Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants ~Omar Bradley

Pa-Pa drove Omar Bradley's car in France during WWII. Isn't that awesome!


I watched Silkwood last night for the first time. I mean, I knew it was going to be rough, but didn’t know just how rough. Meryl Streep + 1974 + Plutonium refinement...I certainly knew it wasn’t going to end well. But I had nightmares about it all last night. I woke up about every hour and a half in a cold sweat. In one of the nightmares, I hit two deer, a doe and a little fawn. I got out of my car and went to go survey the damage. The baby was dead and being carried off my a coyote, but the mother was writhing around, blood streaming out of her mouth, calling out with these low, mournful wails, twitching and shuddering in pain. And I stood there feeling absolutely helpless. I knew I had to kill her, but I didn’t know just how. My shoes were filled with lead and when I took them off, I just started stumbling around. I frantically scrounged around in my car for a gun, even though I knew that I didn’t have one. And then I found this kitchen knife under the seat, but my hands were useless and I kept cutting myself deep while trying to get a grip on it. I also tried to get my cell phone from the center console, but I soaked it in blood. I finally decided that I would just have to strangle her if my flayed hands would work, but when I went back outside, she was dead.

Last winter, at Bard, I was driving home to Tivoli from campus and I saw flashing lights at the intersection of Annandale Rd and 9G. I pulled up slowly thinking it was a license check (which, actually, they don’t do in NY), but then I saw this deer illuminated by his head lights. Everything went in slow motion. The police officer grabbed the deer by its hind legs as it flailed and shook and dragged it off the road into the grass. Then he pulled out his handgun and I saw the spark and the quiet pop. I’ve heard the head-rattling boom of rifles before, but that almost gentle pop in such a violent act made me lightheaded. I waited at the end of the road until he pulled off, leaving the deer there. I asked J about it because he’d once been a hunter, but didn’t find much comfort. I knew it had to happen, that it was the right thing. But the violence had been so shocking.

In Silkwood, Karen hits a deer on her way back from a shift at the plant after her second time being decontaminated. She watches the deer flailing around, blood everywhere. It’s foreshadowing her own messy end, and she sees in the deer the sheer panic that she feels. It was a powerful scene.

My other nightmare, the one I remember most vividly, was part decontamination, part job interview. It started out in a dressing room at TJMax. I was there trying on these dresses for my interview and was somehow convinced that this sheet with balloons all over it was good business attire. And soon after that, I was at my interview, except when I walked in, they told me to remove all my clothing and take a shower with this special soap, but the whole room was a shower. So I took off my sheet and stood against the wall and they turned the showers on. I washed with this soap that felt like a big wad of wet, crumbling paper pulp. When I was done, I kept trying to catch someone’s eye to tell them I was done, but no one paid me any attention. I stood there until the water went cold, icy cold, until I was reduced to tears. When they finally turned off the water, I had behaved so badly that I knew that I wasn’t going to get the job, and for some reason, that really bothered me. They told me to follow them into the exam room for a gynecological exam. It totally froze up and said that I wouldn’t do it and went to go find my sheet so I could leave, but I couldn’t find it anywhere. I decided to leave anyway, and held up my hands to the radiation detectors and the siren’s started going off and I knew that I was about to die of cancer. And then I forced myself to wake up. It was around 5:15, so I got up and read some of one of Shosha’s old political theory books until I felt I could doze off again.

I’m so conflicted about nuclear energy, because it is not the environmentally-friendly solution to all our energy-crisis problems that it was promised to be in the late 60s and 70s and yet it doesn’t seem quite as ravaging and detrimental as coal mining or oil drilling. But we are still not talking sustainability . And while we know full well the environmental effects of the depletion of fossil fuels and the health effects of coal mining, the process of harnessing nuclear energy is really an inexact science at this point in its development.

Valerie Kuletz’s book The Tainted Desert changed my life. I told Andrew that he would have to pry it out of my cold dead hands. I eventually returned it to him before I graduated. I remember him taking me into his office and handing it to me, and saying, “Maura, you have to read this.” And I did. I rarely turn down such enthusiastic recommendations. In addition to really going into the nasty little secrets and details of uranium mining, production, testing, and waste disposal, she brought the concept of environmental racism/classism into light in the way that none of my other readings ever have. She talks about what it means to be a sacrificed people on a sacrificed landscape. The reason we think of nuclear energy as so clean and efficient is that we don’t live in Alamagordo, NM or on the Yucca Mountain Ute Reservation where you look outside to see the billowing smoke stacks of the Alamagordo Nuclear Laboratory or the trucks loaded with poorly-sealed canisters of plutonium-laced nuclear waste taken into the caves of Yucca Mountain. We always hear about Three Mile Island as the worst nuclear disaster in U.S. History, but that’s because the people most greatly affected by the spill were predominantly white and middle class. The largest actual spill was Rio Puerto in New Mexico (I’m thinking it was in the mid-80s), the river running right through the Navajo Rez. I can’t remember all the details, but I remember descriptions of chocolate-colored water lifting the lids off of manholes in a nearby town. Those affected were not informed of the spill (as if they had to be) until 2 days after.

I think mining may be the most environmentally detrimental and dangerous to human health. I’ve seen tailing damns, which are more like murky ponds of yellow-cake sludge evaporating and seeping waste into the air and groundwater. Not to mention the astronomically high rates of lung, liver, and bone marrow cancer among the Navajo communities that are predominantly employed by NM-based mining operations in Grant’s Uranium Belt.

