On Poetry

Hey guys, if you're in love with a girl or were in love with a girl and had your heart broken, do me one little favor, will you?  Do NOT, for the love of all that's good in the world, write a fucking poem.  You are not good at it.  It will embarrass you in the long run.  It will be stupid, at best, and an affront to the English language, at worst.

There is maybe, MAYBE one real poet born every generation or so.  Odds are you are not that poet.

Don't write that poem.  Or people like me will make merciless fun of it.

Nothing now can ever come to any good

My best friend passed away yesterday. Here's a blog post I wrote about her in '04:

Friendship is love without its wings?

I stumbled across the above quote while looking for an adequate title for this entry and I am inclined to disagree with it for I happen to be blessed with a friendship whose wings are most certainly present and most certainly capable of lifting me above the melee of my so-called life.

Back in New York, when I first moved there, I was lonely, cold and nearly always broke. At one point, while looking through old letters in a melancholy exercise that I had hoped would lift me out of my perpetual feeling of friendlessness, I found the address of an ex boyfriend and his wife who, last I heard, were living in New York. Now, since this ex was the first person ever to have the gall to have broken up with ME (there has since been one more dreadful heathen of this ilk), he had long dropped off my "most favored nation" list, but I was desperate for human companionship. This desperation drove me out into the streets with my dog in an effort to find them.

I walked up First Avenue, telling myself it wasn't creepy to do a walk-by of their building because it was very near to the dog run at Carl Schurz park. The fact that my dog didn't seem to ever ENJOY the dog run didn't sway me from the belief that she needed to go there, if only to provide me with an excuse for a slight detour to peep at the names on the buzzers at this particular address. Suffice it to say, their names weren't on the building anymore and my dog spent the afternoon huddled against my legs as dogs with healthy senses of self-esteem bounded around us in doglike fervor. I went home, like my dog, defeated by the exuberence of the rest of the world.

Later, I emailed a friend whom I hadn't spoken to in a while, casually inquiring if he had heard where the Least Favored Ex and his wife had taken up residence. I got a reply back with an email address for LFE, promptly emailed and received a phone call in reply. The day before I flew home for Christmas, I got wasted over brunch with LFE and his lovely wife, whom I had always had a sort of bitter hatred for. After all, he didn't break up with HER, now, did he? As the afternoon wore on to evening and it became apparent that LFE would require scaffolding to remain upright, my love for these folks deepened. Pettiness seeped out of me (the first time THAT ever happened!) and I vowed to stay in touch.

Months went by, and I saw them sporadically. As the time went by, LFE's wife and I became the best of friends. She is the kind of person who makes every moment spent with her shine. She listens without judgement, a trick she must have had to perfect in order to live with the constant barrage of LFE's incessant repeating of himself. Honestly, who do YOU know who tells you the same story three times in rapid succession? She has a warped, brilliant mind and is, to me, the epitome of the word "lovely." She's magic. And I'm lucky enough to know her.

I mention all of this because I got a present from her yesterday. She had painted a beautiful face in oranges and reds, embedded flower petals in the paint and added a verse from a particularly apt poem. It was the best gift I have ever received and it made me cry. I am far away from a friend whose support was all I had at some times in my dark New York life. I regret that I am not there to support her as she struggles with her own issues of career and family and love. I regret that I cannot shine for her the way she shone for me; shedding light onto a path I did not know existed.

My wonderful, wicked, silly and lovely friend! I'll forever remember one experience as indicative of the surreal and sublime nature of our friendship: We walked through a cemetary near her house in the thick sunshine of a fall morning, laughing and talking about our lives. The cemetary is so large that one can hardly ever expect to see another live human as you walk through it, but see one, we did. We passed by, hushing our laughter momentarily in case he was there to mourn. As we walked on, my friend kept looking back over her shoulder in the direction we came. Finally, I asked her what was going on. "Dude," she replied, "That guy is looking at us and whacking off onto a gravestone. Oh well. You gotta do something, right?"

The realities of whimsy...

Today, I was determined to one and for all divest myself of my Georgia driver's license and get a long-overdue Illinois license. Inspired by a former student of mine who once wore a fake beard and blacked out one of his front teeth when he went to the DMV, I decided to go in costume. I teased the hell out of my hair, pasted on the longest fake eyelashes I could find and put on full early 60's make-up. I came as close as I could to looking like an extra from "Mad Men." I was determined to walk into the DMV all fabulous and throw some whimsy up in their faces. Whimsy and reality are sometimes worlds apart from each other, though...

I tottered into the DMV on extremely high heels after a brief panic at home when I couldn't find my pearls. That was my biggest concern before getting to the DMV - accessories. When I got there, I was told that I would need my Social Security card to get a license. Suffice it to say that I was told this after walking through the world's longest velvet rope maze to get to the counter in the world's clackiest shoes. I thought it was extra whimsical that I clicked and clacked my way all the way through the rope maze to get to the counter when I could so easily have bypassed it. It was not. Thwarted, I drove home to retrieve my Social Security card which I didn't bring initially because I keep it in a wallet that was too big for my tiny, cute purse. Accessories. Again.

