Virginia

Ralph Northam didn't get my vote in the primaries, because I found his past appreciation for Dominion Virginia Power's finances problematic, but I voted for him for Governor. In January of 2017, when he appeared and marched with us at the Women's March, I was impressed, and more on board with him than before. He is a former Republican, and the voices deriding him as a present Republican, given that party's increasing lockstep behind the racist-in-chief, are perhaps hard to hear, but not 100% off base.

He has to go. Why he refuses to is bewildering in a painful way.

I don't want to bog down in a long post about all this, because frankly, the personal impact of Virginia politics right now is a fresh bruise. It's painful to live here these days.

When, in 2008, Virginia went presidentially blue for the first time, I didn't quite believe it. When we went Obama for the second time, I began to feel used to it. To tentatively own that I finally didn't live in a backward, reactionary state. And then we did it again, in 2016. There was still Dave Brat to contend with (I signed the petition to get Abigail Spanberger on the ballot at that march mentioned above), but I finally felt like Virginia was breaking away from the all too recent past of White Flight and reactionary thinking I had grown up surrounded by.

In 1982, when I entered high school, it was the Reagan years. Helped by a punk rocker in the house, who was having none of it, and the fact that I was the child of a scientist and the taunts on the schoolyard, "YOUR DADDY CAN'T BELIEVE IN GOD, HE'S A SCIENTIST!" I came to a different sort of politics than have been common here for most of my life. (My daddy, as he told me all his life to take away the sting those kids gave me, was a scientist precisely because he had such awe in the workings of a universe he believed to have been brought to us BY that God those kids underestimated so cruelly. Not an Intelligent Design guy by any means, dad's enthrallment in workings of all sorts was a major part of his faith in anything; and he did have religious faith.)

So I was extremely aware, in 1982 at the age of 14, and have been ever since, of the fact that my preppie high school was the product of White Flight, and the entitlement I saw all around me was not earned. I didn't know the phrase white privilege, but it was instantly recognizable once it appeared.

(W)e lay claim to a wisdom that people just a few years ago lacked, and accuse the recent past of deep ignorance.

I've been loath to actually look at old yearbooks this past week or so. Sure, the only thing that HAS brought me to look at them in about thirty years was the death of my best friend of 38 years, but even then my glances were pretty cursory. But now, the *apathy* of memory, thanks to a life of much greater richness after my K-12 years, has become an *agony*. From having no interest in looking back at the snobs I went to school with, I now have real fear of looking back at the well to do white kids I went to school with. Heck, the school itself.

I went to school with kids who absolutely would have donned blackface, as quickly as the Key Club (so enthusiastically) donned cheerleader outfits at every opportunity. Crappiest drag show ever. There were guys who drank, plenty who probably went on to become frat guys who sexually assaulted drunk girls, entitled asses who think they're nice guys and entitled asses who care not one bit about being good, decent, or anything else tolerable to the human race at large. They weren't my crowd (obviously), they weren't the whole of the student body, but they were crowd enough and then some.

Think I hated my school because it was so preppy? I hated my school because it embarrassed me. It embarrassed me then, and no less so now. They went with naming the place for a Massive Resistance spearhead instead of Edgar Allen Poe; this exposes the taste level - and "judgment" - of decision-makers in our community at that time.

So there doesn't even need to be blackface in my yearbook. The very name of the school said aplenty, and without a doubt some of us knew and despised what that name said. He himself was deplorable then, and I deplored him most especially on the occasion my best friend (a model student often trotted out to meet important people) was obliged to shake his hand, and I was introduced too, looking every bit as unimpressed as I was unimpressive to principal and politician alike, I'm sure.


The link above ...

The link above. I offer it without much comment, and not even necessarily endorsement, though it would be soothing for someone like me right now. There *is* a spectrum of ugliness, but for me as a privileged, relatively well-to-do white woman Of a Certain Age ... growing up where I did ... it is beyond my scope to say "this is right."

Oh, how I wish it could be knowably right, though. That would ease my liberal guilt.



Based on what I clipped for the quote highlighted, the real resonance for me is this: the sentiment accords powerfully with my general rantings about The Dirty, Stupid Past. By this, I'd love to absolve myself of all my own privileged complicity. There are stories I have debated recounting in public for years now - and, when I think about how I have aired out the most sensitive things on this blog, it's extremely plain that some of what I have held back owes to the same privilege Northam and Herring have had. So I should open that up, unpack that.

But that first link ... I'll lean OUT for a moment, lean back, not go all in. Not make anything about myself which absolutely is not. Not come up with any judgments.


I'm as fraught as the history of my state, these days. And ashamed as I was during the Reagan years, going to Beautiful Suburban White Flight High. So very ashamed, and frustrated.



Edited to add ...
Then I remembered our production of West Side Story, which I do think was in 1984. Teen after teen in brownface. Ugh.


THE CLICK BEYOND - good coverage of multiple aspects of this morass, for your analysis.

Reunion

My vacation this year was a trip to go see Beloved Ex. Back in our day, BEx was in a band, and a few months back he mentioned to me they were planning a 30th reunion show, with the original lineup. Intriguing! I thought it'd be funny if I showed up, and ... ended up, somehow, deciding to actually show up.

I haven't seen that town or those guys in 24 years and a month. BEx and I split one week before our first anniversary, and though that wasn't quite the end of our marriage, it was the end of my time in Ohio. I never even saw my in-laws again, and only one of my friends from that time.

Driving into that city for the first time in all those years was cognitive dissonance extraordinaire. The old classic rock station was playing the same music they played back then (not "classic" at the time, I suppose ...). I knew how to get around, but the look of the place was alien to me. It was something like the reverse of a phantom limb - I could touch, I could see, but the sense was gone somehow. The texture, the earth from which the town rose and was built, was impossibly strange.

Being of a Certain Age, too, hormones got the best of me and I cried coming into town. Pearl Jam's "Black" didn't help, though the reasons for that are a bit personal to get into.

Before hitting my hotel, I spun briefly around my college campus - BEx was my "townie" back then - and was struck by how easily I found the places I lived and knew, and how strange they looked to me. And how TINY that campus is.

BEx and I had a date that night, and of course I wanted to look good. I got a bit of rest, cleaned up from the road, curled the oddly-colored hair, put on a dress. When he called to say he was on the way, I was ready. I saw him out the hotel window, and watched his car arrive, watched him get out and look about a bit, head inside. He looked good, but I knew that. How I look these days was a concern, but there's nothing you can do about that once it's time to answer the door.

I got a hug to "squeeze all the mean juice out of me" (he learned that one from my dad - aww), and we went to one of those places that was out of our price range in the 80s, has probably been there since the early 60s, and seems to have the same wait staff and decor it always had. The pizza was good, the service ... personal. Heh. Then we went for a walk on campus, through a night impossibly blessed with a lovely breeze and beautiful sky. He drove me around town until fatigue took over, and we called it an evening. I hadn't recognized much, beyond the walking-distance environs of my college years. Our stomping grounds after marriage, we didn't even get to.

Day two, something changed, and I operated more as if I were in a place I once called home. Whatever was different, my brain adjusted to, and it wasn't so strange.

I picked him up this time, and we spent a while with his mom. Let it be said here, if my Ex is "Beloved", so too were his folks. Though it made no sense on paper, his dad and I always liked each other, and his mom is a lovely lady it was always nice to have women's time with. They were generous, my F-I-L was really funny, and she was as sweet as BEx. Catching up on a drizzly morning was nice, and she seems to be well.

We wandered about for the day, among other things finding a GREAT bookstore, and came back in the evening to meet both his folks for chicken, which we brought along. Dinner was convivial, his dad more laid back than years back, and it felt like family. Maybe in some way it was family (hey, apparently I'm godmother to one of their grandkids; and we never did hate each other, so it works out). Even if not, it was just a nice, easygoing meal with people I enjoy.

The Really Big Show was Saturday, and the guys in the band had let BEx invite me to come see them and get the chance to actually hang out a little outside of the show. The drummer gave me the biggest, warmest greeting I got from anyone through the whole visit. Sweaty from loading out and some rehearsal, he grabbed me in a bear hug and rubbed his sweaty face on my face. Heh. He seemed genuinely happy to see me, and I've always loved the guy, so that was pretty great. Hey, and - sweaty drummers - what're you going to do, hate 'em? Nope.

All the guys were good to see, generous and still the great guys I remember with a lot of fondness. Sound check was impressive, and I sat through a couple songs before wandering off to let them do their jobs.

Campus is just up the hill from the venue, so taking some time to go up there, I was serenaded by the band in the distance - walking the student union, heading up the hill to the chapel.