In one of the recent Democratic debates, one of the candidates (maybe the Alaskan guy) said that we needed to model our nuclear energy program after France’s. While I’m not convinced in the least by this, I’d kinda like to do some research on their program and see if it might change my mind. Although, I have a sneaky suspicion that France (like the U.S. in recent years) is importing their uranium from less developed nations. We are getting more and more of our refined uranium ore from places like India, South Africa, and Brazil.

I was thinking we should take the White Sands Missile Range (which is roughly the size of Massachusetts) and fill it with windmills and pave the ground with solar panels. I bet you could light up the state of NY.

The Whole Why World

The letter that affected me the most, however, had been written by a child named Elizabeth. "It is not fair that other kids have a garden and new things. But we don't have that," said Elizabeth. "I wish that this school was the most beautiful school in the whole why world."

I’m reading Kozol again, which is, by its nature, a slow dance with despair. Shame of the Nation is about the continuous resegregation of our public schools, not only in urban settings where the problem is most visible urgent, but increasingly more so in smaller suburbs and even rural areas especially in the North. Since my 4 year stint in the north, I had suspected as much. My experience on the streets of NYC seemed to verify that suspicion.

“During the 1990s, the proportion of black students in majority white schools has decreased . . . to a level lower than in any year since 1968. . . . Almost three fourths of black and Latino students attend schools that are predominantly minority,” and more than two million, including more than a quarter of black students in the Northeast and Midwest, “attend schools which we call apartheid schools” in which 99 to 100 percent of students are nonwhite. The four most segregated states for black students, according to the Civil Rights Project, are New York, Michigan, Illinois, and California. In California and New York, only one black student in seven goes to a predominantly white school.”

And I looked up the rest of that report and the next in line behind those top three were not South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi, or Alabama. They were Connecticut, New Jersey, Louisiana, and Maryland. Only one of our dirty South states made the list. Now, I’m not one to make excuses for the South, especially it’s embarrassing history, but I will say that I am less guilt-stricken in my white skin being from South Carolina than I would be if I were from...lets say...Great Neck, NY. I’m not sure why that is exactly, but I think the resegregation of northern cities and suburbs has a hell of a lot to do with it. When I think about my high school experience, while not being delusional, I can pretty safely say that GS was more culturally and economically diverse that any other “alternative” or private high school around. I don’t have the numbers or anything, but, venturing a guess, I’d say it was about 70-75% white. SC’s population in 2006 was around 73% (used my trusty Isle / Of = Palms/ 100 method) white. Of course, things inevitably changed after I left when the school implemented a $3000 dollar meal plan, because the economic disparity between white and black or Latino, while not being as grossly pronounced as it is in NYC, is substantial to say the least. And, GS has never been able to tap into the local Latino population as it so desperately needs to in order to truly reflect the now 4.3 % of SC’s documented Latinos.

Meanwhile, I have a white friend from Oakland where the white population is only 30%, who went to a high school where, out of a 300 person senior class, there were only two black kids, 4 latino kids, and 6 asians. The black population of Oakland is 35% and the latino population is 21% and the Asian population is 14%. I was just floored by this...especially when she commented on how backwards the South is. And I have never seen as much blatant residential segregation as I did when I was in Manhattan. Once you get up to 110th street, you just stop seeing white people altogether until you get up to Ft. Tryon and the Cloisters with the exception of a few gentrified, trendy streets around 125th. And the same things happens in Brooklyn, when you walk from the Slope down to Sunset Park. Hell, I worked next to what used to be MLK High School (an almost all minority school despite its UWS location) which Bloomberg closed in 2005 due to low performance. Now the white kids are back, but the name has changed. The building is now divided into three or four competitive magnet schools where white families that can’t afford Cathedral or Ethical Culture send their kids.

I’ve come to the conclusion that contemporary racism is triggered and enhanced by money, not by some ignorant moral/ideological misconception. While I don’t doubt that the philosophical racism our nation’s historical psyche does manifest itself into today’s population, I think the real instigator is wealth. Which is why, I gather, the South has an advantage over the North. Face it, most white “upper middle class” South Carolinians are paupers in comparison with their “upper middle class” neighbors in places like Connecticut or New York. At Liberty High School, I knew of about 3 people that were considered “rich” in my eyes. And most of my peers would have probably considered me rich as a teacher’s kid, even though your typical Park Slope “Business Administration” Dad would spew his coffee all over the living room if you told him what my mother made last year. About half the kids I was close to, growing up in Liberty, were free-lunch kids. I remember staying over at my friend Sara’s house in the 5th grade, a crumbling single-wide trailer with tires holding a tarp over the roof to keep it from leaking where she lived with her mom, dad, and three siblings. It was sort of around that time period that I began to understand that my family’s financial strife paled in comparison to the poverty I grew up around, white and black.

Something Kozol talks about in Shame of the Nation is the rubrics of value that “underachieving” schools have put into place all over the country. He describes a system of rating individual student performance in a school. Level 4 is at the top, where a student is considered proficient and up to his or her grade level in math and reading. Level 1 is where a student is placed when he or she is essentially non-functioning in their current level. While I don’t have a problem with using these levels to keep track of where a student is academically, I was just devastated when reading how these children have started to refer to themselves by level. Kozol described a little girl named Pineapple, who pointed to other children on the playground and told him what level so and so was. “Shavaun is a Level 3” not Shavaun is AT Level 3.” She is. When he asked Pineapple was her level was, she looked down at her feet and mumbled, “Oh, I’m a Level 2.” It reminds me of middle school, before the age of scanned id cards that you put your lunch money on, when lunch tickets were color-coded based on if you had full price, reduced, or free lunch. Blue for full. Gold for reduced. Red for Free.

