McCartney (1970) featured cherries and a bowl of juice, not a cake.

I guess I was thinking of Let it Bleed by The Rolling Stones (1969)…

I am remembering music and art from 40 years ago.  How can that be??

Scroll down to read this story from the bottom up.

Went to Twitter just now, to report hitting my daily word count, and three quotes from Nicole Krauss were just sitting there, right on top of the feed:

“Writing is never really fun.  It is many things, but it is not that.”

“I’ve gotten used to the terror [of failure], but the terror never really goes away.”

“Writing for me is very hard work.  It is very sweaty labor.  I am always aware of blowing breath into my characters.”

I *heart* Nicole Krauss, and her amazing partner, Jonathan Safran Foer.  I just finished Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close this week.  I so admire his ability to really take his story to the bone of human sorrow and suffering — and then he manages to deliver us to another shore, to rest, to soak in the warmth of the sun, to fully absorb the effect of our arduous journey.  I may not understand the reasons we have to travel this way, but I know that I have done it, and will do it again.

500 words a crack.  During the school year I can’t commit to that regular, daily habit that is essential for writers, but I can say that when I sit down to write, I will hit my word count.  And I think, as usual, I am going to have to freewrite and bitch for a while before I know what is to emerge from this.

I have been a writer my whole life, but not a writer who has been driven to complete anything that has not been commissioned by someone else.  I always read that people write because “they must.”  That has not been my experience.  I have demons, like most people, but those demons don’t compel me to write.  Who knows, though?  Maybe my mental health will improve if I give voice to the doubters banging around in my psyche.

With Patricia’s help, I built a big, wobbly table in Foresthill and put my typewriter on it.  I wrote bad poetry all through my youth, and read it at open readings.  It was enough to shock back then, to say the phrase “bury my face in balls” and listen for the crowd reaction, to find myself suddenly surrounded by young male poets after the reading, and to believe that they were there because they appreciated my way with language, not because they could imagine their balls on my face.  Where have I ended up?  Satisfied by writing good and interesting papers in school, writing for work and seeing my heavily edited words printed on glossy sales and company promotional materials, and then finally, teaching young people to write, and reading thousands upon thousands of dull, predictable essays, waiting for the occasional excellent one to surface from the pile.  And they do.  I’ve coached very good writers, and I’ve helped mediocre writers get better, and enabled bad writers to write one coherent, clear essay to carry with them into college so they can say to themselves, “See? It is possible.  I am able to write – it may not be beautiful or incredibly insightful, but it is clear and understandable.”

But what about me?  What about the things I must say?  What about my topics?  What are my concerns as a writer and as a person?  Much of what I have to say concerns my family and my life, but I do want to leave that space and move into a fictional, imaginative space, where I am free to tell the truth without naming names.  I think this may be the way to go.  Memoir is so confessional, denier cri—of the moment— but I do believe that moment has passed.  But again, Anne Lamott would say I am focused on the wrong end of the process, and I believe that is true.  I cannot think about markets and publishers; I must think only of what will emerge.

I was listening to Nicole Krauss when she was interviewed on NPR right as Great House was coming out.  The interviewer asked, “Where do you get your ideas for your stories?” and she said something that I found enormously helpful and encouraging— she said, “I have no idea.”  She went on to explain that she sat down to write, never knowing what the story was, who the characters were, what the problem was; she knew nothing.  The interviewer then asked, “Isn’t that dangerous?  What if all of your work comes to naught?” (Or, something like that.  I’m not sure she used the word “naught.”)  And Nicole Krauss said, firmly establishing herself as another writing hero, model, and guide, “I feel you must work right on the edge of failure.  That’s where the energy is.” Or something like that.  Brilliant.

But it’s HARD to do that.  I want my writing to matter.  But I am willing, finally and at last, to sit at this computer and write, every day…and by that I mean, every day that it is humanly possible, so if I miss a day, I am not going to give up on myself in despair.  And if nothing comes of it, so be it.  It is worthwhile work, even if no one else ever reads it.  And, I am going to post every week to the alexfaye.com blog.  In fact, I think I may put this out there, right now.  No one reads me, except perhaps my sister.  So I will write directly to her, with her face in my mind, and tell her everything that I am thinking.