The chapel on this campus is absolutely filled with mid-century design and really amazing art, and as the rain stepped up, I stayed in there for a good while, taking lots of pictures. The stained glass windows, the floor, the meditation chapel, the whole sanctuary. Even the lights. I even tried to go up the steeple tower, but it was locked at the top. No harm/no foul, I was very glad the chapel was open.

Back down to my car in the rain, the whole campus was empty. Not silent, of course, though the reverb from down the hill was low. Here, the familiarity was at its height, and when I saw the statue of the undergrad I had forgotten existed, I was genuinely happy to see it again.

In the brick walk were a few memorial items ... my creative writing professor and his wife ... a girl whose unique surname and year of attendance might have made her the daughter of the one single "boyfriend" I had from the school itself. Huh. He was a nice guy too. Physics major, actually.

The show was perfect, and two of my best friends from those years, the other "girl with the band" and a singer from our crowd I always remembered with a smile, were there. "Come to my bosom!" the first said, which was hilarious and so absolutely her a thing to say.

The whole visit kind of felt like coming to a welcoming bosom, really.

I've shed my prejudices about that town - my snobbery towards it was bitter for long, stupid years - and never did resent the people in it. Seeing the place again, and those old friends, was a balm.



One of the things several people said to me, unbidden, was how much I needed to get away. Some knew I'd lost my stepfather, but that they could see how much that and everything since has been "on me" was a bit of a surprise. I don't know that BEx troubled to say anything other than to family - I would be surprised - so apparently, my sense of relief to be out on my own was pretty palpable.

And it was a blessing and a blast.

He and I wandered around again on Sunday, one more great bookstore (this one with a cat; I do love cat-owned bookstores) and an indulgent dessert at the local dairy. And that was it.



I'm grateful to have been able to see my friends, even my old school (of which I am less forgiving than this city I used to hate, though the grounds are not responsible for that), and my old home. I was there for most of almost nine years, which astonishes me to count out on my stubby fingers.

Geez, all those YEARS I knew that place. It was my home, even when I wanted to deny that.

And it welcomed me back and said, "Come to my bosom!"

Good trip. Good vacation.


And now ... back to work.

Half Life

June 26, 1993.

... and this would be Beloved Ex.
Posted with permission.

If I can't believe it's been just over three months since my stepfather died, or fifteen years since I saw my dad's face ... believing that (a) twenty-five years have passed since this day, and (b) twenty-five years is half my life is WELL beyond my wee and paltry brain's capacity.

Huh.

Almost my birthday, and all I want is death

This post is a barely-edited version of an email I sent this morning. It's funny how trains of thought actually seem to create their own tracks and destinations.



Forwarded message to a best friend TEO...


"When bitching about a sweater gets REALLY dup and profiend.

Sometimes, being a writer is weird."


-----Original Message-----
Original email to Mr. X
Sent: Tue, Feb 6, 2018 8:06 am
Subject: Yep nope

The quest for the right wardrobe never seems to end. I bought a sweater maybe three months ago - it was definitely "recent" - but am deciding today, it has got to go. Which is especially irritating, as it's a GAP and I usually have good luck with GAP. (One red/black damask print v-neck has lasted me like six years now, it's woooooonnnderful.) But this simple blue rib knit: I'm not into that whole Marie Kondo thing, but this sweater is NOT GIVING ME JOY.

Which, ugh. This sweater made me use THAT phrase. This sweater sucks.

The thing is - it's really comfortable, it's the length I like, and the color is great on me. It is also pill--tastick (yes, with a K - like your name, it needs the consonantal emphasis), the "inseam" tag sticks out (and no, I don't cut out care tags because lord knows I'll louse up the laundry at some point), and the front hangs really weird at the bottom. Gah.

So, though I've worn this probably not even half a dozen times: I need to get rid of this thing.

Life is too short to wear unflattering (and prematurely RATTY) sweaters.

It's just a shame I happen to be wearing the thing NOW. On my fake-Friday, and family day. And with good jewelry, too! Blah.


Tonight is steak night at mom and Stepdad's. The filets from Christmas, which we didn't eat because everyone came down with the flu.

This'll be the way to spend some family celebration time with Step, but leave Wednesday free for me and mom. He's been in bed a couple days, and says he might not eat with us (he'll almost certainly eat with us, but how he'll be feeling today overall is up in the air). Sigh. Poor S. He just can't seem to die.

Bro and I were talking about him this weekend. He said it was something of a shame we came to love him after he lost his mind - I think there's a feeling akin to guilt, for Bro - but I feel like it's a blessing. We LOVE him. Neither of us felt like that was a possibility twelve years ago, and okay, it took dementia to loosen S up and give him this sense of humor we treasure. But he's loosened up. He is funny. We love him. That is enough of a blessing, and dementia is enough a part of life, I feel like it's worth just being grateful for the love and the blessing.

This is the power of a sense of humor, really. Laughter is so elementally *human*, I think, that the bonds it creates can't be trivialized. I mean: look at the way I talk about your face, broken up with laughter. It's in no way a small thing, the way that is beautiful to me.

It's in no way a small gift: S's immense grace in his sense of humor.

They always say there's no comedy without pain. I'd have to agree; that's fair. S's wit has come at such a price. Life itself, arguably. But his funny-ness has made all our lives just that much more wonderful. And just saying that squeezes my heart, and all but breaks it.

And as much as I am grateful for the incandescence of S's impishness and his smile, G-d I wish it could be taken from us all. I wish he could die. Because as long as we have his brilliance with us, HE has to endure such hideous, unbreakable pain. It is so unjust - and I know life is not fair. But nobody should ever suffer this. I would not even wish this on a Trump.

And even with all that, to feel *guilty* about loving his humor would be to waste it, and to negate the blessing it is. I just have to pray it is some amount of blessing for S. It looks like it is. It looks like, even if only a moment at a time, it takes him out of the pain. Even as selfish as it is: he takes *us* out of it. He invites us out of the reality he can't escape himself.

I've never seen grace quite like that. S is something so special.

It was a day ...

... and it is an evening.

One of those days it's hard to keep yourself together. One of those days you feel like this, or this - or wish you did, because actually you are so much more fragile. One of those days you break, because of music. One of those days you are angry - and impotent. Cruelly, inhumanly, inhumanely - impotent. To help, to love, to DO.

It was a productive day. The sort of day you clear out the "pending work" folder and fill the recycling bin. You lob a few balls into other peoples courts, and check off a few things, completed, too. And even still, the sort of day you still have time to realize ... terrible, terrible things. Things you have always known, even articulated before, in different ways. But which still have the power to devastate.

Sometimes, it is a good thing to know that, when I say I am possessed of a  wee and paltry brain, really it is a joke.

Sometimes, it is a burden. To understand too well. And still be powerless. And still be the little girl, who is desperate and too tender and devastatingly weak.

Sometimes, it is a good thing, having a daily routine, having discipline - it keeps us together, most of the time.

Sometimes, it is a burden - the routine, the discipline. Keeping it together. And being devastatingly weak.

It is time to feel this. Instead of maintaining, to succumb.

It is evening.

It is night. Oh, Lord.

Eighteen

My eldest niece's eighteenth birthday is upon us.

On the afternoon she was born, I was on my way into a job interview. I knew my sister-in-law had gone into labor, and called my mom from a pay phone to find out I was an aunt for the first time. I recall the day (accurately or not) as windy and bright, one of those blustery but not very cold winter days that can make your chest swell - and, if you have happy family news, can also make you turn up the radio in the car and drive with a smile on your face.

Instead of getting into my car, I got into the building, and ended up taking a job that was, on its face, the worst I ever had ... but which changed my life in a lot of very, very, very good ways. I'm grateful for that job. And I'm grateful for the photo I still keep on my desk at work now, of my infant niece, on her tum and lifting her face up, mouth full of little wet tongue, looking incredibly cute and incredibly funny.

That pic got me through that job. She'll never know how important she was, before she could even talk; her mere existence had the power to create joy in the hideous slog that was That Damned Job.

I'd been working at one of those big insurance agencies that sells itself as a financial planning outfit, assistant to some of the larger producers (agents) there, and custodian of the newsletter, orphan clients, and (bizarrely enough, for a luddite) the second-string IT go-to. It was a good job, and I worked with one of the best managers I've ever seen; she spotted what people were good at and what they liked to do, and did whatever she could to balance their duties upon these things.

At some point along that way, I impressed one of our clients, a guy we'll call Rick, and one day he sent me a note or gave me a call and dangled the old "I have a super high paying job of the sort you are in, know anyone who might be interested?"

I was pretty naive back then, but not entirely obtuse, and I thought, "Huh, that sounds like he might be asking me." I talked to my dad, he said, "Yep, you're being thrown a feeler there." I interviewed with the guy at a restaurant around the corner from my job, and we went from there.

