When the house lights dim

It is completely dark. The crowd hushes without being told. Open eyes see blackness, nothing but simple black, no light pestering rods and cones into interpretation, color, movement.

It would be restful, still, like pre-birth nonbeing, were we not all, as most are, secretly fearful of death.

Who am I?

Have I wasted my life?

Coughing. Wrappers. Whispers.

The one crowd becomes a crowd of ones.

Showtime.

Astronauts for Hire!

The discontinuation of the NASA manned space shuttle program is the end of an era. But it’s the beginning of a new, brighter, shinier era:

Astronauts for Hire! …by NASA!©  (to the tune of “By Mennen”)

The tragic unemployment of a crew of elite globe-circlers trained in mechanics, astrophysics, engineering, and drinking bubbles of floating water means YOU now have the opportunity to hire a bona fide astronaut to do your chores, errands, child care, and other less than savory tasks. They’ll walk your dog, clean your house, keep your old folks company.

Astronaut for Hire: So, Gramps, you walked to school six miles each way uphill in the snow? I know how you feel! Have I ever told you about the time I ran out of oxygen 238,000 miles from home?

They’ll personally test the functionality of your tumble dryer. They’ll take your kids on the Gravitron operated by the drunk carnie at the sketchy county fair.

Astronaut for Hire: As a veteran of the Vomit Comet zero-gravity simulator, I’m uniquely prepared to deal with rickety and possibly prolonged rides on roller coasters that have been around longer than Space Shuttle Columbia.

Our Astronaut Escort Service will provide a dinner companion overflowing with witty comments for your next office party.

Astronaut for Hire: Newton’s gravitational law? That’s so twentieth century. How bout them Higgs Bosons?

Sexy Lady: (dreamily) What a space cadet!

Our astronauts even offer therapy.

Astronaut: Charlene, I hear you saying that you feel overeducated, overspecialized, underemployed, and possibly obsolete. I empathize with that. But Charlene: the world’s just a tiny, blue marble. So… what does that make us?

Astronauts for Hire!

Astronaut: We’re out of this world! …Well, we were.

Go USA!

Spring wallflowers

(click image to read note)

As spring warms the hemisphere, people paralyzed by winter’s dark and cold now ease into movement, including depressed people. Bleak inner life and the newly pulsating rainbow of plants outside form a sour contrast, and the more vibrant flow of blood gives some the strength to act: suicides peak in May and June.

This spring I found a note by the river. The water rushed and rose up its sandy edge, full of demanding energy, and I could not walk past without stopping to bask. The paper was folded in quarters and slipped between the boards of a park bench where homeless people sleep when it is snowing, swaddled in thin sleeping bags.

A little release, a little shout, poem, question, inelegant, referential, young, assertive, testing. Yet assuming a friend.

I went home and listened to the song it spoke of: the Smiths’ “Sing me to sleep.” Pictured hundreds of solitary teenagers in American bedrooms cultivating a self-image of moody misery, Morrissey intoning on repeat, a copy of The Perks of Being a Wallflower on the floor. Some are serious, some sorta, some not. So which is she?

Lately I’m aspiring to become, like a famous pilgrim, “unstuck in time.” (Vonnegut, another literary reference– though what was hers? I couldn’t find it…) I’m more tender, awake, slow, open, and loving when I shake off time and control for even a short while. That kind of shedding has much to do with death, the death of the little self. A friend died snorkeling amid a symphony of colored fish off the coast of Hawai’i last week; rest in peace, Ed. Another fell from a roof in California while installing solar panels; peace be with you, Hans. Contemplating these deaths makes such a practice even more welcomed and needed.

Dear Friend, nobody else has to go for us to become awake together. Easier said than done… but it can be done.

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Girlhood

We were riding the bus to St. Paul on a Sunday afternoon, Tracy and I, headed to some festival on Harriet Island. We were fresh out of college, fresh into Americorps, and embarking upon an adventure. We unfolded a map and held it in the sunlight to figure out our stop.