It’s kinda scary how these places are being run. Reading about them, I was eerily reminded of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish or Bentham’s Panopticon. Foucault talks about the 4 characteristics of a system that can maintain institutional discipline: cellular, organic, combinatory, and the other one that I can’t remember. Cellular being a way to evenly and effectively distribute bodies, organic making sure that activities are natural to the bodies, combinatory allowing for the movement and cooperation of the bodies as a single entity, and the last one being the one I STILL don’t remember. Well these school systems, implemented for improving student performance, have completely neglected the organic. Emotion and discussion has been outlawed and been replaced by “active listening.” Creativity and analysis have been replaced by “Authentic Writing.” What the fuck is Authentic Writing? And why on God’s green earth are we using this kind of terminology around 7 and 8 year olds?

In the face of the failure of these schools due to their isolated, segregated, under-funded status, have we just given up on education? We can’t teach these kids and no one really cares so we’ll just pay lip service to public education by babysitting them for 10 years until they can drop out or move on to another panopticon...prison. Because that’s what some of these places are: prison-shaped waiting rooms, where all these kids learn is to distrust each other and themselves.

I never knew just what you wanted

St. Francis And The Sow
Galway Kinnell

The bud
stands for all things,
even those things that don't flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as St. Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of
the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking
and blowing beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.

There are precious few pictures of me from my middle school years. Those were the years that I tried so hard to be invisible. Given the choice to walk around in a cardboard box without having to communicate with anyone or anything, I would probably have taken it. But I found this one. It was taken at a wedding, I think, the summer before 7th grade. I love that kid...her shy, reluctant smile, her gentleness, her sensitivity. I wish I could tell her that. I wish she would have believed it.


I was somehow coerced into being a judge for a middle school voice competition tonight. It was so painful. The singing was pretty dismal, of course, but that wasn't why it was so excruciating. Middle schoolers just make me cringe, the girls in particular. It just hurts me to watch them trying so hard, to see what they do to themselves to stake their claim in the madhouse of adolescence. I remember the way I tried so hard and the things I did.

I stuck out at Liberty Middle like a sore thumb. If it wasn't for the generally effective social regulator built into my personality, I would have been swallowed up. I knew how to fit in just enough so that people didn't seem to mind that I was seriously strange. I made straight As without even trying and all my teachers loved me to an embarrassing degree. Well, I take that back. I had an English teacher in 6th grade who just couldn't stand me. She tried so hard to give me a B. While my peers were passing love notes and playing with their Gigapets (remember those?), I would read novels under my desk while the teacher tried to maintain order. I only really got into trouble when I was just overcome with boredom and decided to see what the other kids were amusing themselves with.

I played basketball which helped, so there were always about 15 other girls who, if for nothing else, appreciated me for my height and awkward but accurate jump shot. I also played tennis for the high school from the time I was in 6th grade and played number 1 seed, singles and doubles (which isn't saying much at all...most Liberty-ites could care less about tennis, much less encourage their kids to). So I had an "in" with the high school crowd, which I think made me more "in" with the middle school crowd. And I had musical and artistic talent that was recognized and somewhat appreciated by my fellow inmates. All in all, I should have had a relatively easy go of it, if there can be such a thing in middle school.

Looking back, Liberty Middle School should have been more aptly named Liberty Self-Hatred Preparatory School. I know it is where I honed my own distinguished self-loathing skills. I like to think I've moved on and replaced such ideas, despite having such superior training, but I'm not sure any of us ever fully recovery from our middle school trauma. But it's nice to know that not only were we never really alone in our misery, but that misery at 13 is mandatory. The problem is, when you are 13, you can't fully decipher the misery from the pretense. When you are a miserable 13yo, you think everyone else is having a fuckin' blast! In reality, everyone else is just as miserable and are hoping to God (as you are) that no one can tell.

This poem always makes me think of the process of post-middle school redemption. If we are so lucky, the people who love us try to reteach us our loveliness, reassure us of our worth. Unfortunately, some don't get that secondary education--way too many. And those of us, the lucky ones, who do receive it are forever hesitant to believe it, even if we really want to. Under the praise and appreciation of others, we still must learn to bless ourselves, love the great broken heart, know ourselves beloved. If we can do that, even a little, maybe we can call ourselves redeemed.

Thou shalt know her by her fruits

It never ceases to amaze me how fast plants grow. I planted my seeds 10 days ago and already these impossibly green sprouts have made their way up through about six inches of dirt. I remember growing bean sprouts in a Dixie cup as a kid and it taking months...years...ages. I guess when you are a kid you don’t have as many distractions. You’ve got enough time and energy on your hands to check that Dixie cup five times a day for two weeks until it feels like you’ve been waiting a whole lifetime.