When I walked in the door on my first day, I learned that Rick's current assistant had not been fired, and I was expected to lie about whom I worked for (another president, a new guy, whom indeed I was to support in addition to Rick). Um.

I also learned I was the fourth assistant in this position this CALENDAR year. I started that job in May, having begun these proceedings in, as has been noted, January.

Um.

When September came, and I was fired for not working enough overtime on the morning the CEO sent all the admins flowers because we'd stayed very, very late the night before, I have to say I all but danced out of the building as the daily stock prices posted on the front door went plummeting, and the company made headlines in the Wall Street Journal for all the very worst of reasons. The CEO, I was given to understand, sighed and rolled his eyes when he found out I had been terminated.

Nice attention to exposure to lawsuits, dude. But I didn't sue, I used their computers to look for a new job, as they had given me permission to do so, and got one I ended up loving, with a man I respect and still like to this day. Rick, whatever else he did that was risible and idiotic, had put me on a financial footing that commanded a much better fee in what was an employee's market.

I have a lot to be grateful for, from the worst job I ever had.

But the thing I remember most about it is: my niece. Whose nativity coincided with this sudden uplift in my career, and whose face got me through the trials it represented.

The improvement in my circumstances is tied oddly, but tightly, to her existence. When she was born, so was my own ambition, my professional drive and talent: my career, as it came to exist in real earnest.

I miss my nieces so much. They astonish me constantly, and seeing the older one this past summer was a revelation in: "Wow, she is NOT a little girl anymore." They are brilliant in such unexpected and distinct ways, and yet there is the constant temptation to see in them the threads of our family. Complete individuals, and scintillating ones, still they are shot through with this skein or that of recognizeable traits of my mom's and my dad's side of *our* side of their family.

Being an auntie and not a parent, I get to indulge in silly old lady surprise at how they've grown, how smart they are, how beautiful, how talented, all the "oh my how you've"'s privileges silly auntie-dom confers. Meeting elder niece's boyfriend this past summer, he was marvelously forbearing of my making a point of liking him.

Seeing HER, and the shape of the woman she is becoming, she was at least tolerant of those silly auntie privileges. At seventeen, you can't ask for enthusiasm from a lot of people, but she put up with me almost as if I were actually tolerable. And we laughed. There was a lot of laughter, with all of us, this past summer. And good food. Her dad's a mean cook, no matter how bratty a brother he was in a former lifetime.

I have a fire laid in my hearth, set up during the blizzard, and I have a mind to celebrate my niece's birthday by burning it. We sat around my brother's fire pit this summer, and there is both a beauty and a rite to a good fire that seems right as a small remembrance of my niece's celebration.

Of course, it's supposed to be like sixty-plus this weekend ...

... but maybe it'll cool down enough to accommodate a good fire.

Fractured Light

Speeding up a long afternoon freeway, winter sun glorious and low, rays strobed; daytime shattered by the shadows of ten thousand trees.

She is driving. Set mouth. Day-weary face of freckles and fatigue. Tear-glossed eyes - dry by the grace of G-d(less self-preserving control) - behind large, dark glasses. Music, loud. Very loud.

Picture it ("Sicily, 1933 ..." - no, wait) - music so pulsing the image is made a silent film; even words spoken to herself muted by the utterness of sound; even breath and heartbeat blotted out.

And so, no sound; only thinking.

Thinking of herself on a dancefloor. Imaginary self a stomping Joan Jett wannabe, a black-booted and leather-jeaned stretch of negative space around which everything in the world creates a void. Imaginary self swirling and swirling, the music all a turning, swaying to the sound of the demonic beat ...

She might have become many things.

Somewhere beneath the promise of the girl with a gold locket, she is (still and too) the result of the threat of that out-thrust lip, that early violence and anger, that thing she didn't have to be and half aspired to be, and - almost forgotten - sometimes regrets that she isn't. The bummed cigs and boys' jackets, the always-magenta lipstick, the resentment of her own privilege - ahh, the boys who weren't; the friends who weren't. The girl who hated admitting she went to the preppie school, the rich kids' domains. Could not bear to be one of *them* ...

... and yet never was successfully anything else, either ...

Sometimes ... sorrow is, in us, the most brutish, juvenile rebellion. Sometimes, it is a look into possibilities - who we might have been, when the skin of who we are is so tight that surely it must split and we break free, new and unmade and ready to take shape again.

Sometimes, you have to let the sun strobe to prove it has not died yet, and that you are not in the dark.


And sometimes, you have to listen to deathless music at top volume. And dance; even if only in your head.

Metal, Man

Most of my life I've never 'been' anything - I don't make much of an effort on those things that earn cred-points to 'make you' this or that or the other label-thing.

I'm a huge fan of Trek, but still consider myself somewhat outside Trekdom because I'm not dedicated and have never been to a Con and so on. I'm something of a nerd, but have never played video games (do we even call them that anymore, or is the word "games" itself now the entire description of what once we had to refer to as electronic games and so on?) or achieved academically or committed sufficiently to this, that, or the other geek-cred.

As with my association with subcultures throughout my life, I get in there from time to time, but I'm never a member.

I'm not even an 80s metal head.

When I was in high school, I thought I was a hippie but wasn't ... and thought I liked New Wave but wasn't all the way there ... and had friends into hair bands, but was shy of its brashness ... and, again: I wasn't anything.

The blurb under my bio? "I contain multitudes" ... ? In a way, it's both a brag and a lament. My personality is multifarious, nonconforming - but then, it's also a bit jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none.

It's fun to brag that my first two concerts were The Clash's Combat Rock tour and Bowie (I often don't point out that was Serious Moonlight - but still - I saw all the cool concerts). But I wasn't fully in with either of those crowds either.

When I met Beloved Ex late in 1987, and began a seven-ish year stint With the Band, I actually, finally, gained a bit of cred in the one place I've ever had it. And even that - by proxy, of course.

I spent those years gigging right along with BEx and the band. I even ran lights for them a time or two (not my first time; I did major in theater - and that comment that I was part of the Rhythm Nation refers to one of the best shows I ever did run lights for - a dance concert, set to the album). I helped set up and break down, I sold what swag they had from time to time, I absolutely acted a bit as an ambassador. It never hurt those guys to have a fox dancing and "WOO!"ing up front, getting others to actually form a crowd around the stage.

When BEx worked with a radio station on an in-house band called The Wham Bam Thank You Band - I was (by the radio guys we palled around with) called The Ma'am. My chagrin at the time was entirely faked.

So that post label, the one marked 80s Bimbastic Glory? It's the one label-claim I actually feel I can make. Yeah, it's a joke (I wasn't a bimbo, I just played one for the band). BEx and I were both actually pretty conservative, well-bred, nice kids. He was a bashful and mannerly corn-fed boy who opened doors for me and treated me right.

On stage, of course, he was a whole 'nuther story.

And so, I got my cred.



I have a soft spot for metal, and all those things we're supposed to find risible - or, worse, sanctify as part of My Youth - because it's been That Many Years since they were happening (both in the temporal and the hip senses of the term). Not all metal was born in the 80s and not all its musicians had the bad hair. (I had bad hair myself, but not because it was big.)

Metallica, Megadeth, Iron Maiden, AC/DC - I love some of the greats, and some we are supposed to consider not-so-great. Hell, years ago I saw Sebastian Bach - specifically to gawk at whoever would go see him past his sell-by date, and possibly to throw some Silly String around the venue - and hell if he didn't smack my attitude down by sounding good. Still an asshat, of course. But the guy can sing, and that's his job. My hat was off. G'wan, Sebastian Bach.

More recently, the same friend and her husband and I went to go see The Cult. And Ian Astbury was great, they were tight, and it was a wonderful show, we had a great time. I could have lived without seeing that one guy from my past, but the music? My jam. That was an excellent show.

I still love this stuff. I don't OWN enough of it, of course, but then I don't own enough Janet Jackson nor *any* Loretta Lynn, nor much else of a lot of the music I love either.

Judas Priest. Jeebers, and by Priest, I mean only where Rob Halford is involved. Because - Halford! It's a rock shout unto itself, his name. Woo!

Dio. Aww. Ronnie James Dio. Tell me any fan who doesn't go all AWW when they remember him. He was the best manner of spectacle - and he seems also to have been a great guy, a nice one. Aww, Ronnie James Dio. Rest in Peace - or in mayhem, if that is more fun for a rock god, man.

And Zeppelin.

I have a hard time with Zeppelin, because - I mean, Jimmy Page once basically attemped to own a little girl for a year or two. Pretty much did. And how HIDEOUSLY horrifying. How sick, and way beyond rock-and-roll demented. It's all the worse, given he's all but internationally deified, and grey hair has conferred upon him forgiveness for all sins, if not English sainthood ...

But damn me if I can or will cut Led Zep's music out of my life. "Thank You" alone has some deep roots in my memories, and I can't excise those, nor do I care to.

