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Christmas in Fridaville

December 22nd, 2008

I keep strings of fairy lights on my porch all year long, but they are so special at this time of year. The neighbors across the street have put up their lights, and this ordinary street suddenly seems hemmed about with magic and mystery when night falls. I wish the big live oaks that line our street could bloom with glowing Japanese lanterns and that there were spangled nets of lights strung above the roadway the way they do in the San Gennaro festival in NYC or in the shopping districts of London at this time of year. I’ll be digging in my closet to try and find the Pottery Barn lanterns I bought last year to hang from the crape myrtle tree by my gate and since we are having a warm Southern Christmas, I might sit on my porch, drink Champagne and get stars in my eyes.

Posted in Home, Senses | 4 Comments »

The View I’m Craving

December 3rd, 2008

Lately I find myself thinking a lot about living in the country. I fantasize about a cabin in the mountains, a farm at the end of a gravel road, a cottage on a lake. To throw open a window and look out on moonlight and mist, to be able to hear silence instead of sirens and static. It’s fairly preposterous, because dark nights alone in the mountains would probably make me obsess about serial murderers, and I can’t make anything grow, so I would starve to death on a farm. But I think it’s important to pay attention to odd, extravagant cravings of the soul because it may mean you’re pregnant with a desire that needs to be born. In my case, I suspect I need to make more time to be alone without distractions, and I’m so undisciplined that the only way I can force myself to do that is to remove myself physically, to enter a convent of the mind. In the course of daily life and work, it’s so much easier to fritter away my time than it is to focus my mind. There are ideas for projects that I toy with but never follow through on, creative itches that I scratch by watching television or snacking or talking on the phone instead of sitting at the computer or opening a sketchbook or signing up for a class. My daughter thinks it’s a case of attention-deficit — I’m so impatient and incapable of being in the present moment that I unbuckle my seat belt half a block from home just to be ready to get out of the car– but I suspect it’s more like having a slothful spirit. Could I be rehabilitated by putting myself in solitary confinement?

Posted in Home, Nowness, writing | 3 Comments »

Stop, Drop and Curl Up

November 19th, 2008

I’ve been lying in bed for four days with a tooth implant jammed into my jaw bone and throbbing hard enough to launch itself out of the top of my head. I considered calling my friend Joe the Contractor to come over and pull the implant out with a pair of pliers, but thank god the dentist ordered up some drugs before things got out of hand. Between doses of hydrocodone, I managed to get the cover prose written for my magazine day job right before deadline or I expired. Type type type/doze off/type type type/doze off. The art director loved it, so maybe I should always write high. I can see how Rush Limbaugh became a junkie, because I couldn’t WAIT for my next dose and I loved how slow and easy it took me under and made both my physical and existential pain go away. I cocooned in my bed with a novel by Wendell Berry (Hannah Coulter) and slid in and out of soft sleep and a slow journey around Hannah’s Kentucky farm that was so like the one I grew up on, only more prosperous and peopled with kindly characters who were close to the earth–okay, so it was more like the farm I wish I’d grown up on. Then being all doped up, I shed a tear or two about my vanished past and then got really depressed (more side effects of the drugs?) about how tractors made horse-drawn plows obsolete and then decided to text coworkers with garbled instructions about god knows what. Text text text/doze off, doze off, doze off/text text text/dose up, dose up, dose up. Today was my first day back at work, back to “normal,” and I’m grateful to feel so very much better. But a little part of me misses locking the door on the world, with no alarm clocks, nowhere to be, no expectations to meet because I was an invalid. This little interlude made me realize that I’m so hungry for a respite from the bullshit that bombards us day and night that there was an up-side to taking sick days. Just think of how many things during an ordinary day keep us running away from ourselves. Toward what? I’ve always been a ferociously ambitious person, partly because I felt invisible during so much of my life. Everything I’ve achieved had a goal of giving me an outline–”look at me, I’m here, I exist”–and of making sure I didn’t miss anything. It was the path I had to take and I learned a lot and it shaped me into the person I am, a person I mostly like. Now, though, I want to stop/slow time so that I can just sit still long enough to think. It sounds so frivolous, doesn’t it? But I am ever on the move, like a gadfly, and I crave a long stretch of time to stretch my mind. I want to light somewhere and sit a spell. Do you ever feel that way?