This is when the girl noticed us. She was sitting up front, just behind the driver, holding tightly to a handrail. Her eyes were wide but tired, and rimmed with smudged mascara. She wore a black-and-white dress with ruffles, an unsuccessful attempt to appear sophisticated. She slipped from her seat into the half-seat open beside us.

“Can, can you help me?” she asked.

We were startled but amenable. “Yeah, sure, what is it?”

“I’m trying to get home,” she said. “Can I look at your map?”

We stretched the map over all three laps, and asked where she lived. Unfamiliar with the address, we asked for a nearby intersection, and puzzled for a few minutes, looking at several, equally complicated series of routes, transfers, and layovers she might try.

“It’s pretty early in the day to have come so far,” one of us commented. “How did you end up here, anyway?” And that’s when, in bits and pieces that she told us in a throaty whisper, it came out.

She had gone to a party last night, driven by friends, she didn’t know where. An older boy had had sex with her. He had told her not to tell her parents or the police. That if she did, she would get in trouble for violating curfew. Because she was fourteen. Her friends had left and she had no way to go. She’d stayed the night, then crept out in the daylight, caught the first bus she saw, and had been riding around lost ever since.

Thinking back, I am surprised that she told us. Who was she to trust anyone after the night before? Perhaps she was too young to fabricate or withhold. In any case, we persuaded her to get off the bus at Harriet Island with us, and to let us call a ride for her. We told her it would be a police officer, but that she would not be in trouble with the law. I sat with her under a tree while Tracy called 911 on her cell phone. In my best kind grown-up voice, I told the girl that nobody had the right to do things to her without her consent. That what the older boy had done was a far greater offense than any curfew violation. That there were people she could talk to. That if she ever wanted to bring this to court and help stop this boy, she would have to go to the hospital and have some tests done, and then she could get cleaned up.

She wanted to go to the bathroom. I watched while she went into the park restrooms for an endless five minutes, making sure she didn’t flee, wondering what she was doing to restore herself in the solitude of a dirty stall. Tracy joined us and, like me, tried to embody care, the potential for rightness in the world. Our cobbled-together support and wisdom felt like thin, unsatisfying blankets against the cold wind that blew around the girl’s life. A female police officer arrived to take her home, or to the hospital; we did not know. Tracy and I walked around Harriet Island, only half seeing the displays and cheery acts, numb from the secondary chill. When we got home, we dropped the pretense of maturity, and cried.

I tried to remember the address the girl had given when she was trying to find her way home. Later I wrote to her, first name only, as that was all I knew, to ask how she was doing and send some toll-free hotline numbers. The envelope was returned with a stamp of invalid number, a cuffed hand pointing a finger back to me. I kept the letter, still sealed, and it dwells in a closet in my family home in Minnesota, among other relics of girlhood.

50/50… but not for 50 million

Recently I saw the movie 50/50, the inspired-by-a-true story of a young man diagnosed with cancer, and of the ways he and his friends and family deal with it. It’s a comedy, though as one might expect, it’s not without drama.

The film was good. But one elephant-sized, real-life component of the ordeal was missing: the cost of it all. Of course a person’s time and emotional reservoir would be fully tapped simply dealing with chemotherapy, possible surgery, appointments, telling people, dealing with their reactions, not to mention dealing with one’s own. But what U.S. American faces an intense medical experience without some thought to paying for it?

The protagonist was employed at a public radio station, which presumably offers health insurance to its employees. Even so, insurance is hardly a guarantee of affordable treatment. And as we know, there are at least 50 million US Americans who don’t even have that.

This isn’t only about accuracy. It could be a side-splitter too. Wouldn’t the bureaucratic nightmare of US health care — HMOs, voicemail labyrinths, hieroglyphic invoices, encyclopedia-sized user’s manuals, government assistance and lack thereof, contradicting and often cruel decisions — be a gold mine for dark comedy?

I’m no more enlightened than anyone about how best to tweak, overhaul, or resurrect our health care system, though I have my opinions and theories. But I do know that most people really don’t want to hear any more about how much it sucks. Another documentary about how screwed we are is not going to spark much productive debate, I’ll wager. The only people who would eagerly watch it would be the people one seeks to avoid at parties, those who find diatribes and misery enjoyable. But a comedy could be just the sugar-coated pill the doctor ordered. To revitalize passion for change. To suggest creative and madcap ways to protest, upend, or even just pierce through the system until we find some beating hearts in there, open to releasing rules, cutting away the web, maybe even dropping a few pennies.