And of course "Whole Lotta Love" - the performance of which is a major factor in my saying BEx on stage was a whole 'nuther guy above. I saw people who'd known him as my dorky boyfriend witness him on stage and just about die of shock.

On stage, Beloved Ex was one hell of a rock star.

He was a GREAT front man, a talented singer, guitarist, bass player, AND writer.

His spelling was the pits, but that was dealt with in the divorce.



I feel the need to get out in my car with the fantastic JVC sound system (once it gets past factory standard, it's a "sound system" not a stereo) and listen to something really loud.

I'd do it in the house. But Gossamer tends to jump.

Aww. Gossamer. Even more loveable than Ronnie James Dio. And that is saying something.

Retouched

The past several weeks have brought many reconnections (of sorts) from the past. Songs cropping up, memories with them. Today, a cousin I haven't seen in years pinged me on LinkedIn; this may be reverberations from my brother making new connections a few days ago. A few days ago, a practically-family old friend cropped up, definitely in the wake of the brotherly LinkIng. But there was also that photo of my ex husband I found online; he and I have not been *out* of touch for many years now, but I haven't actually seen him face-to-face in almost exactly thirteen years, so it was nice to see he's aging beautifully (if a little cheesily - hah - the photo was for his work, so it's a bit the corporate Olan Mills style portrait; and the angle is weird, he's looking upward at a camera too highly placed). And then, the sighting of my first love.

I've spent a lot of years losing touch with a lot of people, and the internet makes it possible to erase barriers with the click of an anonymous button. I've been fortunate, in that those I need not be in touch with have not seemed to need to be in touch with me either.

Ahh, but. "But" - the stuff of which blog posts are made.


A lot of times, the idea of first love has a bit of a nostalgic swoon about it. Remembering mine has been bringing  a time in my life into a focus I've never really put on it with age. All that time spent forgetting, and an easily distracted wee and paltry little brain.

First love. When I use the term, it is not the very first boy I ever kissed, nor even the very first one I felt turbulently emotional about. I mean the boy I encountered for the first time on the terms I have met a man ever since - a certain confidence and assertiveness, a certain romantic awe, and a certain set of expectations.

Expectations, back then, were nascent things; but First was the first relationship I ever had that HAD them. We thought we'd get married, we had at least one of our kids named (First seems to have been the only guy I ever seriously imagined children with - or, perhaps, it was the very embryonic nature of this first adult romance that overlooked my lack of maternal drive).

We also went through some really adult stuff. Hard stuff. First was in rehab when we decided to be officially Going Together, and our first official date was my senior prom.

Gave my mom the vapors, all this, and reasonably so. But let it be said that the adult stuff we were dealing with, if I consider it with both pragmatism and the sentiment of my mother's perspectives, was NOT the stuff that would have worried her most. First's rehab TOOK, and well enough that I became, for the last year or two I spent time with a certain beloved crowd of my youth, rather the Go To counselor for an awful lot of people concerned with their own issues with one substance or another. I'd always been, almost conspicuously, very much a good girl in a crowd not thick with them - or, at least, not thick with girls who wanted it known they were good.

It's hard for me to believe how short the time really was, from just being two people who shared a group of hanging-out friends and acquaintances, to being seriously in love ... to being over. Back then, the space of a year seemed great. Twenty-nine years later? Almost endearingly fleeting.

Yet, dusting off the memories and giving them a real look, after so long, I find they are not silly things to smile at as if from a superior vantage. (I met the man I *did* marry only a little more than a year after all of this, and that relationship isn't a product for patronizing.)

It's sort of gratifying to exercise memory muscles long left to relax, if not really to atrophy. I recall the music vividly; the smell of smoke in a city built on tobacco, and a crowd almost adamantly addicted to it. I recall the blue plastic booths in that before-malls-even-had-food-courts burger place we'd meet, and the fake white marble-like stuff of the benches we'd hang out on; built in the 70s and stripped of cushions in the 80s; hard, angular, not much good for comfort, and meant perhaps to discourage precisely the sort of mall-rattery I loved so much and remember now seldom but with a certain mellow sweetness. I recall exactly where he was standing, and where I was standing, when I walked up to my then-flirty-friend and all but dared him to be anything more than that, without ever speaking an actual word.

I recall how giddily terrifying it was to put my interest in a guy out on the table like that. And I remember how gratifying, when the interest was returned.

I do smile indulgently now: thinking about the fact that at least four of the, well, four major relationships of my adult life have all begun the same way.



People who know me much at all, or even just have read enough on this blog, know that I am not forgiving of the person I was roughly through my twenties. I have no patience with that person's need for attention, for drama. Her vanity. Her pettiness and meanness.

But the girl of eighteen? She was something more than just a good girl hanging with the mall gang. She hadn't "discovered" she was attractive, and so was free of the need to focus everyone's undying attention upon that. She was half kid in jeans and sneaks ... and half housewife, in her mind, possessed of the guy she wanted to marry, surrounded by friends and acquaintances who came to her for advice as if she had any sort of wisdom. She was good to those she cared for. She was ... maybe something kind of pure. Not necessarily nice - in those teenage years perhaps even more than in her regrettable twenties, she took all too much pride in NOT being "nice" nor "sweet" (and yet somehow drawing people to her who trusted and turned to her).

She'd never been deeply sad nor hurt, either. She'd never *lost* - not profoundly, unnaturally ... bitterly.

She was an interesting welter of potential - some of it deathlessly squandered. Yet from the ashes of her (burned in those regrettable twenties) rose the woman I am now. Someone I am not ashamed to have become.



It has been remarkable to me how easily conjured the memories of that time really are. Fleeting images of flirting with First when we were friends, before we'd ever touched the idea that could be anything more. Evenings at the sub shop we took over as the mall drew our attention less; hanging out in the parking lot there, or inside - that smell of a sub shop, peppered salami and vinegar and bread. Riding in a car.

All these memories are literally warm ones: most of our actual relationship took place during one tiny summer, so long ago it seems fragile and impossible. T-shirts and sleeveless sweaters. Jeans and sneaks. "Labyrinth" and "Legend" and his parents' Vista Cruiser wagon, or my folks' Plymouth Fury - the Tank, the Zucchini. Our friends could pack in nine to the huge bench seats, and I bought gas two dollars at a time for a car that would barely get thirty miles on its allowance. We'd sit on the hood of it, or lie back, the engine still warm, the steel so strong, while the stars wheeled above and life seemed endless, and the air perhaps even cooled just a little.

He never did stop smoking, at least back then. With everything else he gave up, he still had that. Odd how many of our friends smoked - really, all of them, in this group, in this part of my life. So YOUNG. I think of it now and it shocks me; not least, that the adults in our lives didn't even seem to notice (my mom, though, would have skinned me alive).

I can recall the way he held his cigarette, the posture of his neck, his arm, his shoulders.

I spent months studying his face; knew it so well that seeing him thirty years later ... yes. I see him in there. That impossibly young boy, the floppy shiny hair we all had before the 80s got heavily hairsprayed. The gloss and eyes of youth, like no other age, no matter what we do to preserve it. Real youth. He seemed beautiful to me. The nervousness I see now, an old lady, only the more touching and appealing for recognizing it. For having lost it.

I can remember the coda, after our relationship was over. I remember his mother calling me. And going to him. A meeting so terribly hard I would not share it here like mere emotionally-engaging entertainment.

we went through some hard stuff, some adult stuff, First and I. I never hated him. Never lost my respect for him.

That, at least, is a legacy echoed since. I've never hated any man I ever loved. I have, perhaps, that boy and that girl a debt of thanks. It's what made me the person who can talk about "Beloved Ex" and mean it without being trite.

It's galvanized in me the heart that has been so purely devoted to Mr. X.


Dear G-d. What that girl would have thought, if she could ever have even imagined what her heart would become.



For all that has passed now; I still am sort of the girl with a cocoon of privilege. The mantle of invoilate safety about me - no man, no love, no fear has ever taken from me the core security my parents built. I worry, because I know others have not been so blessed. Beloved Ex. Maybe First. Mr. X himself, certainly. Even my mom has not, in a way, been as lucky as I; I was forged in experience she never had.



It is time, perhaps, to listen to something old. To let Penelope on the couch, and just quietly pet her. To remember that car, the wind through its windows. And "teenagering" ... the way it was. And the way, for me at least, it was meant to be.

I was so very lucky. I'm grateful for every second.

Happy Easter to All ...

... and to all a good night.  The perfect link for the day - about how faith may be dashed, but not actually dented.  This is the post I should have asked him to guest with here!

Anniversary

Housecleaning has always been a rite, a worship, for me.  A thanksgiving, stewardship of what I have been given, what I always hope to earn, to deserve.