Writing, like Weight Watchers, is just something that I do.  It’s a daily practice.  It is imperfect, and I will make mistakes.  But the trick is to return to it, every day.  It’s Zen Buddhism.  It’s yoga.  It’s a way through.  Today’s word count:  789.

Maddy and Hannah are taking some time off from the farm they were working on in Carnation, and they are traveling around the Seattle area, checking things out.  A hero of theirs — Dan Savage  — writes and works in Seattle; they are visiting museums, eating, taking in the city.   And my mother’s family lives in the area — Anacortes — so Maddy made contact the other day by telephone, and made arrangements to go up for a visit on Sunday.  The subject of sleeping accommodations on Sunday night naturally came up when Maddy and I were discussing the upcoming visit.  Where would the girls sleep?

Well, I have an aunt and an uncle in Anacortes, so I assumed it would be no trouble for one of them to put up two girls for the night.  But as I write this, this is still unresolved — after emails and multiple phone calls, it turns out that I may be wrong.  My mother’s people are stand-offish, and not particularly anxious to extend overnight hospitality.  My aunt and her kids have not returned my phone calls about the matter, and my uncle — after his wife already told me that it would be alright, since they have a bedroom in their basement — just wrote to say, “they weren’t expecting an overnight visit, and they will help make arrangements that will fit our needs.”  What in the hell does THAT mean?

And suddenly, this whole part of my family comes into sharp focus.

I live alone, and like it that way.  My sister lives in the neighboring state.  We see each other occasionally, and speak in big flurries of communication with long periods of rest in between.  Despite this distance, there is an implicit understanding that no matter what, we will be present for one other, and we would certainly take each other in.

Having said that, I know my own reticence about taking in distant relations, or friends of friends.  I would hesitate if asked.

But now I know what that reticence looks like from the other side, because even though I KNOW that this is not personal, I can’t help but take it personally.  I am flabbergasted that my own mother’s people would hesitate or deny my daughter shelter for one goddamned night.

When I am in my 70s and 80s, I pray that I remember this moment, because I know the older I get, the more set in my ways that I am.  Good Lord, may I never become this inflexible and closed up.  May I never deny anyone who asks — and especially my own flesh and blood — a bed for the night.

Now I see why the family in Washington never sees or speaks to one another.  My aunt and uncle have not spoken to one another in several years.  One cousin doesn’t speak to her father or any of her siblings.   Another cousin hid from my sister when she stopped in to his store to visit; his employees told her that he was not there.  No wonder my mother put that small town and its people far behind her.

But even our own mother…our mom turned Vicki and her husband away once.  Vicki reminded me today that mama apologized for that incident as she lived out her last days from her hospital bed.  But I can’t help but  believe that was my father’s strong influence over my mother — I find it impossible to think that my mother would, on her own, turn aside her daughter.  And when Vicki went up to see the family in Anacortes, she had to ask for a glass of water.  The convivial sitting around a table with a bottle of wine or a pot of coffee just don’t happen easily.  Those familial, communal moments do not just unfold naturally in Anacortes any more.

Yet Vicki assures me, (and I somehow know this is true) — that if our grandmother Helen were alive — this would never happen.  She was a warm and welcoming woman.  She may not have had anything, but she would never have turned anyone away.  My strongest grandma memory is being in her big soft bed with her, awake past bedtime,  partners in crime, eating snacks and peeping out the window at the kids:  my mother, her brothers and sisters, and all the spouses.  My mom and the aunts and uncles seemed so grown up, connected, and fun that night.  (Drunk — in the funny, happy way.)  The doors were off when Helen was alive.  Everyone was everywhere.  But she’s been gone for more than 40 years now, and the connective tissue that held our family together has deteriorated badly.  The connections are brittle and broken. For my daughter to have to experience this for herself is making me feel sad; I see now that this family reunion idea floated by my cousin Randy is nothing but an empty dream, a fantasy born of some ideal that does not exist between us.  We are not the reunion type.  We are the disconnected type, the unanswered telephone call type, the cryptic email type, the unresponsive type, the “make other arrangements that suit our needs” type.

