My Dreaming Window

This is my kitchen window, at the back of the house, where I do my thinking and dreaming and writing, where my eyes unfocus and my mind wanders peacefully.

Once upon a time, there was a lush growth of ivy, thirty years of ivy, cascading down the brick wall that faces us. The owner of this building decided suddenly to destroy the four stories of ivy, and with it an entire ecosystem of birds and squirrels. I to this day fail to understand his reasoning. In a city where green is a rare and precious commodity, who has the temerity to kill that green? And if ivy were really destructive, then ancient universities and libraries the world over would long ago have crumbled to bits under its weight...

But that is neither here nor there.

Because the birds have persevered, the bright finches and dove-colored doves, and they visit the suet cube I hung from our rusty, rickety, dangerous old fire escape. Their little soft birdy noises keep me company in my solitary moments at the window, without disturbing my various trains of thought.



I have learned to see not the brick wall, but the sunlight and the tree-shadows cast there.

Where is your most special place for daydreaming?

The Five Stages

Once again, the time for our annual trip to Texas draws ominously nigh. Ten days in San Antone with my mother-in-law, truly a daunting prospect. My own mother commented the other day that every year I go through a predictable battery of emotions in the days leading up to this trip. It was a true insight (my mother is nothing if not psychologically insightful), but, further, I have discovered that my stages of dealing with this annual pilgrimage closely follow the famous 5 Stages of Grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance.

Denial: Although Sgt. Pepper repeatedly reminds me that I must do so and soon, I delay purchasing the airline tickets till the last possible moment. The weeks and days pass by, I am frequently online aimlessly wandering about, and still I do not pay a visit to the Jet Blue website. It is simplicity itself to accomplish this task, and still I do not. I am in full-fledged denial. We are not going to Texas, and so I have no need to buy the tickets.

Anger: Finally, grudgingly, I make the reservations and the purchase. We have a departure date, we have our seats. We have laid claim to the little packages of chocolate chip cookies and blue potato chips and crappy headphones that will all soon be ours. And now, I am angry. I am testy. I feel put upon and act out at home. It is Sarge's fault that he has a mother to whom we must pay this visit. I begin to believe that we exist in some odd opposite universe, where he begat her to torment me.

Bargaining: I lose my nerve for the task ahead, and begin to plead with Sarge like he's God and can grant the reversal of fate. I will bake his favorite molasses cookies every day all year, watch Kung Fu movies, get out my violin and serenade him, discuss the works of Philip K. Dick (okay, that wouldn't be such a hardship) ad nauseam (but that would), and generally fulfill any whim or dream that he could cook up, if he would only let us forgo the trip. Heck, I'll even do all that if he would agree to make it a seven day road trip with a three day visit instead...I can tell Sarge, who really feels the same way I do, is about to start bargaining with me to let him stay home, so I rapidly cycle into the next stage,

Depression: I'm now resigned to fate, and become sadly quiet and pessimistic. I cry easily, and lose interest in daily activities I once enjoyed. I have trouble sleeping and lose my appetite. The black cloud descends...and I find myself caught between gloom and a dubious

Acceptance: I honor this new stage with the purchase of sunscreen and travel-size toothpaste and I unearth our duffel bags. We are going to Texas, it won't be so bad, at least it's in the 80s there and the Mexican food is amazing...

but then, in a strange out-of-body moment, I book a hair appointment for Monday morning, our departure date. Because if I have a hair appointment, that means we're not going to Texas...

and I'm right back at Denial...

Dark Night Blues

Why am I still awake at 3:50 a.m.?

Dark Night Blues - Blind Willie McTell



*Photo: "Dark and Quiet" by Tusu, from Flickr Creative Commons

Opulent

Grandma Eva's ruby and diamond ring. It makes me feel almost decadent when I wear it, so I wear it nearly every day. Grandma's fingers were just a bit sturdier than mine, and so the ring has a tendency to slip to one side but I don't mind that it has a little life of its own. It sparkles most transfixingly under any light, and I have been known to stop and stare, surreptitiously, at my own hand while shopping for apples and cauliflower in the market...

I like to pretend that I am a once-wealthy lady, who has suffered a reversal of fortune and fallen on hard times, but who will never, never, give up her rubies...

For Mistress MJ

Go HERE for a book report.