When I got back to the DMV, I clicked back through the maze to find out that the two pieces of mail that I was required to show as proof of address could not be hand-written envelopes, which nixed the envelope from my mom's Valentine's Day card, or any kind of solicitation mail, which excluded the credit card offer from citibank. I rifled through the garbage dump that is my car to find pieces of mail that were acceptable, running inside at intervals to check with the supervisor. "How about my insurance card? No? How about my copy of 'Martha Stewart Living' magazine? No? Are you crazy? If Martha says I live there, you better believe that I LIVE THERE!" Finally, I had the required pieces of mail. Then, I learned that the DMV didn't take Visa cards...

Clickety clack, I went down the street to an ATM. Honkity honk went the cars driving by. Plinkity plink went the bobby pins leaking out of my bouffant as I hobble-jogged back to the DMV.

When I sat down with one of the clerks at the DMV, she looked at the insurance policy that I presented as proof of residency and declared that it wasn't good enough because the policy had since expired. I started to cry, putting my luxurious false lashes in imminent peril. "I don't get official mail at my house! The bills are all in my husband's name!" So yeah, some parts of my life are as early 60's as my outfit was today. The woman took pity on me and told me her supervisor could sign off on it and she'd pass me through. "After all," I said, "Jesse White once gave me a hug!" I thought that might help as I was in the Jesse White building of the Department of Motor Services. The woman didn't look amused. "He called me Miss America..." Silence.

Three counters and one supervisor check later, I was all set to get my fabulous, whimsical, Mad Men-esque driver's license photo taken. Something happened between "get ready" and the camera's click and my new license looks like that one elementary school librarian that looks like she never quite changed the calendar after Dec. 31, 1963. Or maybe like a very pleasant maiden aunt in her late fifties.

Next time, I'm wearing a fake beard. Whimsy fail.

Other people's memories

I buy old photos of other people's families for no appreciable reason. There are plenty of astonishingly awesome pictures of my family, but I just can't keep my compulsion in check. When people visit my home and see the pictures, they always ask the same question: "Is this your family?" When I say no, they try to regroup: "Your husband's family?" No. "Do you know anyone at all who might be related to these people?" No. "Then why?" Dunno.

This is my favorite of my collection. Mostly because the entire family looks drunk, like a potential serial killer, or like they maybe got too much of a forceps squeeze on their way outta their mama.

And here's a closeup of my favorite of this family:

Oooh, come on, now!

Here's the thing... Sometimes, all you need to do is apologize. Sometimes, you need to look another person in the eye and apologize.

On running

I found this old chestnut today and wanted to share it.

It has been so long since I have been able to call myself a regular runner that I was able to wait three years before getting new running shoes. My last pair, a valiant set of New Balance 855's, were a Christmas gift three years ago. This year, I retired them after a leisurely Christmas Day run through rural Minnesota.

On that last run with the 855s, I ran down my parents' road, alongside the river and the train tracks that have been torn up to make a walking path. A car approached and slowed as it came abreast of me and I saw my old neighbor -- also my old elementary school band teacher -- lean out the window. "Merry Christmas!" he shouted as he passed.

As I ran up the rise towards Oak Hill Cemetary, a lone dog trotted up from the ditch to see what I was doing. He let me pat him as he passed and we went our separate ways; him out to the country behind me and me into the cemetary. I stopped by my grandparents' graves to say hello briefly and nodded toward all of the tombstones of all of the people I knew there as I jogged back out. Shannon, Thelma, Inga, Joanne, Ollie, Asbury, Derrick...

I ran up past my old driveway, casting my eyes up the hill enough to see that the new owners of my old house have added on. Down the hill towards town, I passed a mailbox that belongs to a former classmate of mine and the condos that stand where my elementary school used to be. I turned the corner at the top of one of the biggest hills in town and took a left by the apartment building that used to be a church. So many things in my town have been replaced or changed or outlived their usefulness. Taking one more turn farther downtown, I stood in front of the only building that ever mattered to me here; the Little Theatre.

The theatre itself has been an auditorium, a gymnasium and a movie theatre in its day, before becoming the community theatre that it is now. It's the only place in town that I ever felt was really permanent and secure, though. I've been in plays there with some people I will never see again in this lifetime, one of whom believed in me more than I ever believed in myself. I took a deep breath and smiled, and then I turned around to run home.

Here's the thing with running... It always means something. I started running to escape feeling inadequate. I kept running because people said I couldn't. Finally, I ran because it's the only time I seem to have in my life where I'm alone with myself and not insane with doubt or worry. The shoes lace up, the door bangs shut behind me and for those miles that stretch out in front of me, I am wholly and totally me. Running is uniquely redemptive. I challenge you to find a runner who says that it isn't.

Everything in my town is changing, dying, becoming something else, but the miles stay the same. The distance is the constant and the will of the runner is its proof. To misquote Mahalia Jackson, I run because my soul is happy. I run because I'm free.

Caribbean Trifecta

I completed my Caribbean trifecta of playing with a dolphin, holding a monkey and riding a horse.