I miss Hank and Lou.  But even Hank and Lou, if they were alive today…who knows?  I believe that if they were healthy, they would take Maddy in, even if they were 100 years old they would, and Uncle Hank would show her the berry bushes that the deer sneak into the yard to eat from.

My sister, my friends and I know a better way to live that is natural, open and emotionally nourishing.  We gather around tables, we share food and drink and talk.  And I want to cry out, Darling daughter, run!  Run the other way!  Don’t let this weird juju touch you.  Visit for an hour, and drive far away.  It looks like we moved to the other end of the coast for a reason.

Happy Birthday, John Lennon.  I send out a wish for peace to the entire world, in your name.

You don’t need somebody to tell you who you are or what you are, you are who you are.

Instant karma’s gonna get you…may we all shine on.

———————

Addendum:  How it all turned out:  they opened their home, and everyone had a nice visit.

I am eager as the new school year approaches, and at the same time, I dread it.  What I dread though is losing myself, and the things I need to feel good:  adequate sleep, good eating habits, writing time, yoga (to gently hold the line against all that desk time needed for writing), walks for reflection and rumination, weight work for strength and stamina, and golf for fun and release.  Intellectually, I know that I am middle-aged, but I’ve set no reliable habits to accommodate the truth of 53:  If I don’t actively care for my body, I don’t just stand still — I deteriorate.

When I was younger, I had more natural resiliency — could neglect the body and recover quickly…I didn’t ache all of the time as now.  Today, all my joints speak to me.  My shoulders, always silent in the past, yak at me constantly. I am stiff in the neck, hips and hamstrings.  The only thing I can do is resist, push against that stiffness.  I feel like I’m pushing against a slowly advancing plate of ice.

My experience of pregnancy & childbirth put eighty pounds on my frame; I lost fifty.  I have carried the extra 30 pounds for 22 years; few people who know me remember me before.  I don’t look bad, but I don’t look good either.  Beyond aesthetics, the damage of just carrying that weight on my hips and knees is more and more evident to me.  Add to this the dawning understanding that my estrogen output is steadily decreasing.  If I don’t lose the weight before the tap closes altogether, I may never lose it.  So, I joined Weight Watchers this weekend.

Of course I know how to lose weight; of course I can hold myself accountable, and of course, I see the act of “joining up” and paying a fee to do what I already know how to do as crass consumerism.   But ulimately, I surrender to this bare fact:  I know all of this, have known it, yet have not adequately dealt with it in more than two decades — so let’s do something new.  Really, give in the the facts.  So I will pay my dues, participate with the group, count my points, drink my water, and go after it.

My narrative has been, “Yes, I am 30 pounds overweight but I carry it well.  I am fit.  I can still do what I want to do.  I can accept it.”  The narrative has to change.  Without a narrative change, there is no lasting change.

In addition to constructing a new narrative — a narrative the I actually need to write and speak aloud  — I have to schedule the necessary self care right into my week, and make a commitment to it.

Part of what I must construct,  in the narrative,  is clear articulation of what that time means to me over the course of my school year, and insist that it won’t hurt my teaching.

The sturdy counter-narrative that I must subvert:  “I need to grade papers.  I need to plan.  I need to read.”

ALL OF THAT IS TRUE ENOUGH, so here’s the tricky part.  I can’t just discard those mantras outright, like a bad habit.  But I have to acknowledge what actually happens, which is, I say the mantra, cut the selfcare for the mantra, and then DO NEITHER.  Instead put my face in the screen and fiddle around.  (Hello, Facebook friends.)

Again, I need my screen.  My computer and I must spend time together every day.  But I have to manage that time, make the time productive, and limit the time.

Here I am, in the summer, and on vacation.  I can structure my time any way I’d like, and I leave important things undone.  So when my time is highly structured as it is during the school year, it is so much easier to leave important things left undone.

I have to be on my own side.

A Tree Poem/a Love Poem, Alexandra Fletcher 2010

inspired by Rainer Maria Rilke

I’m no beautiful flower, sweet and delicate, swaying in the breeze.

This here is a trunk.

Run your bike into a flower, and it’s the flower who will lose.

Run your bike into me, baby, and I’ll stop you cold.