Planting my own garden this year is my way of staking my own claim, marking out a somewhat reluctant commitment to this complicated physical and emotional space. I’m anticipating the all-too-familiar anxiety of the prolonged job hunt, compounded by the presence of a pressing timeline of bills. So my garden is a way of grounding me...and it is very satisfying work, which is funny because as a teenager I found it tedious and uninteresting. It’s a fairly uncomplicated task, which is a relief in many ways:

You dig and you sweat and you are sore for a few days, turning red clay the consistency of dried mortar to the consistency of week old grits ( a vast improvement) . And you draw out some plans and make a few decisions about what you can plant with the space that you have available. Then you take yourself down to the Pickens Feed and Seed, buy 800 pounds of cow shit, limestone, bone and blood meal (which you carefully avoid reading the label of), and all your seeds. You have trouble choosing seeds when there are fifty different varieties of EVERYTHING to choose from, all sitting up on the shelf behind the counter in big coffee tins saying “Pick Me!” You humor the old man who is humoring you as you ask silly questions about how tall your trellises need to be for Mountain Lake Poles in comparison with your traditional runners. Then you spend a day mixing in the manure and other lovelies and are sore as hell again (but not as sore). And you spend another day in a perpetual squat, mashing the seeds into your mounds one by one. You build your trellises if you need them and then you wait until the bugs start nibbling on your plants at which point you concoct some organic (and therefore pretty much ineffective) spray and face the fact that you can eat the bugs’ leftovers. And low and behold come late June, you’ve got more vegetables than you can give away. Voila!

Well, it’s not all waiting, per se. I weeded today, though I wasn’t wearing my contacts at the time and I think I accidentally plucked a few zucchini sprouts. I further wasted time by squishing a few roly-poly bugs...now that is additive-free farming right there. And I haven’t built my trellises yet, but I drew up the design and just have to go to the lumber yard and pick up some seven-foot poles.

Anyway, I feel good about the whole thing, my little fuck you to Monsanto. I’m reading The Essential Agrarian Reader, which talks about corporate farming both at home and abroad as the most successful (and therefore destructive) colonial endeavor of the 20th century. And the only lofty ideal of this Empire is money. I guess you could argue that money is the heart and soul of all colonial endeavors, but at least in the past it has been poorly disguised with aims of socio-cultural influence or (in our current quagmire) democracy. I’ve decided I could become a Wendell Berry fan. I’ve never been able to get through his fiction, but I did enjoy The Country of Marriage and I really like his essays. Meanwhile, Barbara Kingsolver has a new book out, but I’m not sure I want to read it. She’s so damn self-righteous these days. Reading her essays on sustainability in the face of microbe extinction is one thing, but reading what appears to be a Kingsolver version of Little House on the Prairie... I mean, why does she have to be so admirable, making the rest of us feel like shit. I never thought I’d have anything bad to say about Babs, but it gets on my nerves.

Anyway....

This is the garden from afar.



a little closer....



and there we have it, professionally labeled.



I find that old beer bottles make good markers.



These are the accidental squash. What I think happened is that a dried out squash gourd from last summer somehow got buried during the plowing process. They are kind of in the way of my nice neat rows, but I think I am going to leave them. If they are from last year, there is a good chance that they might be a funky hybrid this year. For example, if you have Zucchini, butternut squash, pumpkins, and summer squash in close proximity, they'll most likely cross-pollinate. It's fine for that year's yield, but if you save seeds for the next year, you'll get all sorts of funky-looking squashes. Kinda like a mystery-flavored Dum-Dum.



This is a zucchini bud up close, nice and fuzzy.



I thought this was pretty...a blurry pea-sprout.



A lone bean sprout. I actually tried to eat one of these, thinking it would taste like bean sprouts, and it just tasted like grass. I just love beans. It's like the bean pokes his little head out into the air and then pukes itself into existence. I love it!



Here's Daddy on his new tractor. The old one died a while back, but our next door neighbor (or one of the various people who live in his house) knows how to fix lawn mowers and so we gave it to him and low and behold, he was outside riding it yesterday. Riding it hard, too. It kept backfiring and the dogs got really nervous. We have the weirdest neighbors ever. There's Tony, who has started painting porcelain baby dolls and selling them on Ebay. And then there's the sex offender who was charged in 1987 for "lewd acts upon a minor," whatever that means. He does sheet rock for a living and my lovely father is going to hire him to do the sheet rock upstairs. Sheesh!



Here are our peppers and chilies which won't fit anywhere else.



The house from the back. I'm upset that the wisteria on the kennel doesn't bloom anymore. I always thought they were magical.



Here are the fruit trees and berry bushes. The blueberries are always fine, but the plum and apple trees mostly produce fruit-shaped clumps of Japanese beetles. It's a shame really. I love plums.



My Crocs getting a good wash down after a hard day's work.

Dogs and Such

So what else am I supposed to do while I wait and stare at my phone.

This is Ialli on the giant dog bed, which used to be the futon in the living room. But the frame broke so now it is 4 futon mattresses collected over the last ten years piled on top of eachother. I think it was originally intended to be for us, although there was some discussion about strategically placing a hookah in the middle of the floor and burn a few sticks of patchouli to complete the picture. This was back at Christmas. I think a real replacement is doubtful. But all the dogs are like "Hell, yeah! Look what the people got us!" It's got Ialli's seal of approval.



Who says a dog can't pick her own nose?



Daisy Grace of Influenza, the newest member of our pack. Shosha picked her up at the end of our driveway (we later found a bag of Scooby Snacks). And of course she has Parvo and Dr. McKee sends us home with these awful printouts of blood-soaked kennel cages. So we fixed her and now she's ours. She'll be a year old soon. We are all anticipating the next drop off come May or June. For the past three summers, we've had a little mongrel dropped at the end of the drive. And we kept two out of three.



