High School Days

I went to get a massage this evening because my neck and back hurt. I mean hurt-ache-twinge-pain-ouch-hurt. It's the second time they've told me I have a "trigger point" along my spine that seizes up when stressed/sit-too-long/insert-relative-menial-labor-task-here. The only thing I ever remember like that was being trigger-happy enough to knock opposing players off the field with my hip while playing for the ball...

I am starting to reminisce --

those days when defense was my stance:

on the court, on the field, off the field.

I can taste the metallic sweat

of not-giving-in, still.

My body is the same me it was, but

I know the muscles have shape-shifted.

The memory retained but they'd mock

my daily performances;

the repetitive plays of "phone, email, desk";

the nylon, polyester, mascara of my new uniform.

Dreaming of Warm Sunshine

Travelling home on the tube on Tuesday evening something reminded me of a back yard I used to play in as an older kid: nine or ten years old, playing with my friend Bree while her mom 'babysat' us. Bree was always a lot of fun and we made the back yard our playground even though it was mostly dust and fallen plums in the shadow of eucalyptus trees.

Catching Flies

Being with Bree, even catching flies was fun.

More than fun, it became an afternoon's mission:

holding her plastic atrium poised, we waited

for the right moment to strike, the other of us grasping

the purple lid that would ultimately secure the flies

in their new four-walled, see-through world.

The fact that her back yard--a softly sloping hill,

dust we kicked up and hundreds of fallen plums--

vibrated with little winged creatures didn't really bother us.

My memory, even then, tinted the scene in sepia--

tones of eucalyptus trees and childhood--

and her hair glinted gold down the length of her back.

She held me in wonder, even catching flies.

Oh, the snow....

Hello, again.

I know what you might be thinking, 'Did she write a poem today?'

No, I didn't write a poem, but it did snow in London. Quite a lot for the city, in fact, over the last two days and moments of my day have been quite poetic enough for this, the 1st December.

The holidays really are here--and when I say the holidays, I really mean my birthday, the countdown begun. I can't help but think of my birthday and snow as two peas in a pod. Sure, when I was little I yearned for the pool party, the popsicles, the summers running around in the sun (credit to my parents, I did get an un-birthday party in June once. It was a blast!).

But then, I wouldn't have the snow. Or ice skating. Or memories of hot chocolate and piling into the peach mobile to go look at all the Christmas lights around little ol' Yreka with all my pre-teen friends.

I can't help it, I was giddy today that it was December. Hello, birthday month. Hello, holidays. Hello, snow and hot chocolate and the end-of-the-year reflections. Another season has passed, another year older. And, another white winter in London Town.

My Toska & Cafuné

Admittedly, I struggled to write poetry today. Every time I had a thought of "Oh yeah, I've got time now to write a poem," undoubtedly Twitter or Soduko or wedding blogs looked more appealing. Thus, I turned to a prompt to get the writing going (20 Awesomely Untranslatable Words from Around the World -- hat tip, sasqi, once more) and drafted a few somethings in the shapes of poems. I kept to the form and the challenge, and some days that is enough.

I also don't think what I've written is terrible either. Just, well, lack-luster on its first arrival that's all.

Some lines from:

My Toska

you are the unwanted ache,
the direct line dredging in my gut,
the smile that left too soon

and

Cafuné

You didn't run your fingers
through my long blond hair
but you did traces lines
down my bare back,
your fingers adorned with
dollar-store fake nails
we'd received from a party goody bag

Chasing Leaves

"She's chasing leaves," says the man

next to me with the white Yorkie

and the purple cravat.

Today I thought of you, Pumpkin Queen!

For Tuesday - Lifesavers

Lifesavers. Now that's a candy I'd forgotten about. I did, upon my last trip home to California, get really excited when I found Butter Rum lifesavers at the grocery store and snapped them up to bring home to my love who loves rum. Turns out, she doesn't love Butter Rum.

I had forgotten the joy of lifesavers. How as a kid I knew I couldn't choke on one because they had a hole in the middle. My favorite vacillated between the red ones (cherry? strawberry? red?) and the pineapple flavors. But there always seemed to be, in my memory anyway, less pineapple ones that red one (or orange ones for that matter). Somehow the pineapple seemed more rare, precious.

I officially miss those little ring candies.