Here is a post about the people who were the vehicle by which I was given everything I have, everything I am.  About an artifact I hope my nieces will love someday, too.



Today is the fiftieth anniversary of my parents' marriage, and though dad's not on this plane to share it with us, mom and I had a brief celebration of sorts, doing a crossword together on the phone this morning.  We used to do them as a family, spanning the kitchen and family room, calling out clues and answers out loud; crosswords were a shared thing for us.  Yesterday was the 100th anniversary of the first "word cross" puzzle, too.

I seem to like anniversary markers, though through most of my life I'd probably have said that sort of thing didn't really have meaning in itself.  But as I've grown a little older, time - and its observance (and marking) - means more to me, or perhaps I just recognize what it's always meant to me.  Mr. X being so far away probably throws this tendency into higher relief, but that's okay.

Today is also the eleventh anniversary of our first date.  I can still recall so vividly getting dressed for that date, our walking together to the restaurant - the very silly place we went - and his engaging telling of The Greatest Bike Wreck Ever Told, a story about X as a kid having what could have been a nasty wipeout and rising from it triumphantly unscathed.  To this day, that memory just makes me grin at what an adorable kid he still can be from time to time.  Not  a lot of people other than his kids get to see that side of X.  It's a nice side.

Mama gave me the wedding album when she remarried, and its images feel so close, for me - even though they all predate me by years.  Padded ivory vinyl and little brass fleur-de-lys.  "Wedding memories" in gold leaf.  Stiff, brass-cornered pages, black and white eight-by-tens, parchment leaves in between every image, every page.  Five little brass feet on the back cover of the book.  A somewhat tattered box.

The photo of my parents' hands on their guestbook, mama's pretty little fingers slim and unbent by arthritis, the ring slender and unadorned - no sapphires flanking the bright diamond , commemorating two children yet unborn and un-imagined.  The picture of my mom and grandma, the pastel hat grandma wore, which I have now, hanging in my dining room.  The picture of mom with my aunts, her sisters, putting on her garter, her appealingly turned ankle, her beautiful little sculpted heel - the wedding crystal and the Fostoria parfaits behind her on my grandparents' mantel, in front of the mirror mama bought for them, which now lives in my own bedroom.  What that mirror has seen.  I remember it, hanging always over grandma's living room, angled downward so we could always see so much, hanging so high.

One of the most striking images in the album is the one of granddaddy walking her into the church.  They're all black and white, and the wedding was in the evening in December.  A puff of wind took up mama's veil and the composition is full of movement, excitement, joy.  Granddaddy looks stoical, but mama is so young, so fresh, so pretty.  The veil rises up toward a deepening winter twilight, framing the dimmer image of my aunt in the background.  Mama, in white, is luminous, a shock of brightness.

My older cousins, little girls, white pinafores, white socks, and black patent maryjanes.  Adorable chubby knees.  Aunts and uncles.  My young grandparents, all of them, together.  These are the only photos I have of all of them together, and I so love these pictures.  I cry a little bit, that mom gave this to me.  This time capsule, this treasure.

This observation of time.  Of a date, so important.

If my mom was beautiful, my daddy was so handsome.  He was a furry fellow, and so dapper.  His hands were warm and manly.  His hair was amusingly thick, here - and yet, as he grew older, as his crowning glory grew thinner, he never looked any different to any of us.  He was a good looking man, they were a beautiful couple.  I had no idea of that, for so long, but once I realized it I have never been able to look back at pictures of them without seeing that anew.

Lace tablecloth, lace long sleeves, gleaming satin, a little linoleum-floored church hall.  Aunt V. putting her hands over dad's eyes as he slipped the garter off of mama's pretty leg, laughter, the sweet comedy of propriety meeting promise, and a couple I know were deeply attracted to each other.  Dad found mom utterly beautiful until the day he died; she always dressed and made herself up for him - until the day he died.

The bouquet, midair, the small group of smiling women - I don't know who caught it.  The photo captures the penultimate moment, the instant of promise the superstition carries, of potential and possibility ... whoever catches it, marries next ...

Mama in her pretty traveling suit and hat, little black shoes on her tiny feet now, her and dad's heads bowed as the rice flies around them, coming down the evening steps.  Out beside the car, the last streaks of light in the clouds above their heads - an image easily as striking, as gorgeous, as mom's entrance with my grandfather.  Her open, nervous, exciting smile.  Mom's smile always so wide.  Mom's smile always a defining feature of her - mom's laugh is so much a part of her self.  Like her, I know people identify me by my laugh.  Mom's youth, mom's face in love.

And the final picture.

Daddy, in the driver's seat, arm around mama, her smile rising above an almost ridiculously large pouf of corsage, the checks of her suit the only pattern in eight by ten inches of black and white and silver.

Daddy's smile.  His eyes all on her.  His peaked eyebrows, his cute nose.

His everlasting, abiding love.  My dad ... was beautiful.



Happy anniversary, mom and dad.

Literalism versus Favoritism

Growing up in my family, it didn't do to be reductive.  Superlatives and absolutes tended to be greeted with deconstructive comments (not un-constructive, but rather debunkingly analytical), and so I learned early to avoid stating many extremes.

Well, I didn't learn not to state them.  But I did learn that if I took anything to a descriptive limit, there would always be someone standing by that boundary to prove it was far more distant than anything I could quantify, or that the very boundary itself was imaginary.

So I began at a young age to take the concept of "favorite", for instance, to its illogical conclusion, and to avoid the idea assiduously.  I can actually recall taking my idea, that green was my favorite color, and lying in the backseat of my parents' very green indeed Plymouth Fury station wagon, peering at the physical greenness of my surroundings, and imagining green as the ONLY color I could ever have, and being disappointed.

It's one of the million ways we affect one another as humans, this sort of tiny influencing commentary of a family, which becomes a very silly part of someone's being, far far beyond any real intention or even expectation.  My parents and brother might have wanted me to become a critical thinker, but to provide me a mild neurosis about favorite things could hardly have been their point.  It means (per my blog's very headline) that I contain multitudes, but it also means I make a rotten interview, because I snark on about how reductive questions are instead of answering them.

And so I am aware that people are capable of feeling that one color is best, or one food is peerless, but the idea of choosing gives me the distantest echo of Sophie's dilemma, in that I despise to pick one superlative because everything apart from "the best" still creates the richness and variety and context that makes anything truly shine.  Intellectually, I can know that loving one thing most doesn't doom all else to destruction - and yet, the only context in this world in which I can honestly say I have a favorite is in Mr. X, who is my most favorite person in the world with whom I don't share DNA.  I peek around from time to time, just to be sure, but at almost eleven years knowing him, it seems reasonable to state he really did ruin me for all the other boys.

It can be bewildering, though, to run across other people's favorite things, because there can be hard lines in this world it's trickier to negotiate if you don't draw your own.  Other people can put you on a path or hem you in with their ability to hold absolutes - in religion and politics, of course, this can get dangerous.  And, at times, it can be more comfortable to be persuasable ("where do you want to eat?"), but of course there are those who see a certain type of flexibility as waffling.

I have my convictions, but I keep them pretty close and refuse to hand them out to anyone I am not pretty intimate with.  Most of my own hard lines took me decades to draw - and, as I have grown older, I have discarded some of those things I thought were non-negotiable when I was a younger person.  Few of my deepest ... expectations (beliefs can be a different thing) ... have ever actually changed - and yet, I have seen my methods of managing their presence adapt in amazing ways over my lifetime.

This calendar year has seen some of the profoundest philosophical changes in me - without compromise, and yet without radical outward alterations.  It is at the deepest level I've let go of certain boundaries, and in the quietest solitude of my soul I have found liberty it astonishes me to have given myself and my heart.

Relinquishing certain expectations has only solidified the power of what drives and matters to me most.  Letting go of certain ideas of practical living, of faith, and even love, has only deepened these things by providing clarity.  There is great peace in the understanding this can give, and such emotional power, and all over again I find myself grateful with the blessings that seem to provide themselves to me, all undeserving.  Paths are easier to follow, fears are fewer.

I don't know a lot of people who can claim the assurance I feel, simply by letting go of certain ideas about conviction, by questioning those things which are supposed to be "given" for us as human beings.


Question something you hate, or love, or fear.  Really let yourself be wrong ... or, more terrifyingly, right.  There's almost no liberty like it.  Almost no power at all.  It is joyous.

Author, Arthur

Elizabeth Chadwick recently wrote a nice piece about her formative influences, which inspired her to historical fiction.  I came to actual authorship far, far later than she, but those works she wrote of I am familiar with set chords thrumming, and those which I don’t know, and which are out of print, have me most intrigued.