More Rejected Post Topics

Late in the evening of a fruitful day. I wish I could be so productive all the time. I went to the gym and did the grocery shopping, paid the bills, sort of, cleaned the house and did the laundry, worked at my awful dissertation, wrote half a chapter of my book, made the dinner, and knit an entire arm of Hedgie's sky blue sweater...

I would think I was all coked up, except that I wasn't.

But now I'm strangely wired from my own industry, and not ready yet to shut it down. If I could only wring one more thing from this busy day. So here I am, back at my computer. I would love to write a post, but can only think of unsuitably bizarre, dull, morbid, random topics.

Here's a sample--more rejected topics from my oddly amped-up brainpan:

1. Bizarre: My hamster's icy refusal of a proffered bit of hazelnut biscotti.

2. Random: Hedgie has a particular individual quirk of speech that causes people to ask, at least several times a week, whether she is British. I have taken to answering this stupid question with the following: "why yes, I found her on the streets of London, and she was so adorable that I just had to import her back to Brooklyn!" Hedgie just rolls her eyes, long-suffering.

3. Dull: My knitting. I do a lot of it, I buy a great deal of yarn, and I have a baker's dozen (read: more than 20) projects going, all stuffed into various tote bags around the house.

4. Random/Dull: Flowers. As part of my effort at sunny good cheer, my house has flowers in every room now--carnations in the bathrooms, lilies on the dining table, branches of peach blossom by the fireplace, daffodils in Hedgie's room, and something tenacious and pink, whose name is hard to recall, residing in the front hall...that's too many flowers.

5. Dull: My quest for a name for the hero of my novel. The heroine has a name, quite a good one, but the hero is so far nameless. Sarge and Hedgie were on the case this evening, Hedgie shouting names of Roman emperors and Greek gods from the tub, and Sarge armed with a pile of history books. Still no luck. His stand-in appellation is ridiculous. I'm finding it hard to take him seriously.

6. Bizarre: The incredible scavenging possibilities on the streets of my rich neighborhood. People throw away the most extraordinary things. Just this morning, on my way from market, I picked up a little book of portraits of Native Americans, a Smithsonian reprint. Recently, someone around the corner put out a little pile of lovely purses. And last year, my next-door neighbors threw out, and I retrieved in great excitement, a brand-new, still-in-the-box Fulla doll. Who throws out a perfectly good Fulla doll?

7. Dull, very very dull: The weather. It's spring, but it's chilly.

8. Dull, and bizarre, to everyone but me: more Severus. Two back to back posts about my special friend are probably one, maybe two, too many.

9. Morbid/Random/Dull/Bizarre: Pippin's ashes are ready and waiting at the vet's office for me to pick up. Yes, I paid a small fortune for his cremated remains, God only knows why, I don't think I was entirely in my right mind the night he died. I haven't been able to bring myself to walk the ten blocks to pick them up, for what are probably obvious reasons. If you haven't experienced the joy of what "they" refer to as "cremains," well then, you wouldn't know what "they"don't warn you about: there are bone fragments, some of them sizable, in that there heap o' ashes. I know this because I also have a box of dad hanging around the house...

I know for sure that you're thanking me for this last little item...

But I think I've thoroughly worn out my day, as well as my welcome, and I'll close up now.

Just be glad I didn't post about any of these...

How much is too much?

I repeat myself ad nauseaum: I'm a daydreamer. I guess I repeat it so often because I've come to believe it's my defining characteristic. It always was, but now as an adult I'm self-aware so I can see it clearly.

I ask myself, how much daydreaming is too much daydreaming? When has a girl's fantasy life become just a wee little bit too vivid?

I'm not sure it really matters, in a way, because I can't seem to stop myself. But I'm wondering just academically whether I spend too much time engaged in it. I guess I already know the answer to the question. But in a sort of masochistic truth exercise, a healing confessional, let me admit to the following misdeeds committed during episodes of Living while Daydreaming (which should probably be, in the High Home Court, a prosecutable offense akin to Driving while Intoxicated)

1. (I've mentioned this before, but as it's grievous, I'll repeat it) While engaged in a romantic moment with Sarge, he asks "Am I interrupting something?"

2. I hear Hedgie's voice, coming in as if from a very great distance, "Mama....mama....mama....mama....MAMA....MAMA!!!!!....why do you have that funny smile on your face?"