Ialli in mid-flight.



The slimy, green appendage...



Ialli and Daisy. Daisy has taken the appendage. Ialli looks at me indignantly.



Flea-ona! I know everyone else thinks she's a smelly old fart, but I love Fiona. She can't help the way she smells. But she just had a bath yesterday and Berrigan has been doing a deep cleaning of her inner ear, which just makes me throw up a little in my mouth every time I see him doing it.



And here is the gentleman himself. Berrigan J. Berrigan. The pack-leader (despite his humble beginnings as a cardboard box drop off), licker of wounds, earwax, and eye-goop.



Happy girl.



Nostalgia.

Gravity of Sunlight

Today I took some pictures of my artwork from this last year and a half. My computer (yes, the less-than-a-year-old-piece-of-shit-came-out-of-the-box-with-a-hardware-problem
-that-Apple-refuses-to-fix Mac) has died and has been sent on to the Apple Gods who will supposedly fix it or give me a new one, so I've been inspired to work towards backing up precious things. Or maybe I'm just bored and looking for projects. The sun was nice and bright outside so the colors came out really well. I'm quite fond of a few of them. They tell a sort of story to me looking back. I know they aren't great, but I think I do okay for never having had any kind of instruction. And some of it might make some nice wall art one of these days. When I am grown up, I think I'll paint the interior of my house a pale orange and hang some of this stuff up. I'm a big fan of the orange and blue contrast. Really it is the only warm/cool combination that I can manage to keep from turning a washed-out brown. When I have money again, I'm going to buy some more oil paints. I've squeezed out everything I can out of the old ones.

This one is called "The Morning After." Because of the teetering emotional state I was in at the time, I had the intense urge to stomp on it as it was drying...so...I did. Though I wasn't so bold as to stomp in the middle.



"The Insides" This is what it feels like in my stomach sometimes.



"Humphrey" I painted this with five tubes of paint on the back of a piece of plywood I found in the dumpster out of sheer boredom.



"Why You Stay"




"Still Life-Joy" This is the one still life that I like. I have about fifteen others that are really stupid looking. Though I did do a still life of my inhaler that was fairly amusing.



"Mirror"



"Sunday Morning--1992" This is what the front room of my house would look like if there were nothing in it. My mother would be thrilled. I was thinking beautiful and lonely and slightly anxious.



"What Might Have Been" This is my rainbow warrior. I love her. She has some sort of serenity in her uncertainty. She doesn't have the answers and she doesn't know if she's doing the right thing, but she's okay with that for now.




A copy of some Bonard painting




This one is called "Everybody Knows" and it has a story behind it. Toward the end of my last semester at Bard, there was this duo nude-modeling session that I went to. I had just stretched this huge canvass and was itching to use it. I was a little nervous because I'd never done a nude session before. So I got there early and set up my easel and waited. And these two women came in, stripped, and waited for the instructor to tell them what to do. They couldn't have been more different. The first was kind of timid, pale, contemplative, probably in her late twenties. The second was scary. She had tattoos covering half her body's surface area, everything that could be pierced (and I mean everything) was, and she had these icy-blue eyes and this sparkley opaque eyeshadow that sent chills up my spine. I think I recognized her from a childhood nightmare. There are two chairs set up, facing different directions and of course the second model picks the one that is directly facing me. And she just swaggered up to that chair and made herself comfortable...really comfortable. If she spread her legs any wider, she would have needed stirrups. I swear to God I could see her cervix. Everybody else was already set up and I just picked up my 50 pound easel and knocked my way over to the other side of the room. I didn't think I had delicate sensibilities, but I did not want to use my big old canvass to do an illustrated pelvic exam. Though, in the end, it really got me thinking about vulnerability and shame in a more visual way.



This is called "Hell, Yeah! Maura made a kick-ass stretched canvas!" This is what the above painting was on. You know, I think I may be prouder of this than any of my paintings themselves. It's like creating something out of nothing. You take some scraps of plywood, a few yards of canvas, four 1X3s, four quarter dowels, some nails, and a staple gun and there you have it.



This one is called "I'm Fine"



I tried to do this black and white reproduction of this famous painting, but now I can't remember which painting it was.



"Termination"

The History Boys

I Netflixed this yesterday and watched it last night and this afternoon (it was a sharing kind of movie). I just can't seem to shake it out of my mind, not even because it resonated with my life that strongly, but because it was so beautiful and clean and real. The acting was just phenomenal and the writing was exquisite...just candy. And I can't even quite pinpoint what it was about, you know, really about. Loving someone and not knowing what to call it. Working hard to get to some place and not knowing why. Getting to that place and then not having it be what you thought it would be. Doing something your whole life and realizing that it hasn't made you whole. Learning that those we adore are only human. Frailty. I can't seem to be able to call it something, but it was really powerful.

It was also a fairly emotionally complex movie. Because the central figure (who we love)is, quite simply put, a pervert. He is a loving, sweet, complicated, funny, beautiful man who also happens to discreetly fondle his 17 year old male students on the back of his motorbike. How are we to reconcile that? This is abhorrent, is it not? And it's not even something to be made light of. But I didn't really care. I forgave him with heart and soul. I cried for his frailty and sadness. I'm not sure how I feel about that.