The Land of Nod

Just finishing up a last minute email, I paused to wait for the website to load; my head nodded down to my chin. Bobbing back up to an 'awake' state, I recollected a favorite poem from when I was little: 'The Land of Nod' by Robert Louis Stevenson:

From Breakfast on through all the day
At home among my friends I stay,
But every night I go abroad
Afar into the land of Nod.

All by myself I have to go, 
With none to tell me what to do--
All alone beside the streams
And up the mountain-sides of dreams.

The strangest things are there for me, 
Both things to eat and things to see, 
And many frightening sights abroad 
Till morning in the land of Nod.

Try as I like to find the way, 
I never can get back by day,
Nor can remember plain and clear
The curious music that I hear.

A few thoughts:

I didn't know Robert Louis Stevenson was Scottish.
The poem did seem longer a kid.
When I searched the poem, it wasn't the one I thought it was.
I still like the illustration with the quilt as a sea of waves. 

Listening to the Stars

Dad, the guitarist is wearing a Triumph of London shirt.

Wind Instruments

I picked up my clarinet again tonight for the first time in over a year. More like a year and a half. The last time I played it was a warm, cloud-free summer evening Culver City, the porch light, a few flying insects and an aluminum trailer to keep me company.

For the past few days, my fingers have started to itch to play. Family has been visiting, I've had to work, emails and to-do lists have been beckoning me. But tonight as I got off the phone with a dear (and musically talented) friend eight time zones away, I saw the clocked ticked 15 mins until a reasonable bed time--just enough for a few goes on the clarinet.

Like the QWERTY keyboard is to me now, my fingers knew their respective positions on my wind instrument. Of all the items in my possession, my clarinet may be one of the oldest: we bought it for my second year of band in school and it's been with me ever since. I was probably an intermediate clarinetist when I stopped, and the beginners book is really what I'd prefer at the moment, and there is some sense of freedom and history in just playing a few notes, running a few scale patterns together--like picking up a conversation with a long lost friend and remembering it the same as ever with refreshing nuances and changes since you last spoke.

Mary Chapin Carpenter

I don't remember how old I was. It could have been when I was under 5 and 1/2--cause I don't remember where my brother was--or I could have been about 8 or 9. Either way, I loved everything about the concert. My parents got three tickets to see Mary Chapin Carpenter live at some theatre in the East Bay and I knew every word to every one of her songs. My parents commented later on how amazing her back-up band was, how fantastic her performance of 'Shut Up and Kiss Me' worked the crowd.

I couldn't have cared less about the former, but I remember her descending the stage and strutting her way through the center aisle, finding an appropriate lap to sit on at the opportune chorus moment. I was mesmorized by her perfomance, and sang right along with her. It was less that I wanted to be down there with her, an aisle seat on the path she walked, but more that I wanted to be her. To have that guts--and the glory--that raw talent.

A child under ten sitting next to her parents, singing along to every song was probably a sight to be seen. I remembered the guy behind me making some remark part way through the show, he had noticed my talent for lyrics, if you want to call it that. Me, I couldn't have been happier. It remains one of my favorite concerts of all time.

For Wednesday - Snow

It snowed in London today. I was sat at a long computer desk upstairs in a high-ceiled, big windowed office in Belsize Park--a beautiful, quiet part of North London--when I looked up and saw the snow lightly falling through the small window, over the rooftops. I spun my chair around to face the wall of windows behind me and watched as the snowflakes fell larger and larger and the wind moved them in swirls to the black pavement. The snow did not stick to the ground, but melted. My heart, though, was floating and I breathed deeply as I smiled...

The first time I saw snowflakes that large before--the size of a quarter or a 50p coin--it was my birthday and I was turning 12. My friends from 6th grade were all arriving via their parents' cars, pulled up in the middle of the road, the snow quickly accumulating on the ground, parked under the yellow street lamp to unload overnight stuff, sleeping bags, pillows and presents. From that year on, it snowed on my birthday every year until I left home. And even then, there has been at least a light dusting on the ground when I've woken, if not more.

Sure, my birthday is in December and the likelyhood of it snowing is greater than say, if I was born in August, and yet, that first year of snow, heavy snow, on my birthday was the first time it'd snowed all season. Like magic.

I was so happy to see it snow yesterday that it could have very well been my birthday yesterday anyway.

Bach

My friend Emily took piano lessons and horse riding lessons growing up. I was fascinated by this; either possibility had never really crossed my mind for myself. Emily would compete in Bach Piano competitions as we got older. I went to one, piled in the suburban with the rest of her family. Emily wore a black dress, I think.

