Ideas

Ideas, like cats, don't 

come when called.

Mister Coffee

The coffee machine died.

A drip job with a Pyrex pot.

Found him bleeding over the kitchen counter.

Plastic skin stained and cracked.

I disposed of the remains.

The new machine is shiny and enthusiastic.

A pumped up Italian job.

I’m trying to bond

with this vigorous European.

But it doesn’t feel right.

I’m going to the Goodwill.

Find a Mr. Coffee.

Make a big pot,

Go watch baseball.

#

Yin and Yang

I stumbled on this quote by Diane Ackerman. I don’t know from which of her books the quote is taken. When I find out, I’ll add that information to the credit.

“The purpose of ritual for men is to learn the rules of power and competition. Watching sports together, for example, they see the formal enactment of ritual, become loyal to a team, learn to conceal their vulnerability. The purpose of ritual for women (going to lunch together, sharing a favorite salon, etc.) is to learn how to make human connections. They are often more intimate and vulnerable with one another than they are with their men, and taking care of other women teaches them to take care of themselves. In these formal ways, men and women domesticate their emotional lives. But their strategies are different, their biological itineraries are different. His sperm needs to travel, her egg needs to settle down. It's astonishing that they survive happily at all.”  Diane Ackerman

TiredforsolongIloveyou

My good friend Ella writes a column (among other things) on parenting. Prompted by another friend’s email about be ‘stuck’ by the recession in a new job far from home, Ella responded with this insight into her own life. I love her writing because she always walks right into the fire and tells it like it is.

This is what Ella said:

My desert is toddler. My desert is alone in this house, with a book called "How to Say No to Your Toddler" who is teething and tantrums and finally sleeping through the night after tired for solong. Yes, that is one word: tiredforsolong. It is the song of motherhood. TiredforsolongIloveyou. Ever since I had to take Forest out of day care, I have been here in this place alone, no respite except from 5 to 8pm when I cook and clean up and then go to bed. I bought a pint of Ben and jerry's coffee heath bar crunch, my special special, a treat I have not had for two years. I turned the corner into the kitchen on Sunday and found Michael there furtive, standing before the open freezer with my pint and a spoon and I said, If you stand there and mine the toffee bits from my ice cream I will come after you as you sleep and remove your liver with that spoon. That is mine, I said, foreshadowing maybe, what my boy will be saying so soon, over and over, if his colleagues in two-ness are any indication. 

I had time to write this weekend. And yesterday. I sat down with the pen and made lists of garden tasks. Nothing came. I miss Louisa's. I miss you, Melanie. Reading this made me want to open up and let it out again. I found a babysitter for Friday afternoons, just yesterday. I haven't been for at least a month. Winter is hard enough without being lost, or caged, or alone. But winter IS being lost, being caged. Being alone. Winter is when the moon rules, though we don't see her and that makes it harder. Our invisible empress.  Forest points at the sky in the middle of the moon cycle, points at the half moon and says "Moon!" He is talking, is beautiful, is distressed by the fact that I have finally realized that he will not break if I expect him to not stand on library books, not throw the crackers from his tupperware, not destroy my moss garden. But when I surround him with no, it breaks us. Just a little. That is what I have been reluctant to lose. I always sneered at the parents who wanted to be their child's "friend," but I misunderstood. We want to be our child's refuge from the world that we know is coming for them. Yesterday we spent the afternoon in the front yard, lifting rocks while Forest called for "Erms!" I showed him a millipede, held it in my hand but did not put it in his, wondering if it was true that they bite. I wanted to protect him from the idea that animals might hurt him. Then we found a worm sticking out of a clod of dirt and I held it out to him. Pull, I said. His finger are small, they are strong. They are like needle nosed pliers. He pulled but the worm got away. Again. Again. And then I saw the mud coming out of the end of the worm and looked at his fingers. He had been pulling pieces off the end of the worm, little crumbs of this creature. Oh, I said. That was a bad idea, I said. and buried the poor thing. That worm has probably had worse from robins, or one day will. But I want to protect Forest from cruelty. I don't want him to be the agent of pain any more than I want him to feel it. It's not my decision anymore. We found another worm and I put it in the palm of his hand and he put it in the dirt himself. He is layers of give and take. Like winter and spring. Bite and frost, shine and rain, bloom and wither and change.

From:

Ella Andrews lookingatbirchtrees@yahoo.com
See Ella's new BLOG at:  http://ellaspen.blogspot.com/

Happily

City of Thieves

Edition: Unabridged Audio

by     

David Benioff

Read by: Ron Perlman

I cannot recommend City of Thieves highly enough.

A gripping, marvelous, darkly comic, heroic, coming of age story set against the horrors of the Nazi siege of Leningrad during World War II. And yet, it could not be more fun. This is a rare gem of a story with a wonderful narrator, a great Cossack reluctant-hero (in the vein of Hans Solo), an unlikely love story and even a chess game with a devil.

I listened to the unabridged audio read brilliantly by Ron Perlman and I wouldn’t have traded his voice for anything.

I hated for it to end.