brain, where there are and will be--have never been-- any more clean slates.

Today's stats:

New music: Whatever they were playing on KRCL midmorning; Foster the People
Long walk: one
Writing: added notes to "Daily Writing"; this blog post 
Enjoying my life: two grandsons came over for pancakes, watercoloring, block-building, and Spiderman. A quiet moment with the historian when he came home from work.

Memorybox.

Yesterday, I posted this:

















Today, I have been thinking about memory, about how posting (almost) every day (so far) in the year 2012 has had the effect of fixing little points--constellations--of memory. Or I hope posting every day will have that effect, anyway--because as I think about it, I wonder: will I see the words "it is hard work putting clean sheets on a bunk bed," and remember that we were straightening and cleaning and making beds because my brother and his wife and son are coming to town to help my niece--their daughter/sister--move back home?

And when I read "September has cool mornings and evenings over August, but August has its pre-semester bliss to recommend it," will I remember what it was like last night when we stepped out, and the moon was waning, and it was cool and late and we had just listened to Obama's speech, and after that, watched a big swath of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels? Which is why I commented that "Michael Caine = pure pleasure"?

It's hard to say what I'll remember, although maybe going over it again here, both inking over the sketch and supplying additional notes, makes it more likely. I hope--perhaps we all hope--that writing does something like that, at least for ourselves, if not for, what? posterity--makes what is fleeting more lasting.

For instance, while my son was helping me move some stuff out of a very tiny room downstairs, so that it could be more spacious--this was prior to the cleaning, in preparation for the guests--he stumbled upon boxes, boxes upon boxes.

"You have a ton of pictures," he pointed out, helpfully.

I already knew this. Today, I took the most brief look possible at the many boxes of photos before moving them, basically, back into that room in a more concise, edited arrangement. I found a sheaf of emails that I had exchanged with a friend who was in the Peace Corps, in the Dominican Republic. I also found a picture of my daughter and my niece up in Idaho, and a picture of my older son and his wife when they were either newly married, or just before.

The sheaf of emails was fully of chatty, daily stuff. For instance, I rattled on to my friend about how my youngest son--the one who was helping me with the boxes--how he and his friends used to have a small battery of retorts that they would use to respond to anything anyone ever said to them. To wit: "Prove it," "Why?," "How do you know?" and "do you have any evidence?"

So if I asked my son--this was 2003, so he was maybe fourteen?--"Do you have any homework?" he'd reply, "Prove it." Or if I said, "You need to call Dad," he'd say "How do you know?"

I had entirely forgotten this episode from my son's youth, although now that the e-mails, tucked away in a box full of correspondence that I'm sure has many, many such riches, have brought it back to memory, I can remember it and how funny, and annoying, I thought it was at the time.

So now those boxes are stacked neatly in that room, holding their written and printed troves of my past, and my children's. And this blog: in its archives I have lain the daily tokens, neatly, haphazardly, which fill its capacious cabinet, and which I take out from time to time, as a tool for remembering.

Little-known facts.

Tonight, after the poetry reading downtown, after deciding where to eat, after our late dinner, we walked to our car in back of the brewpub. Next door, at the pub next door, the Poplar Pub, there was music on the patio, a patio which must have been covered, because it had been raining and there were evidently people outside. I heard the noise of people talking, eating, drinking, and music lifting on the wind. It was funk: Rufus, with Chaka Khan, "Tell Me Something Good."

I saw Rufus, with Chaka Khan, when I was still a teenager. It was at the Forum in Los Angeles. They were the opening act for Stevie Wonder, who was touring with what must have been Fulfillingness First Finale, since it was about the time "Tell Me Something Good" came out. Stevie Wonder wrote the song. Chaka Khan's career was launched with that band and that song.

I remember that time, when all the best music was soul and R&B and funk. I'm pretty sure I didn't appreciate that fact, since I was all Joni Mitchell and Paul Simon and Jackson Browne at the time. Respect to them, but ever since I left SoCal when I was about 18, some of the music that most powerfully conjures that time up for me is the music I so easily dismissed back then--Al Green, Marvin Gaye, the O'Jays, the Temptations, the Spinners, Bill Withers, Billy Preston. (Although I guess I didn't dismiss it entirely--I did go to the concert [with my very good old friend--are you still reading?].

I saw Chaka Khan one other time, when she was opening for Prince. That is a big old voice, with an almost electric edge. Even on a rainy night, over the fence in the back patio of another bar and through a parking lot, all the way into 2012.

This is the audio from the recording grafted on/synched sort of with a live recording. Anyway, you get the drift:



New: Spotify Play Button!

[couplet-o-rama]

My grandmother.

When I was a girl, we went every summer, at least, to my grandparents' house in Idaho Falls. Idaho Falls was basically heaven, in my book. The house had a basement, which no house I remembered living in had had. It was cool and dark. There was a fruit cellar. There were an assortment of toys that included a jack-in-the-box, a jumping jack, a cash register, and a doll that came in its own trunk with its own clothes, shoes, and a tiny little hairbrush. My grandmother had, on her dressing table, a mirrored tray with perfumes, jewelry, and a bowl full of quarters. She had cookies and ice cream. She had particular ways of doing things, like lining the sink with rubber mats when we did the dishes. The dishwater was scalding hot. She played endless games of cards with us. I was the oldest grandchild, and there were uncountable stories about me that she told as part of the family lore.

Lately, when I've gone to visit her, when she was having a good day, she'd say something sweet about my beautiful hair or what a pretty sweater. Her beauty was pared down to its essence. When she was young, her hair was dark, curled beautifully in the style of the day. She was a dish. I love the bones of her face, her gorgeous Roman nose, her white hair in a flurry on her pillow. The last time I saw her was last Wednesday. She wasn't feeling well. Her eyes were closed--it was late. She was talking anxiously, feverishly. I'm so glad I got to sit with her, stroke her hair, touch her. I sang to her, a little. Then I had to go, I was exhausted; this morning, I woke to a call, telling me she was gone. All day I've been remembering her, thinking back to before these last few years, when she was younger, full-bodied, full of life. Quiet day. I spoke several times with my father, my aunt, my children. Remembering what a great pleasure it was to drive up to the house on First Street, with its poppies, its great pine trees, its roses, and a bower of geraniums; to go in, to tear downstairs with my brother, to revel in the wonderful playhouse she and my grandfather had made for us.