There is also something I really love about movies adapted from plays, or movies that feel like they are adapted from plays for that matter. John Sayles's movies always feel a little playish. I guess this is because his words are so important. He's just not as concerned about making a visually pleasing film (though he does so well) as with his subject matter and the way his characters talk to each other. I guess what a lot of people appreciate about film is that it takes the viewer into an authentic, believable alternative reality. Films where the writing demands you to be aware of its presence separate from the visual, might seem to lack subtlety or continuity, but I don't know if I'd agree at all. I guess I like to feel and recognize the creator's hand. I like it.

I wish I could see some good theater. I know I should have taken advantage of NY more when I was there, but I was too poor, and even when I wasn't too poor, I was too tired.

I find myself missing certain things about the city now that I am free of it. I miss spending hours in the NYPL (secret, you can get Bryant Park's wireless from the new Map Division room), going to see every movie at Lincoln Plaza Cinema, prancing down to the Strand every time I felt lonely and running down the balance on J's gift card, sitting in on lectures at the Graduate Center on Wednesday nights...

I would

It's planting time again, my baby,
but all I want to grow is you,
buried so deep in my garden,
a bulb from another land's heart.

My breasts, they ache,
as I rake through the ground,
and water the dirt with my fear.
What happens to almond-eyed babes in the rain?
What happens when I cannot find you?

CHORUS
But if I could, I would
take you away, I would
in a blanket of I would.
And I would hold you
Until the sky knew the land
and I would love you into sleep

This was supposed to be your lullaby,
bathed in sunlight and dew,
but my shovel hits stones, cold and untended,
the carnage of lost things.

And I still feel your cheek in the crook of my neck
and the look of your slumbering lips,
milk-soaked and dreaming
as we walked through the city.

CHORUS

So I search for the ghost of a winter come early,
so I can ask you to leave, to leave, to leave.

The Bubble Bursts

I wonder if I should try and write down all the shit that has happened this year. Not here, of course, but somewhere. The prospect has been terrifying. Telling your story to someone else is very different (and less complicated really) than telling it to yourself. I feel that if I started, I might just fall to pieces and never manage to pick them back up. Or that I would just stare at my computer and nothing would come out at all. And sometimes I just feel stupid for making such a big deal about everything when the world has so many more pressing issue. I'm not sure I'm even allowed to be unhappy when things like Darfur are happening.

And really I don't even know where to start. There is no clear or coherent beginning, or at least I don't know where it is. Should I start at the end, this place where I am now...no man's land? It all seems like a dream to me now from this place. Or a nightmare. But the middle of the story is what gets me, what catches in my throat like a swallowed wail. Stevie. Stevie. Stevie. From the very beginning to the very end of our time together. There I have a clear beginning and a relatively concrete end (though it is complicated). Eight months of not really wanting to be anywhere else in the world.

I loved her too much, too well, too fiercely. My days were spent lapping up her face, drinking in her smell, memorizing her body. There wasn't a place on her little pudgy face that I hadn't kissed. I wanted her to be mine. I forgot that she wasn't.

I remember in the beginning, correcting people when they assumed that she was mine. And I don't think it was just because I was white that they assumed that. (Small interlude here to say that I read this book a few years ago called Distant Companions: Servants and Employers in Zambia 1900 to 1985 and I can safely say that when you go out into a children's park in Manhattan...2007...not so different). It was because I behaved like a mother. Other nannies hold the babies away from themselves, give the baby its bottle in the stroller before pushing it around the park. They also usually have a posse of other nanny friends and/or are constantly chatting on their cell phones. I used to get really pissed off about it, but it was just a job for them. They put in their hours for crazy, rich "lifestyle mothers" and then go home to their own lives. It wasn't just a job for me. I had made it into more. And maybe that's why I never had any nanny friends. Because I just couldn't take my eyes or mind away from Stevie...ever. I held her constantly. I bought a sling, not just because I found it more convenient than the 1000 dollar Bugaboo, but because I loved having her so close and she loved exploring her world in 360 with the comfort of my face 10 inches away. I held her close to me and studied her perfect little face when I gave her her bottle, my body curled around hers. It was such an intimate experience and I allowed myself to be present in that experience more than I ever had before with anyone. And it really bothered me that Stevie's own mother held her like the nannies do...except even more cold and distant, not really unlovingly, but uncomfortably.

And I stopped correcting people. "Your baby is just beautiful...I just loved that age." "Thanks, me too." And I knew I was in trouble when, sometime in October, a woman asked me "Is that your baby?" And I said yes, of course. Then I realized. "Oh, no, I thought you meant...no, I'm her nanny." Afterwards I felt bad. For claiming her so thoughtlessly, yes, but I also felt bad (and sad) about NOT claiming her. She was my baby. She was. But she isn't anymore. And I can hardly bear it.


I remember those last days in Aspen, when I just didn't give a shit anymore. I'd always tried to be as respectful as possible about J's wishes that I not "spoil" Stevie by "indulging her in outside comfort," (the preferable option being self-comfort) especially when it came to her napping/night schedule. I did however, rarely put her in her crib when she wasn't already asleep. But I wouldn't be able to go get her when J or D did. I would stand outside the door sniffling right along with her for however long it took for her to cry herself into exhaustion. If J and D left the house, I would go back in and get her and rock her to sleep. She always slept longer and woke up less cranky when we did that. She was so responsive to singing. We had a steady repertoire of night-night songs (mostly hymns or bluegrassy stuff because I can usually remember all the words).