I’ll bend your rim.

This body is not slender and green. I am all knots and broken-ness.

But just see if you can move me.

Go ahead.  Try.

You’ll breakasweat bendyourback blisteryourhands

digging so deep deep so down

fighting to unloose me from places you didn’t know I could go.

It’ll take all day.  Don’t bother.  Just rest here where I rest. Stand.

Lean. String a bed up in these branches and let go. Sleep.

You see, I don’t love like a flower loves, with just one season of life behind me,

the future uncertain, all heady fragrance and shocking beauty in the right now right now.

Love like sap and history floods my body.

I have survived the fire

the drought

the blight.

Something every year.

Even so love rushes up from one thousand long and tangled places, wills me to make something familiar yet entirely new.

So yeah, that’s right.

I have birds in my hair and

I eat light for breakfast.

But when I turn it on, I’m the interplay of death and life,

I’m shelter,

I’m shade.

You could do worse.

But I’m back.  Say that all is forgiven.

Two weeks of summer vacation left before we jump into a new school year.  I never feel ready, and yet when the day actually arrives, we begin.  I’ve been blogging with my students all summer, and much of my energy has been directed there [AP Blog].

It’s been a busy summer, and as I look down the barrel of the last two weeks, I see just how much I did not do.  Many goals and aspirations left unrealized.  It brings to mind a poem about a woman about to undergo a dental procedure — gosh, the title is sitting just outside my peripheral vision, and I can’t think of the first line either  — in the poem, the woman is gripping the chair, but as the dentist administers the gas, she begins to loosen her grip.  She does not just let go of the chair; she lets go of her fear, her worry, her preoccupations, and she realizes,  This must be what it’s like to die.  Unrealized goals, unrealized aspirations — wave gently goodbye as they get on the train, and depart for a small fishing village in the south.  Bye bye.  “How nice the happy gas,” she says.  Although, now that I’ve said that bit about the fishing village, I believe I’m combining the dentistry poem with the Billy Collins poem on forgetfulness, which under the circumstances seems particularly apt.   Caramba. Someday, the dental poem will come rushing to mind, and I’ll run right out here and post it.

I’ve always been a relational thinker — not linear, but clusters, bubbles, concentric rings spreading in all directions like a pebble tossed onto a glassy pond.  I’ve read that menopausal women become spacier, less linear, more relational.  Well, here I am.  I’m definitely at some stage of menopause…not the tidy part where the menses actually ceases, but the part where I feel myself losing my familiar, list-making mind in favor of another calmer, weirder one.  Oh, and the waistline.  The waistline is spreading even further afield.

THIS IS A DRAFT.  I WILL RETURN TO FINISH THIS.

Remodeling the house required me to pack everything into boxes, and in the process, to touch and consider (albeit briefly) each and every thing.  HOW did I acquire so many fucking THINGS?  It befuddles me.

I moved into my parents’ home after my mother’s death; I shared time and this space with my dad for the last ten years of his life.  I inherited their home which I have made into my own (living without a kitchen as I write, but I SHOULD be up and running by next week), but along with the roofed structure with two flush toilets and a mailbox,  I inherited their THINGS, many of which hold no meaning or value to me.  A service plaque.  A gigantic rosary.  A pair of matched table lamps.  A framed photo of my dad standing, smiling among strangers.

Some things found new homes in a couple of garage sales, and I’ve already forgotten exactly what those things were.

We land in this world, wet and naked, and we leave in roughly the same way.  The things we acquire, without the animating force of our narrative, become someone else’s problem.

A small, painted porcelin candy dish, a cast iron turtle, a small squishy penguin toy — these objects have a story and a meaning that I know, and that my sister knows.  But when we are gone, how will anyone understand why we saved these particular objects?

It is with this mindset that I consider my own things.

I will live 30-40 more years, IF I’m lucky, and then, Maddy will be somewhere between 50 and 60  (as I am now ), and she will have to sit with a melancholy heart to sift through a pile of mysterious material objects. I’m there, Darling Heart. I know the impulse to take a wide swipe and junk the whole mess, and the impulse to hold each thing, to turn it over and try to decipher its meaning.

So: the vase, the photo collage, the doll.

