He said I’m sorry that it’s not as nice as your place. She said it doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is that I’m here. She said I’m here for the company anyway, for you, because you asked me to be here. He kissed her. He said you don’t have to do dishes you know. She said it’s a way to get to know you. Interacting with your stuff. These are your forks and your plates.

She didn’t quite say but tried to say that however few things we have in this life they are – however fleetingly - of us and connect us to the world and to our bodies and to each other one tine at a time, one strangely twisted mirror image of ourselves in the bowl of a spoon after another. It’s the only real reason to have stuff, she thought, but didn’t say at all.

He understood, though. He said he’d only gotten those forks and spoons, those dishes a little while ago, that they weren’t really part of him yet and he wasn’t making a joke of it.

He wasn’t making a joke of her.

She thought about how much she paid for her place. Not the money.

Not the money.

Paid a piece of my soul that I’m only just now, just starting to get back, she thought. Paid with an absence of touch, with a near-cellular loneliness. Paid for it with a kind of pain that a man cannot and will not ever understand, not even the best of men, not even the men who really do try to understand. Paid a piece of my son’s heart that I cannot be sure he will ever get back, that I will never quite forgive myself for taking in the first place.

Like it was ever mine to take. Like anyone’s heart is ever ours to take. Even if we grew it inside our own bodies, even if in a quiet moment we could touch our belly and close our eyes and almost hear it beating inside of us.

She washed another fork, scrubbed another plate. She’d leave the glasses. She’s never really liked washing glasses. Contorting your hand into the cramped space at the bottom to actually get it clean, the fact that unless you hand dry them with a good cloth they never really look clean anyway. There is a futility, an awkwardness, a fear that something will get broken or hurt if there is too much soap, say, and one loses one’s grip.

Sell yourself short – and out – she thought, and the price to get yourself back is high. And I’ll keep paying it. I’ll probably always be paying for it in one way or another. The amortization periods for such things are always longer than one might think.

The acceptance of the debt is crucial, though, surrender to the fact of it a matter of survival – each payment one step after another toward thriving.

She washed one of his glasses carefully. She dried it carefully. She filled it with cold water and drank it.

Paid a lot for my place, for the latest place I hold in this world, she thought, and it is nice.

And he’s nice, she thought, and that is really what matters most and as much as I love my place, as nice as it is, I don’t ever – no matter how much nicer his place is bound to get as the years pass – want his place to be as nice as mine if he has to pay what I paid to get it.

*

*

*

Just sitting on the stairs.  Flight three of six.  Five of them.  Some had their “lottery number” sides up, some their fortune sides.  The first image in my mind was of the cookies they’d abandoned.  Twisted up clam shells of not-too-sweet and crunchy.

Sometimes, I will pick up something on the stairwell if it looks harmless enough:  fliers in need of a date with the blue recycling bin, chunks of cardboard used to prop open a door during a move.  Depends, though, on my proximity to a said bin or how much I am already holding.

Today my hands are empty.  Today I could pick up these little, tiny pieces of paper and the futures they herald with little to no struggle whatsoever.  I even bend to do it.

But, I can’t.

They are not mine.  They are not from cookies I have ordered or eaten.  I am, to my vague if pervasive surprise, too superstitious to pick up someone else’s fallen wealth of fortunes.

Yankee Doodle went to town a riding on a pony
Stuck a feather in his cap and called it macaroni.
Yankee Doodle, keep it up, Yankee Doodle dandy;
Mind the music and the step, and with the girls be handy.

I so get why my folks only ever sang the first two lines…

Seriously…

And while I’m not sure all the grown-ups will be as finely attuned to the double entendre in the last two lines as I am, some will be and they are usually the ones I like most so all it will take is eye contact with an arched eyebrow and I will laugh my ass off and the whole class will go to hell and I will wind up fired…

Damn song…

This song:

Should never be used for this:

I don’t care that the song seems to often have misunderstood origins – it became and remains a well-known anthem of protest, particularly against the mistreatment, killing and conservative oppression of young people who did not believe in war.

It should not be used to discuss cell phone bills.

Not ever.

But especially not now.

*

*

*

It was suggested that I am who I am (good and bad) in part because I may have slightly more “mirror neurons” than do other people.

I heard myself raise my voice and say to my son, “No.  Enough.  You can have more milk once you eat more chocolate pudding!”

I went through the looking glass, down a rabbit hole and came out the other side feeling… free.

I watched a very tall, very old man and a very short, very old woman stand on closed supermarket checkout aisles, one aisle apart, reading The National Enquirer and Hello! Magazine respectively.  I think they were a couple.  I wondered why they weren’t standing in the same aisle while they consumed their tabloid juiciness for the day.

I found salvation, bliss and redemption in that which a new local bakery calls a “Lavender Madeleine.”

This was, I think, my most played song this week:

It kind of annoys me, actually, but I’ve played it again and again.

I haven’t read a whole novel-length work of narrative fiction is so long I cannot remember what the last book was.  I remember the last attempt.  It was The Cave by Jose Saramago.  That man can write.  But I was unfocused and renewed it three times, incurred and paid fines, took it out again and still never finished it.  I can still feel it though.  And I have all-but totally memorized this quote from it:

[Instinct] lives side by side with the intelligence, but is infinitely faster, which is why the poor thing is so often made fun of and frequently spurned.

