A dozen years ago, and I am standing in the arts center of the social services agency I work at. The arts center director is standing next to me, and she is tired, not just from the efforts of this day, but of this week, of the years of struggling to bring services to this community.

We are watching a stream of homeless people enter the center. They are there to see a performance and she says to me, so weary:

I don’t know why we bother. These people have so many other problems.

I want to console her, I want her to know what she does matters, so I reply:

You are offering them something important. They are getting to have a “normal” experience despite how they are living right now. They can come to this place and be respected, come to a place that respects itself, where things are orderly and taken care of. It’s safe and clean and they are welcome here.

I know what I look like in contrast to the people behind me, shuffling into the theater. With my good education, my good teeth, my good suit, I know what I look like to her. And I know where my empathy come from and it should not be such a big surprise, but I have said what I needed to and I carefully shut my mouth.

Because sometimes I see more than I say.

Nerd Girl Club Credentials

This week I re-mounted my crack vial collection. This is not such a great shot through the glass, but you get the idea. The total collection is close to 100, all singular specimens, and arranged by hue...roy g biv plus black, white, silver and gold.

I got invited to join a NYC manhole cover photoblogger group. I can't even begin to tell you what goofy delirious joy this brings me.

Because sometimes I read more than I write (and sometimes I spend all day editing and spinning my thinky wheels)...

"and when I hold my head up you'll know that I'm fragile and you could break me with a harsh whisper and when I walk through the world you'll know that the only grace I ever had I spat into the alley that night and replaced with wild laughter. And we will be beautiful."

visit Conclusion Free Since 1978! for more.

You should fall in love with me.

Because I am crouching in the gutter, taking a picture of something, intense, and you wonder if you can make me laugh with the same intensity, what my waist will feel like under your hands.

Because I am wearing this red dress, so I will burn visible in the blue hour, and you are woozy with delight that it is spring and the air is soft, and when I pass you remember that the pretty girl always goes home alone.

Because this city is a catwalk and I cannot help but to swing down the street with a dip step, a skip, and you would like to let me flow through your fingers like a stream, gather me up precious, press me to you.

Because when you look into my face you know there will be a home for you inside me and we can make worlds and set boats of flowers to sail and have birthdays every day, and that is where everything begins.

Today everyone seems so sad around their mouths. I have my headphones on and am blasting music, blasting joy through my head. This works very well, but to know if someone is speaking to me, I have to watch mouths.

The girl who should be so young and pretty, but her mouth in repose is set grimly downward, suggesting a perpetual disappointment.

The man who is appealing in an earnest John Denver round-spectacled sort of way, but his thin skin and buzzed hair reveal the ferocious clenching of the muscles in his jaw, like nervous animals they skitter and chase each other around the periphery of his face and under his scalp.

The Brighton-Beach style woman of beyond a certain age, overweight, peroxided hair, her lips collagened into a bloated limp fish's mouth.

The pulled-together smart-looking business woman who keeps working her jaw in circles like she is working over a piece of chewing gum, but she isn't, and when her face finally comes to rest she has the overshot and fearsome features of a bull dog.

If You Leave Take Me With You

“We can break each others hearts again and again, there will be a popping sound like a firecracker when we do, sometimes it might sound like a drum roll. We will make music this way. Our hearts will be full of holes and soon they’ll be nothing left of us.”

I did not write this. But I find it extraordinary, a voice worthy of attention. His posting, at that *other* place is “If You Leave, Take Me With You.”

My sister and I were tenderhearted children and loved animals enormously. We were allowed rafts of pets, remarkable because our parents, with hearts and temperaments already too inflexible for the chaos of family, were not inclined to invite dirt, noise, slobber, the whole echhhk, unpredictable wildness of animal into the house. But we were allowed nearly anything we wanted, within reason: frogs; gerbils; dogs; newts; hamsters; cats; a raccoon and eventually a horse.

You would think that would be enough, but we were always bringing home additional finds, an egg from an abandoned nest, a dazed lone baby bunny, a newly-hatched tiny grass snake. One day, hanging out at a nearby stable, I found a barn cat terrorizing a baby mouse. The mouse was unhurt, but cornered, and easy to scoop up and take home.

I showed it to my mother, who declared it was not a mouse, but a rat, and not allowed into the house. I could keep it, but outside only. So I made it a nice home in a terrarium and put it near the raccoon’s pen. The raccoon was an awesome pet, with her own language of soft clicks and chirrs, a wonderful smell, a delightful way of playing and interacting with us, the cat and the dog.

What do you remember about raccoons from watching Wild Kingdom? Aside from having the oddly charming habit of washing all their food before they eat it, they have nearly opposable thumbs, making them amazing escape artists from any kind of containment. As members of the bear family, they eat what bears eat—sweet things, like fruit, berries and honey. Also high protein things, like grubs and worms. And meat. Since raccoons are not really built for hunting success, this means mostly small game: frogs, crawdads, mice.

You can see where this is going. And it did. Too tempted, too curious about her new neighbor, she found yet another way to slip out of her pen, and I caught her in the act, with her soft, black cushioned paws in the terrarium. The mouse was mortally wounded and I snatched it away and ran to my mother, hoping that somehow it could be made better.