3. I drop Hedgie off at school, and on the way home pay Snape a visit in his dungeons...I arrive home at my real life door to my house, cart full of groceries, with no memory of how I got there. No memory of the market, the walk, not even a memory of fishing around in my purse for the keys. (See, it's almost like Dissociative Identity Disorder, but much more fun).

4. Just as Sarge and I have "our song" ("Misty Morning, Albert Bridge" by the Pogues) so too do Severus and I have a song (okay, I'll admit it, because it's just you and me here--it's "Just Like Heaven" by The Cure. But even more tellingly revealing of my delusion, I just know that he would find that completely distasteful, because he thinks our song is "Some Kinda Love" by the Velvet Underground. Because he would never be so maudlin. And because he's S&M like that. Plus, of course, dark-ish wizards love the Velvets, don'tcha know).

5. I've worked out a kink in the space-time-fiction-reality continuum that allows for these fantasies.

6. Just as I have to budget time for my workout at the Y, so too must I budget time for daydreaming. And which do you think gets short shrift? Although to be frank, I can multi-task at my workout.

7. I'm crocheting myself a pair of black lace above-the-elbow fingerless gloves...and let's just say that I don't plan on wearing them to any occasion in this world...

8. I've burnt the dinner more than twice and I'm really a good cook...yes, that was me standing at the stove gazing off into the distance long past the ringing of the kitchen timer...

9. And then there's THIS.

I won't even continue. It's just much too obvious that the jury's back on this one.


And now I must leave you to return my full attention to the Potions Master--I've been neglecting him of late, and he's getting itchy from his long lonely hours in the dungeons--I leave you to ponder the question that's really on my mind, though: can a Jewish girl from Brooklyn and a testy dead fictional British wizard with a penchant for the Dark Arts ever really have a chance at happiness?

And if you read through this, knowing that I'm completely sober as I wrote it, and you still respect me in the morning, well, God bless.

Vernal Equinox: I Will Show You Fear in a Handful of Dust

Spring today.  Although I love spring, all I can think about is this poem, "The Waste Land," and the first section. I think I'll just revel a little in my cloud of black gloom and existential angst.

You can read and if you like, go listen to Eliot himself reading in his evil little voice--but trust me, it grows on you:

T.S. Eliot reading "The Burial of the Dead"


I. THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD


April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the archduke's,
My cousin's, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
Frisch weht der Wind
Der Heimat zu.
Mein Irisch Kind,
Wo weilest du?
'You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
'They called me the hyacinth girl.'
—Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Od' und leer das Meer.






photo from Flickr Creative Commons, by Two Stout Monks

Fatoush: A Love Story

Michel and Me--my wedding luncheon--don't say a word about our enormous glasses! We were wearing them to check out the ring!



We all have intense olfactory, aural, and gustatory memories of those we've loved and lost--more than pictures and stories, a smell, a taste, or even the sound of a key in a lock or a jingle of dog collar can bring them back to us with stunning clarity.

Food is a great trigger for us all I'm sure--we can remember through food--nothing taps all our senses like it does--

My father-in-law, Michel, was a wonderful cook; you might even call him a natural born cook. I loved him very much, and am so sorry that I had the pleasure of his company here on earth for only a mere ten years, such a short time to get to know someone. In that time, though, he introduced me to his life, his culture, his personal history, through the meals he made for us. When I met Sarge and his family, I was already accustomed to Arabic food, growing up as I did right around the corner from a thriving Arab community on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. We shopped at Sahadi's for hummus and olives and pita bread, stopped in often at a little place for exotic fruit ice cream, and for a treat ate dinner sometimes at Tripoli, a very grand local Lebanese restaurant. But until I met Michel, I'd never had real home-cooked meals of this sort.

Michel appreciated my interest, and would school me in the ways of the Lebanese kitchen as much as possible, he would lay out a little dish of feta and olives, olive oil and "Arabic bread" at the breakfast table, and the two of us would share these treats before we made our way to the regular old eggs. He showed me how to make thick, rich lebneh by draining whole milk yogurt overnight in a colander lined with paper towel, then seasoning with garlic and mint and salt and pepper. He introduced me to the addition of fragrant orange flower water to lemonade, and I've always thought that it was as close to a magical fairy drink as anything could be. He made tender, falling-off-the-bone chicken in a tagine placed in their fireplace, and when I was pregnant with Hedgie and food tasted strange, his stewed chicken and moggrabiyeh became something of an obsession with me.

