Endasemester

So it is closing in on the end of a semester and I bid bye bye to students who bright and cheeerful and lovable enough, yet whose names I will retain for the length of a fad.

With notable exceptions.

And I step back to survey the field of my "interest," my personal anthropology, and recognize once again, that I teach the children of strangers. There is a telling curse in Polish which acknowledges the horror of that situation: May you instruct the children of others. Or other people's children.

That's what I do. I instruct other people's children.

And on bad days, I think to myself, I am glad someone loves you, your parents. Cause I don't.

(I will tell this to Amanda, a lovely witty woman who used to work for me, and she will say: There ought to be a bumper sticker that reads,

JESUS LOVES YOU, SO I DON'T HAVE TO!)

On good days, I am amused. Amused, impressed and surprised.

Is that so, I remind myself. Is that so?

I am a Little Old Lady

I am a little old lady, I am, a little old lady.

I go to bed each night at eleven and feel the cold instead of the rising heat.

I take my tea with lemon and sugar to stay warm.

My blood pressure is up: Are you stressed, the doctor asks?

I am tired and my bones creak.

A week of coughing my lungs are crimped as my style.

I am a little old lady, a little old lady of ten days of coughing.

I never used to be this often this cold in Chicago.

But I was not a little old lady then.

Not like now.

Coke vs Coke

Oh no. NO no NO no. Not that my dowdy College cafeteria now sells both Dark Cherry Coke with Vanilla AND Lime Coke. Oh no NO NO NO. My fate is sealed.

And they are each perfectly chilled.

I wavered today in front of the cooler. WAVERED about Coke.

I chose dark cherry vanillla, but it could have gone either way.

Just About Day

Today was Easter Sunday, a just about day, a just about spring day. An almost spring day. I took the walking stick for a walk not far, not far at all, just down the lane to the end of the road and a small loop around. But during this time, about six, it was just about evening but not yet quite and just about spring but not just yet. It was all about to maybe be tomorrow. It was what they call the quickening, a precise little word seldom used anymore.

 Everything is still pretty stingy bare, branches and sod, but beginning its bulging budtobe by bud and the tips of branches are capped with the possibility of leaves. Spring is almost but not quite settled into her workspace, so people are as sparse as those leaves, Easter Sunday, so they were indulging elsewhere, more indoors with families, waiting for the sun to shove them out for good. 

It was so but it gave the street that holiday-vacated look of a cat-nap. Some people had come out, as if to stretch and take stock before the coming Monday, bank holiday but work-day for others. A couple walking...a man emerging, head-first, out of his car into the house on the sidestreet...a three year old in a tee reaching out cautiously to hold "a worm!" from her dad on one knee before the earth he was stirring up...and I did a doubletake at the woman in her forties, simply asit on her tiny porch in a liquid blue knit V neck just as I noted the magnolia blooms beginning to muster on a bush across the road from her. 

I forgot about the magnolia and backtracked to look at her, still hands in her lap, plainly just in a chair on the porch, doing little else but maybe watching me drag a stick down the street. Or wait for spring to check in. I love the blue of your top, I called out. Its like Easter egg blue. She laughed. It was true. But nothing really was going on, but rather readying to be more going on rather soon. 

At another corner, a mexican man was clearing last year's leaves into a paper bag. Kids about to be teenagers were kicking about a ball on the school soccer and Canadian geese field. It was not yet spring but it could be soon, any moment. It was spring caught yawning, just about ready to step into the shower.

A Contest

Tonight it is a contest between:

A slow spring evening budding.

The ratcatcher tale, told with interference.

The dreamchairs we have been supported by.

I will go with the evening. The chairs will be next.

True Confessions

I search for words to come across to a freshman student who has demanded full individualized instruction, a repeat private performance, right after I have just spent an entire hour explaining elements of the report.

I talked about it last Friday as well, I say.

I was not here last Friday, she says. Isn't it your duty to explain this to me? She demands.

........................
What follows is contentious, so lets fast forward, as I propose to her a summary of her problem...........................

Maybe classroom instruction is not for you, I say, maybe you really need one on one instruction, I offer, mindful of tactful feedback.

I do! she lights up at my grasp of her needs, reveals her high school frustrations, and there we are, swaying, on the rickety platform of understanding I have makeshifted for me and her.

Look, Marcie, I say, by way of pouring oil on uneven waters, aiming to introduce a suggestion by way of affirmation, "You are a smart person---"

I know!, she interrupts, fierce with the conviction of a nineteen year old:

I am the smartest person I know!

Good Friday

It is a sign of my state that I totally forgot today was a holiday and the buses run differently. I mean, did I even think about it? No.

Over at the pub, Ellen Marie has finished her scotch and suddenly explains that Jesus's radical suggestion that we orient our lives, society, totally around love and that that is is "an absolutely impossible proposition."

My mind rushes to imagine me shedding my love on the corners of the student mind and getting crushed, like a grape in the vinyard of the Lord.

The Ranunculus Marilyn

The Ranunculus Marilyn
Originally uploaded by evita2005.

This is Marilyn, the most reddest ranunculus in town. She lived with me awhile.