Anyway, I didn't care anymore. Some little heart's warning was going off. I knew something was coming, that I needed to hold tight to my little baby if we were to be able to weather the storm. And I just couldn't put her down. We'd sleep together, curled up in the armchair in my room. Or I'd lay her down in my bed and we'd just stare at each other while my Itunes played sad sleepy songs until she'd fall asleep. And I'd find myself watching her, distracted from whatever book I was reading. She'd wake up slowly, catch my eye, and grin with her little red sleepy cheeks. And I couldn't help but pull her to me again. I'd need her in my arms.

For the first time since February, I've had time to just hurt. The last two months have been so scary for me...jobless, then starting a new job, moving to a scary new apartment, being sick, being scared. The grief caught me in waves. There are only a few times where I actually let go, mostly with Leah, almost never when I was alone. And even then, it just felt like a stiffled sneeze. I was afraid that if I let myself start to cry, I might never stop. Because I couldn't just cry over Stevie and then stop. It would all have to come out. All those abstract and secret hurts. So I just survived, and let it all literally eat at my insides, enough to put me in the hospital.

As soon as I came home, I let myself begin to feel it. And still I fought it. That big "It." I've been walking around tight-chested, like my heart weighs a ton, a constant lump in my throat. There's this picture of me and Stevie on the piano and I walk by it every day and have to bite down and swallow hard. Pictures are so hard, but I just can't put them away. I don't want to. I need them so I can know that it was real.

And I spend three-fourths of my day trying not to cry and the other fourth wiping the tears away. The slightest thing sets me off. And occasionally I just lose it altogether. I was in the house all alone the other day and I heard my sister's new song on her MySpace page, and I just howled. I missed Shosha. And the song was kinda about growing up and changing (which always makes me weepy). It's like she was singing from the other side of a struggle when you can look back and say "It was all okay." Except that I am still here, still waiting for it to get easier. And I started crying those god-awful choking sobs that you're to embarrassed to let anyone else hear because they are so ugly and raw and weak.

I keep having these dreams where I lose babies. Sometimes they are mine. Sometimes they are other people's that I've been left in charge of. Sometimes they are Stevie. Sometimes they are stillborn. Almost every night. I cry so hard in my dreams that I wake feeling like my body has been hollowed out. And then I cry some more because I don't know how to understand them. If I was 6 years old, I might run downstairs and crawl into bed with my parents...but I'm not. And what would I say? How could I ever put the words together. Then sometimes in the dreams I scream and throw fits. I destroy things and smash my little child's body into walls and I yell at everyone around me without fear of the consequences. And it feels really good. None of these things are new, just more frequent. My old therapist, Jeff, said that I do some really important "work" in my sleep. But the dreams are both a curse and a blessing. I don't exactly feel very rested and sometimes I wake up feeling so vulnerable, like everybody knows. But I look forward to them in an odd sort of way. I long for the release. Somehow, in my dreams, feeling the hurt feels good and productive. But in real life...it just hurts.

And here's something I have a hard time reconciling. I'm relatively experienced with losing someone to death. But it is a concrete thing. There is a wake and a funeral, and then there is a grave stone and an undeniable truth: This person was alive and now isn't. But what about when it isn't that simple? What if the boundaries between life and death are blurred or called something else? What if the person is lost to you, but not dead. I'm not sure any of us know how to grieve, but I don't know how to grieve for Stevie who is very much not dead but so far away. And how to you grieve for someone when you made a choice to run away?