- Jose Saramago

Amen, Jose, amen…. And thank you for saying it so clearly.

*

Sucker Cup Kisses from

The Octopus In Residence

A wedding dress.  Smooth white satin, a whole lotta’ veil, a hem that goes on and on with quite a ruffly train.  Capped ruffly sleeves.  It says 80s to me. Early 80s.

Beside it, an apron.  A full apron – almost a uniform apron.  Crisp blue-white with eyelet embroidery, half sleeves, a full wide bib, a wide sash for tying snug around a waist, enough fabric to cover most of a full skirt at least half way around.

Were they put together in the window because they were both white?

Were they put together in the window because someone thought that one inevitably leads to the other?

(And by that I as much mean that a “Maid Costume” can lead to a wedding as a wedding can lead to becoming a maid…)

Was there no rhyme or reason to their juxtaposition?  Only my imposition of meaning?

Why did the sight of them together, each hung so artfully, so carefully, fill me fully – if temporarily – with rage?

Every once in a while there is a fulcrum moment; that single event or single utterance under specific circumstances around which hangs all manner of change.  Collections of words such as, “The beginning of the end was… ” and “No time before or since had been so…” are born of fulcrum moments.

Very occasionally we know one for what it is as we live it.  A moment that feels momentous.  Something tingles or shivers.  Some heretofore unknown part of you vibrates with a sixth sense that “this moment matters.”  More often though, I think, we don’t have a clue that these moments are upon us and it is only the clarity of hindsight that lends them their fulcrum status.

The date of my son’s surgery last summer was a fulcrum moment of the latter variety and I’ve been thinking about it a lot.  Probably because it is now highly likely that he will have another surgery and anticipating living through any part of it again conjures the last time it was lived through.  How can it not?

It has been just over six months since that surgery and the landscape of my life is so very different than it was then.  The two friendships which most bolstered and sustained me that day are, from what I can tell and it is somewhat baffling to me at this point, either on extended breaks or just plain non-existent now and the friendship that I felt most let me down that day is one I find I am missing a lot.  It was that friend alone who got a written account of all the most important things I felt and experienced that day and I reread it the other day… I am worrying something in my mind about how some people bring out new things in you, one after another for better and for worse, and how other people just bring you closer to being exactly the person you most want to be just by being who they are… So that you simply need them to be there, in your life, in order to grow into being the person you most want to be…  I dunno’…  It’s selfish probably.

Anyway – not long after the day of the surgery – and I believe that day may have urged the relationship into a higher gear – my son started to talk to me about my ex’s girlfriend.  A lot.  It’s taken some getting used to – the idea of another grown woman playing a massive, regular role in my son’s life –  but mostly what I hear is very warm and supportive of my little man and that’s all that matters to me.  That and the fact that he always feels comfortable telling me things.  All the time.  Forever if I can make that work.

Also, it was not long after the surgery that I actually started making moves on going back to school.  Moves which are still playing out (which is why I am not writing about them more openly yet) but have been, on-the-whole, very favourable, very positive.

And thinking about school and life, losing friendships, building and maintaining others and accepting that I live a lot of my life alone lead me to last night when I volunteered at a Swing Dance so I could see what it was all about without having to go pay for a ticket to a dance and walk into a room full of strangers all by myself and by the end of the night about 10-15 people had taken the time to come and introduce themselves to me.  They invited me to go out for bubble tea afterward (smile) but I passed on that.  Genuinely nice-seeming people.  I’ll be going again next weekend I think, when my ankle has healed from a dumbf–k thing I did to myself at the gym and I can actually take a lesson and dance.

But I don’t think I would have taken the chance and left my house by myself on a Saturday night after being up since 7am and teaching four classes if it hadn’t been for all the events and happenings that began to unfold after the day of my son’s surgery in July; after that fulcrum moment had done its work.

And I know with all that I am that there are people in my life now who will be there should the kidlet again have surgery just as I would be there for them.  And I know that the goal is always to live in the now, to not look forward or dwell too much in the past but it’s hard to ignore a sudden glimpse of a fulcrum moment.

It’s like seeing through time, somehow.  Again.  I dunno’…

Okay.  I’m a tired octopus now so I think I will away to bed.

Goodnight Kisses from,

The Octopus in Residence

It mocks me.

The dress.

The one I bought last summer.

Every time I open the door it’s there.

Right there.

Snickering.

There’s a pair of shoes too.

Bought them two springs ago.

Never worn them either.

Turned out they go beautifully with the dress I bought last summer.

It’s been bugging me.

The dress, the shoes, their tittering snide comments…

But I just realized that I am my own fairy godmother.

I am putting together the outfit myself.

The costume.

And I don’t need to co-opt stars, fireflies, mice or pumpkins into sartorial or transportation slavery to do it either…

And that costume will sit there as long as it damn well has to until I’m ready and the time is right and the company and the moment are right and until then whenever the slinky, draped, strapless, sexy, colourful garment and its sling-back, open toed stacked heeled friends go all Valley-Girl lilting bitch on me I will tell them that they would be languishing in retail purgatory were it not for me and to shut their shiny gobs until I tell them it’s okay to speak.