But nothing reminds me of Michel more than the fresh, wonderful fatoush salad he would prepare every time we visited. I can see him clearly standing at the little wooden butcher-block island, carefully cutting vegetables with his little paring-knife, in the Middle-Eastern way, even and precise, so pretty and unlike the rough, lazy salads of my own kitchen. Cucumbers, lettuce, sweet good tomatoes, maybe some cauliflower bits if they were around the house, a dressing so light and rich at the same time: crushed garlic, olive oil, fresh lemon juice, salt, pepper. And on top of this would be the small, even, toasted Arabic bread squares, waiting to soak up the delicious garlicky lemony juices. Michel told me that no Lebanese household could ever tolerate wasted food, and so the stale bread would find its place in this way. Even leftover, soggy, the salad would be the most sought-after tupperware in the fridge, when Sarge and I made a late-night snacking foray.

For Sarge, these foods are the taste, scent, and texture of his childhood in Beirut. For me, they're the essence of Michel, and the kind way he welcomed me into his family, my real introduction to a culture once foreign, but now a true part of who I am: the Lebanese blood of my daughter, the memories that are now mine too, a very real vestige of a world that might have been lost but not for our meeting in the kitchen!

Kiss Tag Boy Crazy

A new development in 8-year-old Hedgehog's development--notice how blithely I trip from the total psychic meltdown of previous post, to lighthearted musings--made itself known last Saturday.

One of Hedgie's very best friends is a boy, I'll call him Hector, a marvelous charismatic little boy I believe I've spoken of before--he's naughty, rip-roaringly funny, and so kind with Hedgie, and he's an intellectual powerhouse, perfectly matched in his wide-ranging and obscure interests and little obsessions to her own idiosyncratic way of being in the world.

Last week, Hedgie and I were talking about crushes--who had one on whom in her class, among her friends. I asked--probably I shouldn't have, but I couldn't resist--"do you have any crushes going right now Hedgie?" She told me she had a crush on Hector. "Really?" I asked. "Do you think there's a difference between having a crush and being good friends?" "Yes," she replied. "There is a difference. But in Hector's case, I have a crush and a friendship. You know, I think he's really handsome."

Ah. Well, Hector is a handsome little boy. And, even more compellingly, he has such a courtly manner with Hedgie--deferring to her wishes, letting her hold his hand as they walk down the street. Friendship and a crush--on such lucky happenstance are marriages built. I should know. But I didn't mention this to her.

Anyway...

Saturday mornings Hedgie, Hector, and their other dear friend Nicole attend Tae Kwan Do classes, after which we all retire to the charming local cafe for Limonata, Whoopie pies, lavish paninis, and other high-end gastronomic delights (which at this moment in time, I might add, I can ill afford, but I figure, hey--what's life for if not a Saturday afternoon guilt-free indulgence...). The children take their own table and spend a nice hour discussing Lord knows what--they seem so sophisticated and well-behaved, until the moment when, suddenly, they aren't. We parents joke that that moment comes unbidden--and then they must be set free poste-haste, before chaos descends on the quiet little bistro--the three children bum-rush the door and crowd through it comically shoving--bursting forth wildly into the sunshine and fresh air like they'd just spent a month chained in the dankest of dungeons.

Usually, their reclaimed freedom is expressed in unstructured running, up and down the block, until they are winded. Last Saturday, though, one of the children called out "Kiss tag!!!!!" and of one accord they began a new--ominously new--game of, well, kiss tag. I needn't elaborate, I'm sure. Hector pursued the girls, who stayed a step ahead, shrieking, until they allowed themselves to be caught and kissed. Over and over, until it was decided that there would no longer be a "base" and so all bets were off. Screaming, catching, exaggerated smooching on cheeks.

The parents--well, we weren't sure what exactly to do. We were trying not to laugh, trying not to watch, trying to chat idly about other things.

I wonder what Hedgie will be like as she gets older. Will she be boy-crazy like me? I was, am, and always will be absolutely stark-raving boy-crazy, I know, I know, I've said it before. Even now I am, as boy crazy as a happily-faithfully-married woman can be. It's a joke in our household--Hedgie's aunt, my sis, is always warning Hedgie "don't be boy-crazy like your mama!" Hedgie always laughs.

I'm alarmed, but amused, but resigned to the inevitability of it all, but resistant--a kiss--so innocently given and taken--but still, watching my girl laughingly running away, and then letting him catch her--