A Lesson In Cleanliness

“They should make this stuff for little kids,” I said, squeezing the royal purple shampoo into my hands. It was called the One ‘N’ Only Shiny Silver Ultra Shampoo, specially formulated for bringing the silver shimmer back into your gray. It was old folks’ shampoo, specially formulated for little blue-haired ladies. Of course, my grandmother no longer had blue hair, in fact, she had scarcely enough to run a comb through, and what was left was a stringy white that had to be foam-rolled and plastered upright with canned glue hairspray in order to look like hair at all.
“I bet kids wouldn’t put up such a fight to take a bath if they got to use purple shampoo,” I said, trying to sound pleasant despite the knot in my throat. My grandmother didn’t say anything, and I immediately regretted my attempt at conversation, for certainly she must have thought that I was comparing her to a child. Or was she thinking anything at all, her naked, withering body curled over the detachable shower head in her hands? I couldn’t tell. My eyes wandered to the half-finished pack of Depends at the base of the toilet as I massaged the purple gel into her scalp. She shivered underneath me and I turned on the box heater at our feet.
Her Alzheimer’s had advanced quickly in the past year, but not quickly enough. She was losing her mind and body functions, but the serious injury was that she was not so far gone as not to realize what was happening. She woke up every morning terrified of death, scraped up enough dignity to fret over my grandfather and comment on how he was going to work himself to death (actually, a fairly rational observation), and then sat in front of the television all day apologizing to her sitters, myself in this case, for being such a bore. Sometimes, like that day, she would not make it to her handicapped toilet in time, and I would find her in tears, face in hands, the soiled Depends fallen down to her ankles. I would act like it was no big deal, like it happened to all of us. I would wisk away her diaper, convince her that now would be a perfect time to take a shower, and try to ignore her despair that would take the heart of me if I let it.
The knowledge of my grandmother that I accumulated those few times when I gave her a shower during my Christmas break, amounted to my twenty years worth of observation. Her normal sitter, Michelle, was on a three-week vacation, and so I came in her stead. That day was the first, and I fought back nausea while undressing and bathing this woman who had been a tower of strength in my childhood. A door was closing, and she was moving through it. I rinsed the purple bubbles out of her hair, watching the suds slide down the curve of her back.
“That water feels good,” she said.
“Is it warm enough?” She lifted her head and dabbed at her face with a washcloth as I moved the stream of water up and down her back and around her shoulders, careful to avoid getting it in her eyes.
“Yes, it’s just fine.” In truth, it was barely luke-warm. After lifting her onto her bathtub bench earlier, I had checked the water with my hands like I would for a baby’s bath, and then I had her test it with her feet. It had been too hot.
I lathered up her washcloth with Dial and let her wash, but while pretending to be busy with the hand towels by the sink, I let myself watch her. Her small, decaying body gave away any secrets that she might have been hiding. In her sagging breasts, with the nipples sticking out like wine corks like only ones that have nursed six babies will do, the story of her womanhood told itself, of sleepless nights and frantic days, a fearful loving. Her belly was round and pregnant-looking while her limbs had hardly enough meat on them to stretch over her bones, a clear sign of the malnourishment that she tried so hard to deny. She had somehow sustained life on salted cashews and lemon poppy seed muffins. My mother had given me hints before I started about how to get her eat, to make her grilled cheese and beef broth to remind her of her childhood. With her hair wet and clinging to her scull, I noticed the shape of her head for the first time and it looked too small for her broad shoulders. Her neck was warped downward so she could not have held her head high even if she had wanted to. She didn’t want to.
Her legs were dry and flaking after I dried her off, so I helped her into her bathrobe and guided her walker into the bedroom where I convinced her to let me put lotion on her legs and feet. Squatting down, I was keenly aware of the tight pull in my thighs and calves, and I felt at once grateful and ashamed. As I held her small foot in my hands, caressing the insoles and kneading gently at the bones, I felt what Mary Magdelene must have felt when washing Jesus’ feet. This was as much I could give to her now. I closed my eyes and tried to move energy through my fingertips into her diminishing muscles, wanting to give her my strength, my youth. I became aware of her hand running through my hair, and I looked up, and though I searched her eyes, I couldn’t get inside.
“You are going to break your back down there,” she said, almost cold. She turned her head away and stared out the window at the birdfeeder, “Are you going to hurt your back?”
“No, ma’am, my back is just fine,” I said, running my hands up and down her limp calves.
“I don’t want you to hurt your back.” I stood up slowly, and wiped my hands off on my jeans. I wanted to sit down beside her and put my head in her lap like I had as a little girl. I wanted to say something wise and careful, tending to the delicate state of her spirit. I wanted to erase the memory of her nakedness from my mind. But I could do none of these things. She was too far away.

Signed, Sealed, Delivered

I;m glad to be back home...really I am. I remember last fall when I was so homesick: "I'll dream about my father when he was just a boy and know that he was fragile just like me. And I'll dream about the springtime in the land that I love, and I'll be there for a while and then I'll go." This is what I was talking about. I'm pretty allergic to the South in the springtime, but I love it all the same.
After Kayla and I arrived safe and sound from our feverish road trip from NYC, we both slept for a day and then headed out to Carl Sandburg. It's such a place of healing for me. I don't think it's possible to be unhappy there. I have such a rich and beautiful story there. When I walked down that little path from the barns to the watering hole, I just felt like everything was going to be okay...that I'd be okay.
I used to get Carl Sandburg and Charles Lindberg confused all the time. I used to look at the family portrait in the visitor's center and wonder which one of those kids was the baby that got stolen.

This is Ialli in the backseat of the car as we drove up. She was so excited. She's not wearing her seatbelt (Shosha) because she somehow managed to wriggle out of it, though neither Kayla nor I can figure out how. Little Houdini!



Kayla suggested that we take turns romantically strolling down the lane. Unfortunately the lighting sucked.



My heart always lifts when I see the house peaking through that clearing.



I have strange dreams about the underside of this staircase. In my dreams, the long split-log benches are still there (though I don't think they've been there since I was a kid) and I am sitting on them...no, I'm waiting on them. I'm usually a child with skinned up knees and dirty finger nails. I'm always a little nervous, like I've just done something wrong and that I might need to sprint down the hill to escape the wrath of whoever walks through that screen door.



I think it is my dream in life to have an old bathtub full of rain. Maybe it's the trashy side of my coming out. I mean, I don't necessarily want to fill up old toilets with pansies and peperomia on my front porch, but a bathtub full of rain, I could do.




This one is me having a go at shoveling sawdust. But right after we took this picture, this horse-fly decides to try on my hair for size and I scream like a girl. I'm really not squeamish about bugs or bees, but slugs and horse-flies bring me down. I can handle a bee sting: scrape out the stinger and slap on some tobacco. But when I get bit by a horse-fly, I get this big red, puffy welt the size of my hand.



This is me pretending to scream at my imaginary kids from the back door, except the camera only caught the moment right before the scream. I have a back-door-scream baby naming policy. The name has to sound good screamed out a back door in a menacing manner. I learned the trick from our old neighbors: "Matthew David!!!!!!!!!!! Get your ass in here right this second!" Generally the more redneck it sounds, the better. By the way, my redneck name is Gloryetta Mary-Alice. I think Mark Boozer give it to me ;c)



This is Kayla pretending to get milked in the milking shed. Hath ye no dignity....



Ialli, of course, would not leave until we had gone swimming.



M'Kaylalala Reenay and Gloryetta Mary-Alice