Food is Love

My children lost one of their great grandmothers over the weekend. The funeral is today. And while I'm not certain how much of anything Baby grasps, the Boy is having trouble. While we were having dinner last night, I let him know I'd be picking him up early from school, where we'd be going, what would be happening.

And the poor little thing was trying so hard to be brave. He was asking questions, and as I answered, he just kept saying "ok" and taking these big gulps of air in as his little chin quivered. And finally I said, "baby, it's ok to cry. It's ok to feel sad or scared." And he burst out crying and climbed up on my lap, in a way he hasn't done in quite a while.

And once he stopped crying, my first thought was to take them out for dessert. Once they had finished a reasonable amount of dinner, we piled in the car and headed to Eat n Park for a bear claw. I didn't stop to think what I was doing until we had ordered.

So how much of feeding our emotions is nature and how much is nurture? Almost all of my memories of my father's mother involve her cooking. Most of the family traditions I've tried to pass on to the boys center around eating. Would I be more cautious of loving them with food if they were girls? If we had weight issues?

I don't know. I know we are going to a funeral and after there will be food. Lots of fattening food.

And Again

Husbandry
by Jennifer Borges Foster

For you she builds a house of spices and sleigh beds,
of anise and armrests, of typewriters happily clacking
their teeth at the blowsy dawn. She builds boxes and ladders,
kneelers and coffins, stocks hardtack and swatches of cloth.
There is a history of horses and husbandry here,
a history of holiness and excess, of morning and mourning,
of days that never wake. For you she builds a body, a list
from hip to waist, a weight in breasts best set to anchor
the architecture of your mouth. On leaving she
lives in a biscuit, peeking through the gnawed-out window
sat the robins who dumbly clutter her roof.
She is vaulted and volleyed by the long-armed god
of her father; holed up and hoping you’ll come rob
the stockpile she’s been hoarding for years. Her letters to
you are written in steam, apparent only on nights
when the windows drift open. For you she builds a house
of hallways, one easy to wander when she is gone.

And another poem

Chance
by Molly Peacock

may favor obscure brainy aptitudes in you
and a love of the past so blind you would
venture, always securing permission,
into the back library stacks, without food
or water because you have a mission:
to find yourself, in the regulated light,
holding a volume in your hands as you
yourself might like to be held. Mostly your life
will be voices and images. Information. You
may go a long way alone, and travel much
to open a book to renew your touch.


And yeah, Sunday. 6-0 Pens! How wrong would it be to try to get my shifts scheduled around the finals?

Score!

Pens won! In Philly! Game 4, I think it is, tonight. Woohoo! Go Pens!

So, that was the highlight of Tuesday night. Good hockey game. Celebrated a friend's graduation from college and acceptance to grad school. Finally found out that a "chocolate cake" is comprised of vodka and frangelico. No wonder I like them so much. No wonder I can only have one.

The low point of the evening: having to go to the police station and pick up one of my new girlfriends. DUI is bad. DUI is very very bad. She's damn lucky all she got is stopped by the police and didn't hurt anyone. It was an utterly stupid thing to do. But somehow it didn't seem like the time to be giving her that lecture. My lesson for Tuesday night is that sometimes the last thing a person deserves is the thing they need most, and in this case it was compassion.

Old dog. New tricks.

Well, apparently my career as a lush has ended. Or maybe Monday is just sobriety night. Anyhow, I set both a drink limit and a curfew for myself and followed them both. Some days it is no fun being a grown up and having to worry about rent and jobs and bills and more bills.

Sigh.

Anyhow. Enough sighing. Hockey playoffs. Meeting a bunch of girls from work at the bar to watch the game. We've had a long enough hockey drought around here. I seriously wish I could find a picture of Braydon Coburn's face. I love hockey. And some day, I bet BabyStar repays me for that in full.

Lessons Learned on a Friday Night

Or Saturday morning. Very early Saturday morning.

1. It is not a good idea to go out with your wild girlfriend to "her" bar if you have to work the next morning.

2. Even when you know this ahead of time you will still do it.

3. Reminding yourself you aren't twenty anymore really doesn't help.

4. If the song playing as you walk into the bar is Cake's version of I Will Survive, you will have too much to drink.

5. If the first guy who hits on you has the same first name as an ex, you will have too much to drink.

6. When you drink too much, your internal filter shuts down completely. You will say things you should not say out loud.

7. Those things you should not say out loud will make you very popular with your wild friend's bar friends.

8. The reminder of how much fun it is to go out and dance is worth everything else.

9. McDonald's double cheeseburgers are really good at three forty five am, even if you don't have the munchies.

10. The phone number written on a napkin sitting on your dresser blinks like a neon sign all night, not helping anything at all.