Lilacs Window Chair

Lilacs Window Chair
Originally uploaded by evita2005.

Breeding Lilacs. One of my favorite pictures with my favorite motifs: lilacs. window. chair. the ineffable. or something like that. stirring. memory and mystery. mixing. dull roots with wet rain. and so forth. anyways the window is open to the lilacs.

The Language of Flowers

Yellow Tulip
Originally uploaded by evita2005.

The Victorians wrote out their lives in flowers when they weren't knitting hair into brooches. The tulip spells out the perfect lover and the yellow tulip, hopeless love.

But mostly it's amazingly yellow.

Tomorrow, pinque!

Bookmarking a Smell

I smell dead people.

April is the cruellest month and so forth. Comes to mind.

The sun blasted from the sky today and on the way to the TTC, off the TTC, all the way down the Village, I smelled dead people.

At the train station, I smell them and they smell just like garbage roused by the sun to bloatstench. It smells like the past thawing into light and taking sloppy sweet nonshape.

Breeding lilacs. Out of a slumbering land.

They must have not collected the garbage all day today because the smell continues up and down the sidewalk.

It smells like the dead. It smells like Mr. Robinson down the hall in Chicago.

He had been smelling like that for some days that I went by his apartment. I kept saying, I kept saying. I kept thinking, a quiet man like that, always a quiet nod in the hallway, too quiet now. Then, one day, the door was open and the cops clustered, one of them droning into his phone about the African American male, deceased, hanging from the shower rod.

Nor was he the only one.

By the time it smelt of the guy on the ground floor, I already knew the smell. And sure enough, a few days later, the yellow tape.

People die in rooms all around but it is still odd to smell them on a bright spring day, tipsy with tulips.

Google Earth

My sister threw my parents a party to google earth them through the cities of their lives.

Who could resist google earth? Deen loves it. Ene Enry, the husband of my sister, pored over it an entire day long. Me, I got tired just remembering the places I had lived. My sister remembered more of them than me: Suffren, Tronna, places in Woodge, NYC, Chicago, lots and lots and zooming in and out and all around the terrrain of memory taking shape.

My parents sat and stared and said nothing.

"I would have thought they would be so excited to see all the places they had been, Paris, Buenos Aires," my sister related. "But they had nothing to say. 'Oh, alright.' That was all they said. They were not interested at all."

Travel was all we had. Travel was all we were. My father would always ask for a map to pore over, to track the changes, to plot the houses. I was not trained in values except adapting to them and we lived by change of address. We were all about new maps and new applications, vying for visas and documenting cargo. And now they had nothing to say. Not a wow between them.

Will I be interested in the topography of my life at 75? I wonder now, so close to ditching the scrapbooks and finding no company to zoom along the past with. What will I remember, and more importantly, what will I love being reminded of enough to clap my hands and pour a martini?

I should never end a blog on a question, so that means I have to art an answer.

Well, the Grand Canyon for sure. Hands, heads, lives down, the Grand Canyon.

New Flash of Color

The color of the blog has changed because the navy blue was making it more dismal than it needed to be.

I keep forgetting good opening lines and I forgot a really good closing line to cap a story with. That's me.

If I am not careful, this blog will turn into an extended blurt.

It Rains

It rains and drizzles. It is a miserable day. A cloud squatted over the town to slobber like some Lovecraft creature. Oh no, my blog is deteriorating into a blog.

Mister Moon

Mister Moon avoids this apartment. In the old one, you could moonbathe in the light of the full moon all over the bedsheets through the window. It was like lying in silver. You don't get that here. All you get is room, room, room.

And of course that wallpaper.

When you gotta go....

The diff between me and a True Writer (and I never use the word True ever or so lightly) is that when a writer has to write, they write. They have a pen, a pencil, a cell phone and they jot, note and then RETURN to their thoughts, notes, jots and GROW them BIG and STRONG!

Like Chachi, bless his heart. He dwells and ponders and enscribes his glimmerings. When he has to write, he writes it DOWN and OUT. That is KEY.

Me, I am all meta, I THINK about noting them down and growing them and then I let them slip out of my fingers to slither right back down the tendrils of my synapses where they resume latency.

Snap of there, I scream inwardly and here in this blog.

Hence I have devised a plan to lure forth and trap those notions that idle and spark and fizzle and that I do not note down and track to their conclusion like True Writers Do who when they have to Write, they Write.

A crafty plan involving a balcony and a Flowering Plant that would dwarf my world so much so that I would have to write my way around it.

What in the world am I talking about? If I knew I would finish this idea, but I won't so as to tempt me to finish/conclude it later, as a brave gesture toward True Writing.

Sparkly Bits!

Sparkly bits! I want sparkly bits! I want sparkly bits in my cereal and in my coffee and in my dreams and in my sentences! I want sparkly bits in all of my prose! I want the glitz the litz the glitx and the shimmer of all the sparkly bits you can see but you cannot touch. Shimmer immer! Sparkly bits from the getgo everymorning to get me going!

This blog is not sparkly. It is unremittingly somber. As somber as if I were currently living in Canada.

Wait! I am!

This has got to change!