That and a recurring crop-uppance of Arthur recently have me thinking along similar lines:  how did I come to where I am as a writer?  Not as an author, but as a writer?  For me, the author is the business steward of the work I as a writer – that solitary thing, that creative animal not participating in the querying and all else – creates.  Why am I the writer I am?

The short answers have been written – how I came to write about Clovis, specifically.  But why do the things I gravitate to fascinate me?

I tend most often to remember the books my mom put down – Jean Plaidy, Victoria Holt, Norah Lofts – and think that was my entre’, along with the appearance of Mary Stuart and Myrddin Emrys just at the right moment, that summer I was fourteen and staying at my Aunt Leila’s house.  I can still remember the bookstore, the sun, the very wall before which I stood, when I found The Crystal Cave and The Hollow Hills.  Today, though, for whatever reason … the name Malory appeared somewhere or other.  It’s been a long time since I remembered that my dad had a copy of Steinbeck’s very late Arthurian work, the 1976, modern translation of Le Morte.  And now I can think of little else - oddly, that work tied up to a reading of Connecticut Yankee when I was young as well.

I have not touched Steinbeck's The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights in thirty years now, but suspect I still own it, and am burning to pick it up again.  My recollection of it is fairly clear as something very unlike other Arthurs (though, like most, Arthur himself is just the excuse to tell others' stories).  Steinbeck’s experience of violence, Steinbeck’s cynicism, Steinbeck’s humor and even extreme disillusion permeated that writing.  And it was writing, pure and clear – nothing worried over with an eye to any market, nothing coddled for the needs of any agent.  It was a raw thing, as I remember it, but that is not to say it was a draft piece.  I remember its view of women – both a pitying and pitiless view, a consideration of characters from the man who wrote Rosasharn, the man who had no "feminine side" as the kids call it nowadays, but who has nonetheless touched millions by now.  I remember being affected by that book.  It may be the first book that ever involved me quite as it did emotionally, it may not.  But I remember it – not as clear as Stewart’s Arthuriana, which I re-read and re-read, and which still is new to me when I leaf into it a little – but perhaps more deeply.  That it ended incomplete – the place it ended – always physically hurt me.

Given my leanings, you might think I’d have been more of an Arthurian nerd, but if the truth is told, even with friends and family thinking of me that way and even giving me Arthurian books, some of them beautiful artifacts in themselves, I rather limited myself after Steinbeck and Stewart.  Who was going to improve on my experiences of those two writers’ works?  Nobody.  It wasn’t a need for Arthur that interested me – it was Stewart’s Merlin, it was Steinbeck’s impossible talent.  It never really was Arthur himself, and the truth is, in the books I did read, he wasn’t even the main character.  Only a frame on which more interesting stories were hung.

I was in college before my Aunt Leila (she and her own bookshelves had a great deal to do with my fascinations; I wish I had ever told her that before she died …) gave me the Kristin Lavransdatter series by Sigrid Undset.  Lavransdatter intrigues me, as I grow older, as a study in the way we read things differently as we mature (or not).  The first time I tried to pick up The Bridal Wreath, I found the writing arid in the extreme.  The whole of the works is, after all, very hefty.  So things do not move at a clip, though there is no lack of action in Kristin’s story.  I recall finding the story offputting, as a girl of a certain moral conviction, and disliking the leading man very much indeed.  It was hard, therefore, to much like the girl so taken with him, and the first experience for me was clinically unappealing.  I thought I wasn’t smart enough to get the novels, and indeed I probably wasn’t – the story was geared to be archetypally feminine, and I at that age had hardly experienced my own feminine life.

I don’t know whether I read them in the interim, I think that I must have, but my next recollection of reading Kristin is when I was just past thirty.  I remember sitting in what we joked about being my De-Lux Apartment In the Sky.  I remember the 3-CD stereo my dad and I had bought, listening to only two on random rotation – Fiona Apple’s debut and David Bowie’s “Hours” – some of the best reading music ever written, and I’m not much for music when I’m reading, actually.  I remember giving my brother a copy of “Hours” and his saying to me, “I hope you bought this for me because you have it” – it is that good a piece of art.  I remember sitting in my grandmother’s chair, in the alcove beside my door, feet tucked up beside me, facing, but hardly looking up from the book to actually gaze, westward.  I remember the light in that apartment.  I remember that reading, those days, those weeks, those hours, as sacred time.  It may not have been peace in my life, but those books, that music, that light, that chair.  Peace in the sacred space we create when reading.

Older now, I look at Kristin and understand why some voices of posterity remember the story as somewhat melodramatic, a bit soap-operatic.  But I know, too, why this histfic has the staying power it has.

Likewise, Anya Seton’s Katherine, the story of Katherine Swinford, nee de Roet, who shaped English history for centuries.

My mom found this one at an antique store, and amazingly I had never heard of it.  She gave it to me around the time I had split from Beloved Ex, and that seems late to me for the discovery of this work.  For one, its place in the genre is perhaps as well known as Lavransdatter.  For two, the first time I read it, I was utterly ensconsed, and a later re-reading felt just as pleasant but very different.  It came off more as a romance novel than it had seemed to me at first, but still a high quality story I know I will read again.

It is this kaleidoscopic experience of perspective which drives me to return to works I have loved.  Some never pall for me – A Memory of Lions, I know, will never lose its place in my heart and mind.  Some simply shift a little.  A recent re-reading of the Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide reaffirms its appeal, but exposes to me the extent to which I am no longer the facile kid I was when I first knew those characters.  (The blasphemy – H2G2 will never die for me, but I like the Dirk Gently novels better …)  So I am burning to pick up Steinbeck’s Arthur again, to clarify in my mind those scenes with Lancelot encountering the tragic, the ridiculously sad, the cruelly tempting.  Between picking up my own work – and picking it apart once again – there must be something else to fill, to occupy, my reading mind.  Because that’s what a writer is:  a reader.

Rest in Peace, Mr. Godwin

When I was about sixteen or seventeen, I bought a book based on its cover.

The book turned out not to be what it might look like ... I'm not sure whether I really experienced that nor cared at the time.  I loved the novel from the very first time I read it.  When the edition above slipped away at some point, I ended up replacing it with a used one from Bibliofind (long since subsumed by that perniciously helpful, ubiquitous behemoth, Amazon).

This one has a great very late 60s/early 70s feel, but is even less relevant to the story than the first one I had. I might not have bought this one.  I might have missed out on The Best.

Lions is the best piece of historical fiction I have ever read.  Only very recently, I was excited to find several friends online whose opinions I respect very much, who loved this book too, and others of Parke Godwin.

Godwin was not a young man.  But he died yesterday.  And I am sad, but grateful for his work.

Godwin and Donald Harington wrote two of the works I have loved most in this world.  Very briefly, after I had begun work on The Ax and the Vase, but many years ago now - I had the joyous honor of corresponding with Harington via email.  He was working on a new novel at that time, and he himself was about seventy then.

My brother - not a cover - first introduced me to Harington, when I was in college.  He lent me The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks, and I loved it, and ... that year for Christmas, my brother gave me his own copy, because I had asked for it and he could not find a copy to give me.

I am a wide-eyed and trusting fool, and when many years later I became friends, online, with a woman who worked at the same University with Harington, I sent her the book.  As things go ... I've never seen that book again.  For years, she would email me periodically, apologizing.  But the getting-him-to-sign-it and the sending it back never happened.  I hope she still has that copy somewhere; the idea of its not being merely lost, but actually trashed, or recycled, or otherwise destroyed as an artifact - breaks my heart.  I feel less personal loss than immensely guilty about being such a careless steward of the GIFT that was given to me.  And the loss of my brother's note to me, in that copy, is more painful than the novel.  (Of that, oddly enough, and in a very weird and squicky way actually, I have another copy - a first edition in hard cover.  I've never once opened nor read that one; with the result that I haven't read TAOTAO in quite a few long years now.)

I don't even know what became of my first copy of Lions.  In that novel's case, the cover's first-look magic notwithstanding, the artifact doesn't matter to me.

Both of my favorite authors have died.  Both wrote histfic - and many other things, too.  They were immensely unalike - yet peers in their great talent.



I will miss you, Parke Godwin.  May peace be with your loved ones and friends - and with you.  I know many readers' gratitude always has been.

Stumbled on Ashes

I'd forgotten, somehow - just where I had put my dad's dragon box.  This isn't without intent, but it isn't quite with it either.  Dwelling on his ashes wouldn't exactly be dad's idea of a memorial, and he lives throughout this home in other ways.  In me, not the least.

So accidentally discovering where the ashes were today was unexpected.  He was in that cabinet?  I can't even remember when the box went in there.  Huh.

I miss you, dad.  Had a good time with your son and your granddaughters this week.  We love you.  So much.  Thank you again - for being my daddy.

"David Bowie Is" ...

