Dance 4 Lyfe

I always miss the exit to Interstate 205 when I'm driving home from Seattle alone. I delve into my own private world and once there it's hard to recall me from it. It's especially hard when your a voiceless sign alongside the highway. I wonder if road signs ever get lonely.

Which reminds me of an idea I had once. Dancing is a powerful medium of expression, yes? Only robots don't like dancing. Regardless, it would be wonderful set up people at a sequence of light posts down a main interstate. You know, those giant light posts that jut out besides the big roads of america like nerve endings from a spinal cord. They turn black night to orange puff. Magic.

At each light post a person would be dancing. Really getting into their jam. Smooth moves galore. Then maybe at the front of the sequence a sign would be placed, saying something along the lines of "tune your radio to 98.6, por favor!" And then the nice compliant driver would comply, and something along the lines of Green Onions by Booker T and the MG's would drift out of their car speakers, and the people standing by the roadside and the light poles would be dancing to the same song, and everything would feel really nice.

Yeah, I would really like that.

To tell you the truth, there are a lot of thingsss I am feeling right now. Or avoiding feeling. Among them, my Grandpa is here and tomorrow him and I drive down to Medford to meet my family there. But that means it is just him and I in the big Lone Elder house. And who isn't nervous staying by themselves in their parents house?

I am.

I anticipate a lot of good writing material in the wake of all this driving and relational time with relatives. Activities as liturgical as driving awake my brain. Or at least, I wake up enough to miss the exit signs for subsequent interstates.
Hopefully I will scope out a few new spots to implement my dancing plans. I love public space, and I love seeing it filled by the public. Next time your driving and Green Onions blares over the car radio, watch out. A revolution might be taking place outside your car window.

The Thinnest Gold (a revised story)

There is a memory I am told often. I was too fresh in the world then to remember it now, so my mothers voice fills the colors in for me instead. She sits in one of our old kitchen chairs and begins with Grandma and Grampa, with their driving hats and wide smiles. Almost every year, when my sisters and I were young, they would drive their old Buick across the country to our home in Oregon. We loved it when they came to visit. My sisters and I would wait patiently on the porch in the spring, or behind our big living room window in the winter. The gravel of our driveway would crunch and suddenly all the waiting was over: They were here. Then my father would open the door and his three girls would flood out; surrounding the weary travelers, taking them by the hand, hugging their knees.

My mother listens even when she speaks, and her smell is clean and lipstick.

She tells me my grandparents would take me on long walks when they came to visit. She would stand behind the living room window and watch me toddling between the both of them. I would stop soon after we passed the mailbox. There was a grassy ditch there, paralleling the road that lead to my house. I would stop there and squat down, with feet firmly planted and bottom brushing the ground, in that child’s pose that comes so easily to kids. Examining the ground, I would tenderly sort the grass and pick out a dandelion, a rock, the dying stalk of Queen Anne’s Lace. I wanted my grandparents to see, and I was fascinated with the tiny organisms.

My mom usually ends here, but then my dad picks up the story. He holds his hands up with the tips of all his fingers touching. He moves them softly, rubbing them over each other like a jewelry man sorting the thinnest gold – memorizing its veins and malleability.

“This is what you would do,” He says, “I saw you do that a hundred times.”

        

My dad is the subtle thespian of the family.

It feels nice to hold a collected memory like that, all curled up and tucked inside of you. It’s nice to hold a moment like that with my grandparents, who lived far away then and are separated now by opaque time and the curtain of life. But what tethers me to that memory is the moment I lean down to study the small weed. I am trying to understand my steady fascination with the dandelion things, small worlds that we barely even see.

         Eventually I started coloring in my own memories. I remember sitting in the old kitchen chairs at that house on Black Bear Drive. They where a scratchy 70's beige: if I had known other kitchen chairs during that time I probably would have been more skeptical of their dated yellow texture. But these were our chairs, they belonged to my world. Ten years later the padding sewn inside would start to creep out the stitches after ten thousand games of pretend. My dad would plead and cajole us to fix them up with sewing needle and thread. But my sisters and I had been to other kitchens by that point. Staunch in our consumer training we smugly thought: just buy new ones.

My dad is the subtly sentimental one of the family.

When we were young, though, these chairs where the objects of our affections, the foundation of our games of pretend. The rules to these games were adjustable and were most often adjusted by me, the eldest. The plot of these games, however original or inspired they began, always turned out to be some sort of escape. Escape from The Sea Monster, from The Abominable Snow Man, from Mom With the Vacuum.

We always made it. (Though there were times that the latter prevailed and we were banned to the out of doors to make way for the cleaning rumble of vacuuming monsters.) Still- my sister Bailey and I were quite the heroines. We would dangle on the precipice of make-believe danger until our littlest sibling, Maddie, would be close to tears in fear and angst over our make-believe safety.

But I made it through, all pretend appendages still intact....

The question that haunts me still, however, is what if Maddie was right? At that age she was still examining her own dandelion worlds. She was privy to sensitive information that Bailey and I must have exchanged for faster reflexes and video game systems long ago. I find myself wondering sometimes if I were ever truly at risk, of losing something. She was always so scared for us during the cliff-hanging climax of our adventures; so breathless and teary-eyed.

There are those nervous dreams where you try with all your might to get a message across, your mouths opening and closing like unsatisfied goldfish. No sound escapes.

Our old chairs now sit in the kitchen of our new house, faithful runes remaining from the earliest years of the family. Our own little Easter Island. The rules of the games they played their parts in are long since mist among the runes - fuzzy memories we bring out and polish with talk until a film covers the clearest parts. We laugh at ourselves. We have lost nothing, we think.