Posted in Home, Senses, writing | 3 Comments »

“And so to bed”

September 9th, 2008

I often think of this line from Samuel Pepys’ diary when I go through the house late at night, locking the doors, making sure the computer is off, the candles are blown out. I love bed and I hate bed. I love reading in bed and watching tv in bed and working on my laptop in bed–all no-nos as far as the sleep experts are concerned. And yes, sometimes I turn out the lights

and roll from side to side and pound the four pillows I can’t do without and grind my teeth and worry about my carbon footprint and get pissed off about why Jamie Leigh Curtis is doing those stupid commercials for constipation (or is it diarrhea?) and wonder if I should have taken one more Melatonin. I remember sins of omission and commission. I look at the clock. I turn on the light to make sure that wasn’t a brown recluse spider on my foot. But then, I pick up my book and snuggle up to it and love being awake in the middle of the night, even though I know I’ll pay for it tomorrow. When I was a teenager, I lay awake at night, listening to a dj playing Elvis and the Everly Brothers on the little radio on my bedside table, aching with unrelieved sexual and emotional tension for a bigger life. When my kids were little, the only time I had to myself was late at night after they went to sleep. That’s when I got into bed with cup after cup of hot tea, stacks of books and a journal to pour my heart into. Still looking for a bigger life, still yearning for something that seems so very possible in the middle of the big vast freewheeling night. In my bed.

Posted in Home, Inspiration, Senses | 4 Comments »

Storm Clouds

May 28th, 2008

I love rain at night, rain anytime I’m safe inside the house, or at least have the illusion of being safe. I think so often of how lucky I am to have a house, snug and small and wrapped around me like a hug. The house I grew up in was full of discord and loud voices and sharp corners. The houses I lived in when I was married were far from safe because I never knew when the atmosphere would turn violent. I tried to take up as little room as possible, call as little atttention to myself as possible. When I was a single mother, I was always calculating how to keep the roof over our heads intact–paying the rent the very last day it was due, getting to the electric company to make a middle of the night payment. Shutting the door at night and knowing I’d kept it together one more day was sometimes a major accomplishment. So home is unreasonably important to me. Maybe it’s why I’m not very daring when it comes to travel…I set off as if I will never see home again, with a resignation that would be comical if it weren’t so limiting. Once I’m on the road, I’m better and I can understand why it’s important to leave home like Mole in The Wind in the Willows to see the world. But oh how I love the sound of rain on my own roof, no matter how temporal or transient that shelter may be.

Posted in Home | 1 Comment »

City Mouse, Country Mouse

March 17th, 2008

I want to wake up and walk out my door to coffee shop on the corner. I want to drop off my dry cleaning on my way to the subway or tube stop. I want to have a book store and a movie theater in my neighborhood. I want to sit in a local bar and have a glass of wine and write in my journal. I want to know the bartender’s name and have a bowl of mussels with butter and herbs in broth. I want to wear black and high heels and fake pearls. On the other hand, I want to own a farm in Kentucky, grow limestone lettuce, adopt a dog and let him run and hunt, listen to rain on a tin roof, raise chickens, drive a pickup truck, sit on the porch at the end of the day, sleep like a baby in a four poster bed that belonged to my grandmother. Except those two sides of my self will never be fully reconciled and I live in the between spaces. Maybe I need to choose.

Posted in Enlightenment, Home | 3 Comments »

Kuan Yin Blesses the Kitchen

December 3rd, 2007

Have mercy on this stove that was born before self-cleaning was invented and only has one rack. Have mercy on its owner who is impatient with recipes and directions. Have mercy on whatever lies behind the stove and I pray we never have to go there. Have mercy on the garbage disposal that clogs up for no reason and refuses to grind–may its rage be directed more usefully at lemon rinds and celery behinds. Have mercy on the microwave–it can’t help being friends with fast and frozen food. Let it coexist peacefully with oven-roasted chicken and tagines. Have mercy on General Electric and Jack Welch…he can’t help his hubris and hormones. Have mercy on Alec Baldwin who plays a General Electric executive on tv and who I sometimes hear when I’m moved to the top of the entertainment center at the whim of my owner. May his anger with his ex wife be abated or mediated by a Hollywood Kuan Yin. Have mercy on the kitchen renovation coming soon and may it not last too long and may the granite be the right color. Have mercy on everyone who eats my owner’s cooking. She means well.