At last, a post that combines my love of artifacts, the history of costume, my middle-aged chick bragging rights about having seen all the cool concerts, and Ziggy/The Thin White Duke/any spider you ever found on Mars ...

No less than the Victoria and Albert Museum has sold, apparently, nearly 50,000 tickets to an exhibition of David Bowie memorabilia, creating what promises to be an exhaustive and multifariously fascinating retrospective of the man, the art, the career - and, yes, the costumes and his various dramatic personae.  Hit the link if for no other reason than the photos The History Girls have posted (by special permission; so not reproduced here) - the Yamamoto bodysuit alone is worth the clicks (two clicks - if you don't view it full size, you aren't viewing it at all!).

Bowie is a valid subject for those interested in history for - pick your reason.  He is the 20th (and 21st, as long as he's been quiet this century) century's answer to the Renaissance man - and his collaborations have  reached farther across the arts and popular culture than anyone in Renaissance times, perhaps, could have, or could even have conceived of.  Not merely by what he has himself done, but by his myriad associations and - let's face it - a dizzying fortune the like of which Michael Jackson never even dreamed - Bowie has accumulated force unlike any other rock star.  Far more than personifying glam rock, he practically invented reinvention - a dynamic so necessary to pop stars today it's almost unthinkable to associate him with the idols who have lived within one image throughout generations-long careers.  There was a time, boys and girls, when even Elvis's single transition from leather jackets to spangled pantsuits could cause cognitive dissonance.  To this day, people still talk about the "fat Elvis" years as something almost alien to the rock and roll guy who gave us his most iconic music - and gleefully cheesy movie musicals.

David Bowie had already lived nine rock and roll lives even by the time *I* saw him in 1984 - and was candid about having damn near lost his, literally, thanks to some of the more florid chemical excesses of his glam years.  The Thin White Duke wasn't ghostly merely in a visual way - he was the husk of a man all but displaying his own corpse.  And that was thirty years ago.

Bowie is the man who caused me my undying adoration for snaggle teeth (I never did forgive him for getting braces - that was actually worse in my mind than marrying someone who wasn't me!).  He was my second big arena show.  He has crooned Wild Is the Wind into my ears since I was a weeping, overdramatic teenager, and my own encroaching age has only deepened my appreciation for the instrument of his voice.

I can hardly even comprehend the level of technical expertise, the sheer madness of his creativity, the scope of his contributions on the stage, and in all the lives of those who are his fans for one reason or other.  Few people have developed the ability to offer quite so damned many reasons, at that.


What's funny is - as hagiographic as all this hyperbole embarrassingly is, and I don't deny it - the fact is, I'm trying NOT to be a gushy little fangirl.  Bowie has DONE all these things - he just IS an immense presence, it's not my gooping about him that makes it so.  If I'm honest, most of my goopier feelings about Bowie are long since dessicated in my own drying-up hide, and I just enjoy (a) the nostalgia memories of my own Bowie experiences bring on, and (b) his catalogue of music, which is literally matchless - without hyperbole.

For those who have the chance, I envy them the opportunity to see this exhibit.

For those who never have - y'all can envy *me* the memory of seeing him live, from the front row.

Bram Stoker: Cultural Landscaping

Breaking out this (public domain) passage of Bram to take a look at something I actually meant to write about yesterday.

This garden in front of my room is the old Italian garden.  It must have been done with extraordinary taste and care, for there is not a bit of it which is not rarely beautiful.  Sir Thomas Browne himself, for all his Quincunx, would have been delighted with it, and have found material for another “Garden of Cyrus.”  It is so big that there are endless “episodes” of garden beauty I think all Italy must have been ransacked in old times for garden stone-work of exceptional beauty; and these treasures have been put together by some master-hand.  Even the formal borders of the walks are of old porous stone, which takes the weather-staining so beautifully, and are carved in endless variety.  Now that the gardens have been so long neglected or left in abeyance, the green staining has become perfect.  Though the stone-work is itself intact, it has all the picturesque effect of the wear and ruin wrought by many centuries.  I am having it kept for you just as it is, except that I have had the weeds and undergrowth cleared away so that its beauties might be visible.

But it is not merely the architect work of the garden that is so beautiful, nor is the assembling there of the manifold wealth of floral beauty—there is the beauty that Nature creates by the hand of her servant, Time.  You see, Aunt Janet, how the beautiful garden inspires a danger-hardened old tramp like me to high-grade sentiments of poetic fancy!  Not only have limestone and sandstone, and even marble, grown green in time, but even the shrubs planted and then neglected have developed new kinds of beauty of their own.  In some far-distant time some master-gardener of the Vissarions has tried to realize an idea—that of tiny plants that would grow just a little higher than the flowers, so that the effect of an uneven floral surface would be achieved without any hiding of anything in the garden seen from anywhere.  This is only my reading of what has been from the effect of what is!  In the long period of neglect the shrubs have outlived the flowers.  Nature has been doing her own work all the time in enforcing the survival of the fittest.  The shrubs have grown and grown, and have overtopped flower and weed, according to their inherent varieties of stature; to the effect that now you see irregularly scattered through the garden quite a number—for it is a big place—of vegetable products which from a landscape standpoint have something of the general effect of statues without the cramping feeling of detail.  Whoever it was that laid out that part of the garden or made the choice of items, must have taken pains to get strange specimens, for all those taller shrubs are in special colours, mostly yellow or white—white cypress, white holly, yellow yew, grey-golden box, silver juniper, variegated maple, spiraea, and numbers of dwarf shrubs whose names I don’t know.  I only know that when the moon shines—and this, my dear Aunt Janet, is the very land of moonlight itself!—they all look ghastly pale.  The effect is weird to the last degree, and I am sure that you will enjoy it.

My maternal family line include a number of diggers and gardeners, and go back in a line of farmers whose memory makes me blush.  My brother, especially, is the living branch (you must excuse the fancy) of this in our generation, probably more than anyone.

It was from him I first heard about planting for the long haul.  Beyond the locally inevitable crepe myrtle, azaleas, and boxwoods, few people put much thought into landscaping.  Their own, or the increasingly corporate variety which surrounds us.  My own yard owns all of two trees, and some very rare and beautiful camellias and azaleas which predate my tenure, and are kind enough to get on with what they are do without much input nor attention from me.

When Mojourner lived closer by, in the days even before our dad died - there was a greenhouse in my front yard, and a richly interesting garden in the back.  I did nothing for them, but let it be said I did benefit from them.  The back garden was more for food than artifice's beauty, but it was a wonderful sight in its day.  Peppers, and these amazing marble-sized tomatoes, positively *blooming* - and in such profusion even the birds never got them all.  Sweet, and delicious right off the vine.  Lettuce lived in the protection of the eastern wall of the house, a spot with enough sun to thrive but enough shade not to wilt - and popular with mockingbirds, who were not shy to strafe (and, indeed, even touch) you should someone venture out for a little greenery for a sandwich ...

In the greenhouse out front, there was a once-huge collection of ti plants (for Virginia!).  Some had slender, inky-dark leaves, with the reddishness and greenness deep and mingled into an almost raven-wing iridescent purple.  I used to have many of these inside, but none survive today to grace the place.  Others had larger, richly green leaves.  For a long time, I still had two of these.  By now, only two ti's with these wonderful, verdant leaves still lives.  At less than 24" tall, each of them would be considered "cute" by Island standards - and shockingly small, at probably eleven years of age now.  Mojourner has laughed with his friends before, about the stunted growth of transplanted ti's.  But for me, these two plants are the only Hawai'ian life my home has seen since he moved so far away, and I am protectively in love with it.  The cat catches, if possible, even more grief than when he meddles with the memorial plant I bought after Siddy La died.  (And he does meddle with that one, and it's lost two of its major shoots, too - little bugger.)

Obviously ... I am not the family botanist.  The garden is a vague, disappearing hump along the east side of my backyard.  The lettuces are long since gone.  Even the greenhouse - what, once, our mom thought looked like a big plastic coffin in front of my home - is no longer, its denizens distributed long ago.

Mo knew the magic of planting for years' growth, for putting together trees or bushes or flowers which, ages down the line from his involvement, would still relate to one another, to their environs, in the way Bram Stoker describes so richly, above.

My family - my grandmother, my mom and dad - my brother - have all known the richness of nurturing and growing.  But I never have.  Like the bone-deep urge for procreation, it's one of those things I simply lack.  Unlike The Baby Itch, though - I do, from time to time, regret this omission in my makeup.  It disconnects me both from my family and my earth - particularly from an important experience in the kind of stewardship of my blessings, my literal *estate* on Earth, which I do think is important.  I remember my mom's mother - one of the most beautiful photographs I have ever seen in my life, a photo of a blue bucket, filled with her potatoes, tomatoes, squash, whatever it was she had grown and one of her kids had collected.  I remember helping Mo collect from our own parents' garden, when we were kids.  The year he grew that huge musk melon.  My dad's father, who cultivated tall asparagus and roses and almost certainly corn.  The berries I've eaten with my nieces, and the snow peas, sweet as those tomatoes - as fresh - as beautiful.