I will tell them in an eerily neutral way that I have considered going all Tyler Durden on them with a rubber glove, a tube of crazy glue and a pair of pinking shears…

My closet.  My rules.

Plus, it’s winter.  And slushy and gonna’ get cold again before it gets bright and dry and the last thing they, or I, want is for them to get ruined.

Not before I’m ready.  And the time and the company and the moment are right.

Until then I am my own fairy godmother so I’ll open that closet door and say:

Bibbity

Boppity

BOO!

Since a chunk of my life began to be played out online a few years ago I’ve been cautioned in one way or another about the perils of the ether.  It harbours criminals and losers.  Particularly men.  Men on the internet are all liars, of course, and will only be out to take advantage of me in some way.

That charming, smart, nice single guy who says nice things?  He’s really fifteen years older than he presents, married, three kids, chats with you from his basement lair during bouts of compulsive porn-watching…

The kindly older gentleman who sneaks a comment in once in a while?  Total nutjob who secretly fetishizes table lamps that illuminate your photograph as he’s been able to print it from whatever you’ve posted online…

In fact, whose to say that the super nice women you’ve met aren’t really men trying to lure you into a false sense of security while they get you divulge juicy secrets that gals only tell gals?

And even if people aren’t actually crazy or twisted – they must be very sad indeed, very lost and broken to be driven to spend so much time communicating to people they might never know or see, communicating with people they have never seen or spoken too…  It’s not “normal” is the cry… It’s not “healthy”…  All this despite the fact that something like 60% of American marriages started online last year;  people first met without meeting and then wound up married.

Ultimately, I am not naive.  There are a lot of not so stable or kind people out there so there are likely as many, if not more due to the anonymity and flexibility and fantastic possibilities of the internet, online.  I am, as you might have figured out if you are a more regular reader, quite cagey about my son in that I hardly ever post pictures of him where you can truly see his face and if any friends have used his name in a comment I have gone in and changed it to “boyo”, “kidlet”, “your son.”  I am leery of things.  I am careful in ways that feel right to me.

But, it should be noted, I’m on the internet too.

And I would argue that I’m no more of a liar than is any other writer.  We obfuscate.  We hide things behind other things.  We use misdirection.  I’m perhaps more direct than some, less than others and some people who know me personally might disagree with all of that.  They might think read this blog and think I’m a HUGE liar or  ”hider”; they might only know me in person and think I’m much sunnier and bubbly than I actually am.  Who knows?  Getting to know people is difficult, it takes work and you don’t always know what yer gonna’ get when you reach out but, the bigger point is:  I’M ON THE INTERNET TOO.

And somewhere, someone is saying to someone to whom I’ve written nice comments or something, “Watch out, she’s probably a guy with three kids sitting in a basement chatting with you from his basement lair during compulsive….”  You get where I’m going…

The internet provides a place to reveal yourself as well as hide yourself.  It provides a sense of freedom that allows people to be more open but it shuts them off from physical tells and smells, movements and gestures.  You have many fewer and yet a few more ways to know someone online.  It’s different without necessarily being better or worse.  Even my ex and I would sometimes settle fights or be kind to one another by sitting in different rooms sending pictures of grumpy-looking animals to each other over ichat because it made us laugh…

It’s a tool.  Some people use tools to hurt, abuse or kill.  Some people use them to build things: connections, ideas, concepts, buildings, spaceships, treehouses…  In face-to-face life, the risk is always that you place your confidence in the wrong person, in the person who doesn’t use the tools at hand well or kindly and it’s not really all that different on the internet.  Only it’s highly unlikely that if an online connection sours that you’ll ever get that nasty email saying, “I left my copy of the Chipmunk Movie Soundtrack at your house and I want it back!”  Or have that awkward moment running into them at some gathering where mutual friends didn’t know you weren’t friends anymore…

Face-to-face, skin-to-skin, pixel-to-pixel, one-to-zero, the risks of any kind of intimacy and connection are very similar, the ability to maintain connections is a commitment and one has to ask careful questions and keep asking them of the other person, of yourself to make sure that it still feels safe and worthwhile.  And, I will not deny that I do find myself thinking that it is harder without eye contact to know with more confidence who – exactly – you’re dealing with.

But, again, the larger point here is that I should not be exempt from this type of sensible scrutiny either.  If I am to be reticent and careful about who I let into my web-based world then so should people be of me.  It is only wise.

It is only wise because I am on the internet too.

To the preschool licensing officer after successfully gaining a long-term preschool licence:

“Cool, now we can light fires in the sand pit and shotgun beer from the water table and no one will be the wiser for three whole years!”

*

- AND -

*

To a health care professional examining your son’s eyes when they inform you that they have no record that your son had surgery 6 months ago:

“Take me to your leader so that I may smite him with the fury of Ares.”

*

(The rest of what’s rolling around in my brain today, I’m afraid, is truly better left unsaid….)

*