Yikes. This is already fomenting too much hope. I can just feel disappointment licking its chops, ready to rush in when nothing materializes out of this obscure blog post. But still I dream. And of course, someday, somewhere, something’s going to change.

Free skate

My father is slightly nervous, slightly timid, and just plain slight. He is caution, planning, deliberation, care, hesitance. This is how he has been as long as I can remember. This is Dad.

But today, our small family went to the ice rink in the old train depot downtown. Pop music piped into the arena and a disco ball spun over dozens of shouting, fumbling, laughing skaters of all ages. My mother, brother and I laced up the endless hooks on our skates, pulling the laces tight, losing the grip, re-pulling. We looked up and Dad was gone. We hadn’t even put our street shoes in a locker with the stack of three quarters yet. His shoes lay next to ours, unsecured.

And he was already on the ice. His hands joined easily behind him, his posture was as casual as if he were merely strolling, but he skimmed the length of the rink in seconds flat. He came to the curve and lapped one foot over the other, rounded efficiently and whizzed back between the other skaters with the grace of a dancer. He spun and skated backwards, then forward again, weaving his course without thought or effort. There was no flash to his skate: he wore his usual coat, glasses and thin jeans, and he cut no tricks. But there on the scratched rink, slant January sunshine slicing across the ice, my father cast a long and elegant shadow, more at ease on frozen water than on land, concrete or carpet. 

I stumbled onto the ice and began my flailing lap, energetic and fearless, but inept. He laughed as I tried to sneak up from behind, he whirled and stopped in a sharp hockey move. “How do you skate backwards? Show me how you do that!” I begged. No taller than me, he pushed forward as I, holding his hands, tried to slide back. He couldn’t explain how he did it, and I couldn’t do it, so we quit the lesson and just looped and looped, and I followed him and filled my eyes with his flight. To see him free that way, free as a boy skating on a frozen river in Belvedere, Illinois, free as a youth rushing into a hockey fray, free as a spirit, filled me with gladness and love for my father.

Pangaea

And then there’s Ty Tymon’s place, Pangaea Permaculture. In terms of disorganization and lack of structure (and structures), it’s all right. Ty himself looks pretty harmless, a sixties-ish guy six feet tall and thin with long dreds, dressed like a Rasta, always rolling or smoking or finishing smoking a giant spliff. But he’s a former Black Panther and told me a story once of how he went at a guy with nunchucks for crossing him. The first time, I went with Rambler and some other guy, down winding red back roads, turn after turn through the ropes of kudzu, for hours. I had no idea where we were. Time and space telescoped, we were driving the contours of a fractal. Finally there was a dented mailbox, painted red with yellow dots and the address: 202 Tomato Lane. We parked and piled into Ty’s little trailer. I soon realized, once Ty and Rambler got to smoking, that it might be forever before we left. I’m not into pot myself, so the conversation and the ambience bored me yet kept me on edge, much as I tried (as I always try, and always unsuccessfully) to chill. I was also the only female, and though none of these guys were remotely menacing, I was unforgettably conscious of how bepodunked I was. I browsed through the dusty bookshelves that lined the interior, floor to ceiling, and spread on the cushions near the incense. Most were paperbacks from the seventies, about revolutionary black politics, flora and fauna identification, the messed-up institutions of Amerikkka, manure and gardening and alternative building methods, and photo albums of Ty naked with a variety of young women.

I must have looked pretty out of my element, because after a couple hours, Ty handed me a small glass of blood red juice, slightly viscous, which he called elixir. “This stuff is rare,” he said. “My homemade elderberry wine, last bottle.”

“Oh Ann, don’t drink it,” yelled Rambler. “Elderberries are poison. It’ll kill you!” I couldn’t tell whether he was kidding. “It’s my gramma’s recipe,” Ty told me. “Trust me. You just have to make it right. Girl, c’mon. I swear, it’s OK.”

