The Garage Bug

I? Am not a nature girl.

Forget the wrinkles or risk of skin cancer, the sun burns me. Within seconds.

Mosquitoes feast on me.

So, I leave nature alone as much as possible with the understanding it leave me alone.

I have boys. Two curious, energetic, outdoorsy boys. They like bugs. They really like to scare their mother with bugs. The older boy is in first grade. In the days of No Child Left Behind. Know what that means? That means these kids get math and reading books, and most everything else is hands on. Which has it's pros and cons. First graders learn about bugs by raising mealworms. Which become some sort of beetle. Which come home on the bus. To their father's house, thank dog....

At my house, we have some daddy long legs living in the stairwell. Occasionally a stink bug makes it's way across the living room floor. But there is this thing that has taken up residence in the garage.

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It's on a web. I have no idea if it's predator or prey, but it's been there a while. It's up high, next to where I get into my car. We've made our peace, the creepy bug and I. As long as it doesn't ever move while I am in the garage, I'll leave it alone.

The baby was playing in the garage the other day and happened to see the creepy garage bug. He comes barreling upstairs, insisting I come! Come! Mommy! Right come! and see this bug.

So, figuring this is what he's referring to, I come down to see the bug. Told him I'd seen it before, it wasn't bothering anyone.

“When did you see it, mommy? Did it make you freak in your pants?”

Ah, boys.

I got nothing

No inspiration whatsoever. I could bitch about work. Or the weather. But instead, here's a poem lifted from Wicked Alice.



Insomnia


Chella Courington



You know me well strolling streets to be with people without

being with people. You ask for one dollar. One dollar.



What if I only have a twenty? Can I owe you for tonight?

Your eyes bloodshot like mine bags holding them up.



Johnson roamed London midnight to sunrise. Couldn’t bear

the garret stacked in leaves of words worked reworked



amanuenses oblivious to stale air to his rambling Fleet.

My rambling State slipping in my skin bleak above cement.



Days disintegrate unseen except by you grave lady reaching for me

singing a hymn my mother sang When nothing else would help



love lifted me. I’m not him: I can’t take you home. But I’ll leave you

this bill & all the change in my pocket.

Mother's Day

I’m working today. So, we had dinner and a movie night last night, during which BabyStar insisted on unwrapping, ahem, giving me my presents. He has finally reached the age where he doesn’t blurt out what the gift is as it’s being opened, but thinks anything taped up in paper is exciting.

The children’s father chose Marley and Me for the movie, as they had already watched all the other children’s movies on the OnDemand or Pay-per-View or whatever overpriced cable thing he has at his house.

And I am not even going to bitch about the end of that movie. I’ve read the reviews. I knew what was coming. And I knew that if the kids didn’t get upset on their own, they have a crier for a mother and would have gotten upset seeing her get upset.

I was just unprepared for what got me upset.

(I would imagine I’m the last person on the planet to see the movie, but just in case I’m not here’s your huge spoiler alert.)

There’s this scene early on where the happy pretty couple is expecting their first baby, and go in to have a sonogram. There’s the tense ultrasound tech, and the nondescript, soothing doctor speaking hollow platitudes in a hushed tone.

They left out a lot. They left out the cramps. They left out the blood, the copious, unbelievable amounts of blood. They left out how a body can open up and let go. They left out the catheter, the internal ultrasound, the Rhogam shot. The left out how kind, how willing to share their personal lives all the strangers who work at emergency rooms can be.

They left out the scene where you put your clothes back on and walk out into the cruelly bright April sunshine, into everything green and growing and blooming, and go forward carrying emptiness, carrying failure.

Living Rooms do not Need Couches

So says Sandra Beasley.

http://sbeasley.blogspot.com/

(really I am going to come down off the poetry high and write about something else some day)

"I Hate Workshop Prompts"

or

Why I am the Biggest Sandra Beasley Fangirl Ever

or

How to Spend a Friday Night in Pittsburgh


I woke Friday morning from one of those horrible dreams in which you’ve regained something you lost, and the dream is so real, and you wake to a disorienting, disappointing reality. And the emotional aftermath of that hung over me all through work.

Meanwhile the boy was staying home from school because of am asthma flare. I stopped to see the kids after work, then headed here.

I managed to get myself somewhere unfamiliar in the city without getting lost!

The building is this lovely, artsy, exposed brick studio. All sorts of paintings along the walls, sculpture and textiles, paper cranes hanging from the ceiling. There’s a big bathtub in the middle of the room they fill with ice and drinks.

Sandra Beasley is small, slight. And she’s funny! Really, really funny. And when she starts to read, she, hmm, expands. She drove up from DC and kindly complimented my city.

She read:

Cherry Tomatoes (that came from a workshop prompt)
One from the Allergy Girl series
You (the hairs all stood up on the back of my neck)
Fireproof
The Fish
Theories of Nonviolence
Theories of Falling

And then she read three poems from her new book. Which may be even better poems. I would have never believed that possible.

After half an hour, they took an ice cream break, then Ron McLean read one of his short stories, a really haunting one about a father and teenage daughter. During which I got a text that my kid was sick enough that he needed to go to the ER.

So, as soon as the reading was over, I rushed right up to her and asked her to sign my book, explaining I had to rush home to get a kid to the ER.

I chatted with Sandra Beasley about food allergies! Squee! She was so lovely and gracious and funny. I have such a huge huge girlcrush.

And then I rushed to the car, cranked Kings of Leon and sped down the Boulevard of the Allies in the rain, and got back to the house to stay with the little boy while the big one got pumped full of meds.

And on my way back home at three am I came this close to hitting a deer. I’ve had enough excitement for one weekend.