And completely off topic, for Mother's Day BabyStar used the potty! Yay!

And another

I seem to be on a poem kick.

Room with a Bed in the Middle
Curtis Bauer

While I sleep my wife writes words
on my back.
She wants me to feel what she thinks,
what's inside her chest.
When I wake the letter Q boils between
my shoulder blades
as if it were branded or etched.
I think she traced C
but there's longing in her and she hates
the word covet.
Her delicate hands can’t hold desire.
She is sitting on top of me
naked, though her hair clothes her.
The bed isn't large
enough for this love tracing from her
fingers. The room
diminishes when she opens her eyes.

How we do it Around Here

Poetry, that is.

Going Deep For Jesus
Jan Beatty

Run to the street light, make a right
at the blue car, and go deep
--Sharan Watson

1981, I'm on the back of a cherry
red Kawasaki with my boyfriend Stush,
my biker jacket bought with a tax return
from a year of waiting tables, stuffed
in my pocket the bad check I wrote
to see Stevie Ray play the Decade.
Down Beck's Run we hit Carson, my cheek
resting on Stush's firm shoulder till
the ground rises up with the hulk of J&L
across the river, steel house that burns it all,
an up-against-the-wall-fuck, thick &
ripping, everything is smokestacks
& yellow blaze. We ride the river roads,
looking for deserted two-lanes,
newspapers stuffed under our leather
for warmth. I want to forget my name--
everything but the sharp lean into
the next turn, the cheap slap of the wind.
Stush brags about his water-cooled,
two-stroke engine, but I just want
the contact high of leather, metal,
and the slow burn of a few joints.
Past the bridges & bridges, we ride
away from our fast-food jobs and
run-down apartment, toward the smell
of the Ohio, its perpetual mire, the rotting
docks and lean-to's, to what we knew.
I knew the muscles in his back & his
low voice would make me come
back to my self. We stop near the bog
of the river's edge to have hard sex
on the ground, our jeans still on,
trying to shotgun a moment, to split open
our lives in the brilliant light until
we were the mills, we were the fire.
It was then I decided god and orgasm
were the same thing, that if jesus
had an address, it would be a dark two-lane,
if god were here, she'd shove down
like a two-stroke in a rainstorm,
she'd let it fly.

The Door Knob is Gone

So, after the last fiasco, part of the doorknob, that part that latches into the frame, was still there.

As I was getting out of the shower on Saturday, the baby came in, ran back out, then slammed the door shut behind him. Latching me in. No door knob. No tools in the bathroom. Thought about shimmying out the window. Which is three storeys above a gravel drive. Have a lovely purple bruise along my hip from trying to force the door open. Right. My hip was going to break the door frame. So, I told the boy to get my cell phone, and started reciting numbers until we got hold of their father, who came and got me out. There is now no door knob hardware whatsoever on the bathroom door until I decide if I'm going to wait out his obsession with locks or get a door knob that doesn't lock at all. And my humiliation is complete.

So, Saturday sucked. The way some days just suck. Long and hard. The way some days are just complete and utter pain, and you do whatever you have to to get through. The days when a song gets stuck in your head and won't let go. Saturday's was Glycerine.

So, eventually I just decided to feed the earworm, and dug out the cd. And danced. And moved because I had to. The baby is now ready for a mosh pit. :) The boy, not so much. Machinehead came on, and he said, "Mom, why are you jumping. Jumping isn't dancing." He still needs some work. :)

May Day

So, while National Poetry Month is technically over, my love affair with the villanelle is not.

So.

Mad Girl's Love Song
Sylvia Plath

"I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan's men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)"

So. That Sylvia. I've lived longer now that she did. And yeah, she was some freak brilliant child prodigy genius. But still, she had a troubled marriage and two young children. And still she wrote. Still she was capable of Ariel. (Maybe because of the two young children and troubled marriage she was capable of Ariel.) The excuses I have for not writing are starting to sound weak, even to me.