So I drank it. I’m not much of a drinker, and I was raised cautious as a cat, but this stuff was delicious. Deep, sweet, and subtle. I could taste centuries in there. I could taste the land that Ty’s grandmother knew, combed, tended, became. She had gotten it, she owned it, Ty told me, though I don’t remember how. How in hell does a black woman, a medicine woman, part Native American, living in rural Georgia at the turn of the twentieth century, lay claim to land? She must have been as powerful and charmed as Ty himself. More so, even; the heir was probably a dilution. I saw her moving over the land, following game trails, bending to know and to use each plant, even the toxic ones. The rest of the evening was comfortable and warm.

I went one other time to Pangaea, for Ty’s annual New Year’s Eve gathering. When we pulled up, he was making wild hog and venison burgers. He had shot the wild hog himself, as it was ravaging his farm, and his neighbor had bagged the deer, and they had shared. On an iron grate over a wood fire in the sand outside the trailer, he poked at the meat with a stick. The smell was intoxicating. And my admission here, just to show that I too have something at stake in the telling, is that I ate some of that meat. Just as I am fickle in my arts, wandering in my path, and wavering in my career, it should be no surprise that I am an imperfect vegetarian, though rarely. That evening I was in another world, and I took that world’s communion.

We sat around the fire as the dark flowed down, and people came and went: Ty’s neighbors and friends, communards, the bohemian fringe of small towns, and some folks who just knew that there’d be lots of Natty Light. I chatted for a while with a woman wearing pelts—a schoolteacher with a double life. Two locals, a couple unpredictably paired (she was a round ball, and he a long stick, both with strikingly asymmetrical features), groped drunkenly in the shadows. The embers calmed, and I left the circle before the drumming started, and definitely before the dancing. When midnight approached I walked out to the road and found the highest point, the better to be nearer the blazing stars. When hollering, singing, and cowbells rose from the distance, I knew the new year had begun.

I tested out my sleeping bag that night, in a tent I had pitched off the path in the afternoon. It wasn’t as warm as I’d hoped, but I was glad anyhow, as I learned the next day that all who had crashed in the house had slept very poorly. Apparently the stick-and-ball couple with the crooked faces had loudly fornicated all over the property for hours, including romping over beds already occupied by others. But the morning was fresh and in the new light I walked the narrow trails, exploring the hulls of half-finished bamboo yurt frames, pagan sacred circles, and the sparse rows of wintering vegetable patches, where Ty’s grandmother still moved.

The country runner

Nobody exercised there, except through manual labor. The nearest gym was ten miles away, and I did not own a car, nor wish to pay dues. So I ran. Nearly every day for nearly five years, I ran. In the stormy season, I’d greedily await the lifting of the clouds, pacing indoors impatiently. In winter, I’d savor the half hour between the end of the work day and the point when I couldn’t see my hand before me, much less the path ahead. After a hurricane’s four days of downpour, I’d gamble that a sodden, weakened pecan branch wouldn’t crack my head open.

I ran everywhere in a three to five-mile radius: fields, trails, woods, roads paved and dirt, neighborhoods. People I had never met would say, “I seen you running, you still running?” My first season, I marveled at the carelessness of some trucker who must have spilled a bale of napkins to unravel over miles of road, until I realized that I was an ignorant Yank who didn’t know cotton when it hit her on the soles of her shoes. So running was my way of entering a foreign land, divining its curves with footprints, learning, soaking in.

It was a sensory carnival. The taste of pesticide infected my spit as I trotted along the perimeter of freshly harvested cotton fields, the poison upturned by the blades of the giant harvesters. Next it was the heavy stink of smoke, when the fields were burned to release the nutrition of ash into the soil, and next, manure, spread over the whole mess. In lovelier seasons, jasmine filled my lungs, dogwood blossoms and azaleas, birdsong, new ferns. I leaped across rivulets and puddles, investigated familiar paths turned new again with the changing of seasons.