But maybe we are wrong.

         These two memories fit snug in the cavity near my heart. They have been there so long they are a part of it now. I would feel their absence if I granted them worlds of their own. But if you were to tease them out of me, I think they would open up like a set of Matryoshka dolls, like the painted collection my aunt brought us back from Russia. Opening to reveal until all you have is a last true remaining essence. And when that world within worlds is held in your palm, I hope you would hold it like the thinnest of gold.

Lately...

...I'm spending my time thinking about the weight of life and the change of light. 

More posts after finals, I promise.

Twas a good night.

candle light-like voices in a cafe on the Ave. Spending time with people who are real and are really my friends. There is a weight to friendship that can go unrealized. I circle and settle. I struggle to finish my papers on the state of society in Emerson's Self-Reliance. But than I do; and make the people around me listen to a hundred Emersonian references I manage to make at any given moment.
Breakfast at midnight is always a good idea.
Don't regret the way the hashbrowns make you feel later.
Jump into Greenlake if you get the chance. I promise I will.
Clark and Lucas and I play music on the balcony. And for our friends. However flat my french horn sounds, it still was a right thing. a good thing.

Twas a good night.

Noodles, Basements and Lead Paint

Tate the roomate licked the wall tonight. Be careful, I replied. There be lead in them walls.
The university warned us, I said
But the realization comes too late:
we be rebels in this house.

She does enough yoga to survive one wall lick here and there, I decide. And I don't want to be the one to suppress her proclivities. Not to mention we both took a shot of apple cider vinegar earlier this evening. We've got crazy things moving through our systems. Rioters in an empty street.
I took that line from a Kings of Convenience song. Or maybe an entire album.

I started my blog this earlier this evening by writing about feminism and the words of Kalide Edib and Benazir Bhutto, but I realized in the process that these are subjects that my mind doesn't fully contain, and so a post-midnight blog on the subject might lead me to make suggestions or allusions that don't fully add up or give insight into my honest situation/set of beliefs. blah blah blah. Basically I must not be a genuine woman-of-the-blog yet, because I can't properly sift my thoughts into word form at a moments notice. Somewhere along the line I have developed the conclusion that good blogresses are efficient, clairvoyant, and exceedingly charming. (The last one is more of a rhetorical/inception statement, where I fish for your thoughts to retaliate against my self doubt and mentally assure me of my aforementioned efficiency, perspicacity, and good looks/charm/general wit. I can already feel your inceptioned {not a real word yet but lets be honest it will be} vibes coming my direction, and I thank you. Internet vibes!)

I ask you to imagine a woman in a kitchen. She is making noodles. The long and beautiful Italian kind. The dough is being fed through a device that strains the noodles into the long and beautiful whole grain figures that you will eventually see on your plate. Before this process the dough is just regular dough. indelicate, hardy, might make an okay pancake or something.

Metaphor Alert.

My mind is like the pre-noodled dough. A Real Blogger can and will use her mind to write a blog like noodle dough through a noodle device. At any time - day or night.
Can you see it? Eh I'm not Italian anyways...

What I am, however, is a musician. But only just. And I admit this now only to transition you from noodles to a memory from my day. Sitting in the Ballard basement of J,S,T,P, and D, I had a really good moment. We had set up all the gear and passed out a few lyric sheets. Taylor had divulged his intricate but well working melody and subsequent harmonies. I sat on the couch and did my part. While we were bringing his piece to life, in a jazzy key of c, Sirens pervaded from 15th street. Something about the feeling of being tucked away in a cold subterranean nook, crowded with dear people, a single heater, amps and a couch caught my heart for a moment. The safety of that environment juxtaposed the invading sirens and caught me off guard. Tilted me out of my natural course just long enough to allow me to notice the contentedness of my situation, the happiness to be there creating with friends. Internal instead of external, with fresh cold and crazy march raging all around us.

Sometimes we are pitched from the ruts we dig.

And it is a breath of cool basement air, for a moment.

How To Be A Man According to Brian Field, Part Tres.

"Be careful driving home this weekend, okay?
   Your grown and in college now but you still take
    my heart and mind with you every time you cross the street."

He hangs up the phone.

-- I don't know a time where we have been in the car together and my dad hasn't found a way to comment on how to brake in snow, or when to turn at a four-way-stop, or how good it is to hear the Eagles playing over the car stereo on the drive home from work. 

I Heard Titles Were Important

I have not written a poem
for a long time.

A real poem, mind you - with stark enjambment and dripping metaphors that spill over
and flood the living room floor.
I've started several, recently.
But I keep stalling at the first stanza.
Right when I shift into second gear my engine sputters and I quite the cresting hill.

sputtering engines
crestfallen

A resilient ambiguity attends me whence ever I go. It covers my tracks like Pongo in 101 Dalmations. (Rachel that simile is for you.) Pine branches sweeping my little footprints back into the slate of snow.

I was never there.

I forgot I was here until a girl in class today stood. Quivering, she read her poem about earthworms.
"I'm a little passionate about them." She ends, with a shy smile.
My foot presses through the crust of of ice that always covers
snowfall in Oregon.
And then I remember the words I love,
The way reading fills my belly with a warmth that
could replace food.

I write down "little passions" on a piece of paper as the girl sits back down (did you know words only last as long as it takes to say them?) and the ambiguity settles like dinner: filling up my corners.

Spring crashes through my window and melts winter into pools on my living room floor.