I'm not the sort to make New Year's resolutions, and I'm to aware of my weaknesses to become a person who thinks about shoring them up.  It's unlikely I'll *ever* plant for food - or for the ages - or for the almost melancholy, evocative beauties above.  My creative outlets ... are the most passive and undemanding kind.  I write.  I put together the occasional stylin' outfit.  I revel in a laugh from someone who thinks I am momentarily clever.  I do take pride, always aware it may be disproportionate, in my own accomplishments and talents - and I don't regret those I have not (hah) cultivated enough to feel I'm truly "less" as a person.

But I know that ... I've missed out.  And so, I fancy - I sit back, arms crossed like our dad, and watch with pride what my bro does and I do not.  What my mom and dad planted a long time ago.  Planted by other generations.  And I think we've grown, as a clan, to a mellow, fascinating balance.  To ... perhaps ... the right composition ...

Felt Like Freedom

Mojourner, speaking as someone who *was* a punk - and on the subject of dancing like you don't give a hang who's watching.  Because that is what dancing is for.  I'm struck (not for the first time in his remarkable explorations of the punk scene he let me spectate from time to time) at how clearly, how freshly, I remember some of these faces.  The spiky mullet in front.  The fro to one side.

What he describes comes back, too.  The chicken fights, the on-the-spot made-up dances, the getting on stage.  He hasn't mentioned the time he was one of the "aweem-awep" dudes for a spontaneous rendition of "The Lion Sleeps" - and, in fact, how frequently spontaneous classics like that came up.  Sometimes sped up to 78 (as Mo said recently, an hour or so could hold thirty-eight thousand punk songs - or something far funnier, frankly, but to that effect ...).  Sometimes screamed, sure.  But sometimes, and not infrequently, pretty much in their original arrangement.  The guys on those stages were musicians, after all, as much as rebels.  Sometimes, rebellion could be performed with respect for music unlike their own.  Punk had a lot more taste than exclusively for irony, and it's easy to forget, in the post-'net world which has come to so intensely depend on snark - not everything even the strident anarchist had to say back then was said with a sneer.

Anyway, amazing photos once again, and remarkable memories I am enjoying very much.

(Also of note:  "history, brought to you by women."  In and of itself, a fascinating phenomenon of the dynamics of - at least "our" little corner of - punk.)

Punk Nostalgia

This post is going to be a bit of a bouillabaisse of memories - mostly really my brother's, but he was nice enough to share a bit with me back then.  He and I have been enjoying - of all things ... - "good times" memories of that least of all "aww"-inspiring things, the hardcore punk scene of the early 80s.  And yet, if not "aww" - there are some very good feelings with these memories.  (For me, the surprise and excitement of cool stuff shared with my bro.  For him, a youth not spent wearing alligator shirts and worshiping Reagan.)

Kind of loving my brother's memories.  I won't go back to edit the post about being at White Cross shows, but here is the vid that woke me from the malaise of my illnes:



It'd be impossible for me to go back to that time and place, even as sick as I was on Tuesday, and not feel some resurgence of the energy they held.

The POV of the video camera (I still can't get over someone having such a rare and expensive thing at one of these shows!) is pretty much exactly where I would have been.

Mojourner has more to say about those days here and here.  He also appears in the Mini Mag I linked before, but I ain't sayin' which dude with attitude he was.  Though he does match one of the guys in this vid!  Maybe he collected all his archival fame in one night (apart from that White Cross album cover he was on - I'll tell you this time, he was the guy in the striped shirt).



There was an immense amount of anger at that time, but what people may not understand is that it was not a scene of menace and cruelty.  The anger was a shared thing, binding kids deprived of privilege (and those of us who had a little bit, but hardly lived in Reagan-era Greed-is-Good-ness or Dynasty wealth), expressed in voices raised as loud as those who were socio-politically very very small could be.  But within the scene, there was a lot of laughter, much loyalty and trust.

I showed up at these things wearing what I hoped was ironic and cool - a pink CIA t-shirt given to me by a relative who at that time, oddly enough, was an expert on the Russkies and (though no more on the Blake Carrington level than my brother and I) had a lot more interest in Reagan - and a hippie-ish white flowered prairie skirt, with little black cotton Mary Janes.  Amidst the Marks-A-Lot'ed jean vests and black tees, nobody was mistaking me for one of them - pink and white!? (though, for the record, yeah, it was pretty intentional; apparently my nonconformity among nonconformists began earlier than I've ever really thought about) - but they were nice to me.  The guys there would have protected me from any harm - if it had actually been likely, in the not-so-wilds of our downtown of that era, danger were really likely.  But the circle of punks, spilling out of the bar and up the block to that 7-Eleven, was big enough to contain, and cohesive enough not to break.  Nobody broke inside - nobody wanted to - and in that group it was safe.

I probably learned a lot which still serves me today.  I frequent a very different scene when I get out socially, but the effect is in its way similar.  Outcast and underprivileged people might seem scary on their margins, from the mainstream, but the marginalized keep an eye out for those they claim, and those they welcome.

Sure, the force of a brother who didn't exactly invite violence and violation to his person - nor his sister's - had its power.  But the fact was, the larger dynamic within that angry and alienated world wasn't one of anger nor alienation actually aimed inward.  The anger was never with those sharing it, and so the dynamic was of the adopted-erzats-gang-family variety popularized in everything from The Outsiders to Penelope Spheeris' "Suburbia" (itself a veritable goldmine of who-was-whom and pop-cultural trivia of a remarkable variety).  So that anger, that terrifying rebellion and defiance, was not the attractant - it was the repellant.  Stay away, preppies, stay away, established authority, stay away if this scares you.

But, if you come in, you'll be in for some laughs, the shows, the friends, the people.

My Idea of Patriotism

I noodled around with this post yesterday, but it appears I never put it up.  Little late post ...

***

Yesterday, leaving the polling place, it seemed of course dead appropriate to me to listen to an Englishman, so I cruised on Bowie and enjoyed my commute.  He finished off my drive with "Heroes" - a song I've always found pretty powerful, but which seemed appropriate to the culmination of a wearing campaign season. 

Today, once I shifted away from NPR, I hit the radio instead of the CD player, and was treated to ...  "Too Sexy for My Shirt" which was a giggle.  Even more of a laugh, the "we play anything" station segued from Shirt into Tom Petty - hilarious enough given almost any track, but again, somehow pleasing and appropriately, the song they chose to play was "American Girl". 

I liked Petty fine when I was younger - he never set my teeth on edge the way Springsteen *STILL* does, nor got worn out by the DJs like Stevie Nicks and Led Zeppelin did.  I was enough of a little white Southern girl (still am ...) to go for the rock they fed us - Bad Company (yes, I'm aware they're not exactly Georgia boys; tell it to every pink-necked boy I grew up with), even Charlie Daniels, I can admit that.  Petty, though, has aged very well indeed, and he appears to be a pretty smart cookie, as simple as a song like "American Girl" may seem in its way.  Simplicity, as it turns out - particularly with music of a certain flavor - is genius, and "American Girl" still curls up in a VERY comfortable place indeed in my aging mind.  Petty doesn't feel stale - where, as much as I like it, "Shooting Star" feels of-its-time in a very different way.  BC take me back.  Petty just is.  American Girl may not sound modern - and his early 90s work in particular is less flexible - but take a listen to "Breakdown" and it doesn't drag you to a particular place (unless you have a personal association to link that song to a memory of your own) necessarily.  He doesn't sound more 70s than 80s than now, his music has a tensile twang that, no matter when you hear it, you can take or leave.  It's likeable - or it's not.  But it's not laden with bellbottoms or skinny ties or mullets or election-memories, circa 2000.  (Sorry, Fleetwood Mac, but y'all tied yourselves to Clinton in '93, and ever since, there've been branding issues with politics and music.  Happy end-of-your career, Kid Rock ...) 

We've come to the part of the year where it's still dawn and dim when I drive in to work, and dark when I go home.  Music can be more fun on a breezy golden day, with a sunroof - but music in the intimacy of cold and dark, all alone in the car with the news of the day quieting the noisy tires, music can really make me laugh (you all KNOW I was thinking of the President when Right Said Fred was playing when I changed channels - right?  I'm not one of those women with a crush, but he's by far the only president I can imagine who *could* laughingly listen to that song in front of all of us, and maybe bust a little move or two), and music can make me just feel good.  Thanks, Tom.  You're not half bad, says this American ... Broad.