In May, when the trail through the woods became so overrun with banana spiders that I tired of waving a stick in front of my face to prevent my head from being shrink-wrapped in dense, three-dimensional webs, I ran instead on the shoulder of the state highway. I’d switch to the opposite side when a car, or a semi loaded with pine logs, barreled my way. A neighbor told me that my image, jogging on the side of this highway, is immortalized on the street view of Google Earth. Though I have never found myself, I enjoy the idea.

In the hottest months, chiggers ate their way into the backs of my knees, no-see-um bites dotted my ankles, mosquitoes pierced my nape where the sweat dripped down under sun-scorched hair. Kudzu crept clear across dirt roads, consumed all other foliage, emitted unmistakable, sinister aroma. The roads in the wet season were mud and my sneakers and cotton socks stained red from sinking in, sometimes up to the ankle. It would not wash out.

People warned me about crazy rednecks who might abduct me or beat me with chains, but I never met any. People warned me about snakes. I did jump over a few, and others I saw in advance—a few weeks every spring, the big snakes, three feet long, would get wanderlust and I would come upon one lying across the road in a fat squiggle. I would stop: “Snake, I’m right here, and you are there. You can be comfortable there, I don’t want to bother you. I am going to walk way over here through the woods and behind you now. I’ll be gone in a minute. Thank you.”

But running was good. Alone, alive, away from people and people’s information. Omissions, ideas, insights rose from the path. Salt water seeped out of me, knowledge seeped in: the moon phases, which plants bloomed, which faded. The names in the graveyard, the unmarked stones. The taste of wild grapes, of sarsaparilla root. Barbed wire fences fallen and entombed by trees, ruined barns absorbed by forest, abandoned mattresses, beehives, and the hood of a 1948 Ford. Sweaters, condoms, beer cans, abandoned trysts. Passionflowers. The two oaks whose trunks twisted in embrace.

I knew where cows stared, rabbits fled. A loner fox, a pair of bobcats. Countless dead birds, squirrels, mice. A dead coyote on the edge of the cornfield, whom I had heard howling the night before. And human animals as well: the two guys who parked their red Ranger on the red road daily, their spot to smoke weed and eat ice cream, then toss the evidence—cardboard pint, plastic spoon. They waved, told me to mind the snakes.

Now I have a gym membership, live in the city, run on paths smooth and wide and populous with other joggers. But humans are territorial, and I am solitary. I miss patrolling my own beat, tripping, finding burs in my socks. Finding a narrow way through a strange world, rather than being guided over it.

Zzz

I have long been thankful that humans – and most creatures – require sleep. No matter how determined, how frantic, how executive, controlling, even insomniac a person may be, eventually, sleep’s gonna win. Every pesky little doer is going to be taken out of commission, made vulnerable, and rejuvenated through a host of mysterious mental and physical processes. And on a regular basis. So… may as well find a dark nest and accept it.

I love that it’s mostly unconscious, but still one is aware of time having passed afterward. A solid chunk of relief from I, from thought – and the awareness that it happened, even though there’s really nothing to remember. Long hours of simple bodily being, practically without effort. As a sucky meditator, but one who loves it on the rare instances when it “works,” this is a spectacular reprieve. Being in a body is a strange experience, so damn particular all the time, bounded and defined. But when it gets dark– the sublime melt. Good practice for death, though who knows what that’s like. Good practice for surrender, for succumbing, for giving over what doesn’t belong to me, not permanently anyway.

Of course, it is interrupted by absurdities, which are in turn laced with archetypes – two of the most interesting things around, really. But even without dreams, there is no boredom. Thank the powers of evolution that it’s not possible to lie asleep bored for a third of one’s life.

And arguably, humankind does the least damage while hitting the sack. Arlo Guthrie has said that he prefers a sleeping president. After all, who can you bomb while you’re sawing logs? On a smaller scale, I know I do the world no favors when I am sleep-deprived. Even a few missed hours on a single night, and I’m beastly. This is why statistics on the ever-decreasing average nightly conk-out time of American citizens so alarms me. People of the nation, save yourselves and the world. Hear my impassioned cry for more sleep: (yawns)

Sleep makes wakefulness beautiful, or at least bearable. In these dark days, sleep is even more a confidant, a lover, a land to be explored.  So good morning. I hope it was lovely. And, in not so long – good night.