For her 20th birthday, I got us tickets to go hear a Bach concerto at the San Francisco Symphony Hall. We sat in the highest balcony, leaning over the curved marble edge to peer down at the musicians, the vocalists, the harpsicord.

All throughout the concerto, I got lost within the music, wandered in the music, scribbling on my arm with a black ink pen: I had forgotten to bring any paper at all, did not know I would need paper to record--record...--the thoughts that came to me, the lines of poetry.

Lately, I have wanted to find myself in a symphony hall once more. I don't think I would have ever listened to Bach before without Emily. I miss both of them.

Where I Go

I hear a voice say, 'You asked me once, where I go.' The voice, she continues. 'This is where I go.'

The hill slopes down from a ring of oak trees where cloth tents are nestled on the even ground. A natural patch of trees upon a hilltop, overlooking a field, overlooking a lake (it is hidden from my sight by the tall grass, and eclisped by the great red-brown boulder I am heading towards), overlooking the valley which slopes back up into hills covered in oak trees. This is the place where my soul is truly happy.

This place is a neverland, a meditative happy place, but this place is neither of those things. This field with its trees looking over, its boulder my home in the center, this is where I was truly happy. This place is a memory of where I once was as I planned to be in my happiest days, and it is where I return to when I am my most lonely.

The contrast between the joy of the wind across the tops of the grasses and the breathlessness of my being inside. They are interconnected. They are never without one another. I am never without the other in the reflection of tears, of water droplets, of rainy puddle days.

Tonight

Tonight I was going to write about the children's novel I just read, Swallows and Amazons, that has me completely enthralled. I was going to write about the booby traps and forts my cousin and I made one warm autumn afternoon on the hillside down the ravine behind his house in the Sierra Nevadas. I was going to tell you about my adventures. But instead, I am going to turn off the computer and the desk lamp. Instead I am going to reach over and kiss my love's forehead as I shut off her side light. I am going to crawl in bed beside her and in turn put the room into darkness so that I can breathe deeply, feeling her warmth and knowing that right now that is more important.

Lullaby of My Childhood -- From a Cassette

Tell me why the stars do shine
Tell me why the ivy twines
Tell me why the sky's so blue
And then I'll tell you
Just why I love you

Because God made the start to shine
Because God made the ivy twine
Because God made the sky so blue
Because God made you
that's what I love you.

Grandma & Grandson

I hope he remembers this moment. Tan faced toddler in shorts a t-shirt, arm fully extended from reaching up to grasp the hand of his grandmother. I know her town, palest skin, white curly hair, wearing a pink house gown, staring up at the sky as if she is staring down the heat, concentrating. The little boy knows nothing of the heat, the street, shows only joy on his face. His fingers playing in his mouth, watching my ruby car as I drive by; me, thinking, I hope he remembers this moment.

Donuts

"OK, what do you want?" my dad would ask at the donut shop.

"A chocolate old fashion. And a apple juice."

I liked to eat the old fashioned donut in pieces, breaking off the side parts and eating them in a series of bites. Methodical, but not obsessive. I liked how to see how the frosting would crack, fissure, break from its center.

For Monday - Floral Dance

Dressed in white, we danced through the streets of Fowey. Onto the Esplanade, the little girl who'd joined us tired out. So I picked her up and carried her on my back as we danced.

The Country and The City

'Is it anything more than a well-known habit of using the past, the "good old days," as a stick to beat the present? [I Want to be a Cowgirl] It is clearly something of that, but there are still difficulties. The apparent resting places [open range, children's books], the successive Old Englands [The Wild West] to which we are confidently referred but which then start to move and recede, have some actual significance, when they are looked at in their own terms [Giddy Up, Cowgirl!]. Of course we notice their location in the childhoods of their authors, and this must be relevant [Susan Lowell]. Nostalgia, it can be said, is universal and persistent; only other men's nostalgias offend. A memory of childhood can be said persuasively, to have some permanent significance[Cindy Ellen, Little Red Cowboy Hat]. But again, what seemed a single escalator, a perpetual recession into history, turns out, on reflection, to be a more complicated movement: Old England [Old West], settlement [cattle drives], the rural virtues [gender roles]--all these, in fact, mean different things at different times, and quite different values are being brought to question [gender, identity, power, imagination].'

-- Raymond Williams, The Country and the City
(1975, 21-2; notes mine)

Notes from a Field II