This vase standing on my desk is approximately 18 inches tall.  Who knows what it is made of?  Let’s say clay.  Porcelin clay?  Very girly in shape.  Tight waist, big ass.  It must have caught my mother’s eye in the medina, a Moroccan market, and she bought it.  Did she haggle?  Did she pay with francs?  (Now that Europe has gone to the Euro, has Morocco cast off the currency of the colonizer — the French franc? Suddenly I recall currency with Arabic characters on it.)  The vase, painted in geometric shapes in rose, yellow, green and navy blue, is older than most of my friends.  This vase is at least 40 years old.  On the bottom, it says “SAFI.”  Is that the creator?  Who was SAFI, and is she alive? I doubt it.  The vase has been from Kenitra, to San Diego, back to Spain, back to Los Alamitos: in case you’re counting, that’s 24000 miles, or roughly the circumference of the Earth.

We lived in Morocco from 1966 through 1968.  Robert Kennedy was assassinated; so was Dr. Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. It was in Morocco that my mother received the news of her mother’s death.  Those were the years that my father’s drinking really caught fire.  I rode horses, and had a spectaculr bike accident.  We lived just 100 yards from the Chief’s Club, and five hundred miles above the Sahara Desert.  The heat was crushing.  We lay on the floor, on the Navy housing linoleum, in the air produced by a oscillating fan positioned behind a block of ice that my dad brought home from work.  Our couch was naugahyde — fake leather — and I remember sticking to it.

This must have been in 2005 or 2006.  Dad’s first surgery was in September of 2006.

He recently switched from a cane to a walker, thank God.  In the years of his terrifying virility, he stood 6 feet 5 inches — long arms, long legs, and hands as big as plates.  Even now, stooped, frail, and failing — the muscles of his once powerful arms and legs stringy and loose — his falls are spectacular:  two hundred and thirty pounds falling in five directions.  The world is momentarily displaced; I hear the dull thud of bone and flesh even in my sleep, and run to find him.

Always, the ribs crack.  Recently, I stood studying his bright white pelvis, bigger than my head and floating nonsensically in a field of black, partially obscured by mysterious grey clouds (arthritis, scar tissue), while a white coat traced a hairline crack with a perfectly manicured finger, dispassionately reeling out his careful analysis:  nothing we can do. Age is degenerative, unstoppaple, inevitable. Thank you, Dr. Science.

Once, to save himself from falling, he slapped his huge hand down on the coiled red burner of the stove.  The blister covered his entire palm; it rose up slowly like the Houston Astrodome — a big bubble of skin, a leather balloon.

After the last fall — a catastrophic one that required a midnight ambulance, hospitalization, convalescent care, and appointments with physical therapists — I outfitted our house with supportive acceessories, reflecting on how much we take our mobility for granted.  I appreciated anew the horror of the bathroom: a nightmare combination of precarious balance, tile and water and soap — and gazed darkly into the future.  When I stand perfectly still, I can hear the crack of bone on walls, the shattering of safety glass.

So when I came home last week and saw the walker, I struggled with relief and sadness.  Without it, his gait is startlingly familiar, evoking childhood: he staggers through the house like a drunk, catching himself on furniture, counters, door jams.  His size thirteen feet drag along as if he were wearing cement shoes.  He cannot feel them, he says.  They are blind, stupid appendages on the ends of his legs, laced into bright white athletic shoes.  He prefers the cane, thinks the walker is for sissies.  For him to have it out is an acknowledgment, a white flag of surrender. He needs to surrender, maybe.

Of course, I want his safety, but on another level, I need him to resist just a little bit longer.  I rode his shoulders through the helplessness of childhood.  I was suddenly 7 feet tall, and invincible.  He swung me in wild circles, holding just one hand and one foot.  And on the other days — Bad Daddy Days — I learned to avoid his bad smell, his sloppy affection, the slurred insults he hurled at my mother.  First I was a mouse; I grew into a liar. I found ways around the threat of him and his swinging, punishing hands. I resisted him; I subverted his agenda, threw secret obstacles his way.

Tonight, my champion and my foe grips his walker, and drags himself on a senseless round from bedroom to bathroom to kitchen to recliner.