She declared that there was no way to make it better, and that I needed to take it out of the house and do what had to be done. I looked at my little pet, wriggling in my hand, a pink loop of intestine poking from a puncture in its tiny belly. I went outside, to the field across the street. I found a flat rock and placed the mouse on it. I found another flat rock, lifted it above my head, and did what I had to do.

Road Trip Rules

1) You must eat at McDonald’s. Status: accomplished. Not some wussy salad, but a big nasty hamburger, a bucket of french fries and half a basketball of Coke. Oh god.

2) You must play loud traveling music, and sing even louder. Status: accomplished. Rolling Stones, Lucinda Williams, Sheryl Crow, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Bonus points for howling off-key.

3) You must take the top down. Status: hell no. 45 degrees and raining. However, partial credit for driving with the top semi-open. The duct tape holding the back window on ripped loose at 85 mph on the Hutch, trailing a silver streamer a yard long all the way home. Bonus points for laughter.

4) You must pull into a rest stop for hot monkey sex. Status: not applicable.

5) You must stop at weird little museums. Status: accomplished. The Golden Age of Trucking Museum in Waterbury, CT. The gift shop stocks those items important for truckers—Burt’s Bees glitter lip balm, maple syrup, crayons. And it does beg the question, where is the Bronze Age of Trucking Museum? Or The Stone Age of Trucking Museum?

In the Russian language “red” and “beautiful” have the same root. As they should.

Several years ago I bought a red dress. There was a man, and I wanted him to think I was beautiful, I wanted to be beautiful for him.

I never wore that dress much. I didn’t actually have the guts to demand that much attention. But yesterday, because the springtime flashes of bare skin are starting to emerge all around me, because my arms, my collarbones, my knees are starved to be touched by the sun, I put it on.

I went about my business, in Midtown, the Lower East Side, Union Square, the East Village. Wearing that red dress made me lift my head, look people in the eye, it made me feel beautiful and I smiled and smiled.

That lovely warm day was followed by a lovely cool night, and the first night to sleep with the windows wide open, delicious air streaming across my bed. Now the red dress is put away, and with it it's charm, and the bed feels so empty, as it should.

Today, however, I bought another red dress.

Commuting 4/20

I love the girls who are wrens. The girl equivalent of dusty, small, brown, they are not the ones you notice, not screaming for your attention. Their hair is messily swept back, there are three pens sticking out of their purse, they are earnestly clutching some reading material. Their feet turn in, there is ink on their hands, their knees are bony.

I am watching a little wren on the train this morning, she is wearing my favorite wren girl combination of blue and brown, a blue blouse with a brown nerd cardigan over it. No make up, a sloppy bun with bangs falling over her forehead, knobby fingered, and I feel my own kin.

6 Things

I have been touched by the 6 Things Meme Fairy. (or is that the 6 Things Me! Me! Fairy?) And so, six things about me:

1) The alpha and omega of my personality just might be my finger puppet and crack vial collections.

2) I like to read building permits. I will climb up on people’s stoops or enter construction sites to do this. I once terrified the contractors on a huge project by asking that they show me their permits, in compliance with the regulations that mandate their public display. I think they thought I was gonna bust them.

3) My southern accent was so thick, I was well into my twenties and still pronounced ford, forward and forehead all the same: foooh-uuuurd. If I didn’t understand something you said, I used to say: do whuuuuuuut? That had to be beaten out of me with a stick.

4) Those dreams you have where the bell has rung and you’re standing in the hallway of your high school and you don’t know which class to go to and you are naked? I have those dreams sometimes. And I’m always like, cool! Everyone will be so freaked out and uncomfortable, but not me!

5) I desire books. Particularly art books, big glossy ones. I don’t necessarily want to read them, I mostly want to possess them. Possess their potential, their world, their knowledge, know that I can access it when I want.

6) I have a nearly invisible mole on the underside of my nose. I fretted over it when I was a kid, and my mother told me not to worry, that boys would kiss it when I grew up. Boys have only kissed it after I tell them this.

Today the train sways perfectly in time with the music in my ears and commuting is time for reviewing recent pictures in my head.

The cop dusting for fingerprints, the shattered car window, her Easter bunny headband.

Turn around to exit the train and there is a tiny Spike Lee, solemn and owlish, a book folded neatly into his hands: John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men.

Clipping the vines and fussing over the dozen teeny heads of lettuce at the old house, and there is as always huge bumble bees, cargo jets, zeppelins, trundling gravid over the fence.

Saying good bye to my friend. The glare of the sun and I can’t tell if he can see me through the bus windows, so I stick both arms in the air and wave like crazy, joyous and grateful for laughter.

Distracted, I am late for work again. Of course I will work through lunch. Stay late. Stay later. Take work home on the weekends. I am deeply connected with the work I do, with what it means to serve.

But I am walking down the street and my eye is caught again. A blue, a rusting lock, a shadow, and I am squinting, turning it over in my head. A grate, a tree, a forgotten slip of paper and I am cocking my head, looking.

I will be late for work again, but only by a little, and oh so much the better for it.

I am running through a blizzard at night. I am carrying the baby, the house is on fire behind me. I am nine years old.


There is a blizzard approaching. And when my father ends his evening class, the battery in his car is dead. The university is deep in inner-city Chicago, it is closing down for the storm, there is no way for him to get home. My sister and I are 11 and nine, we are well-behaved, responsible, and the baby is asleep, if she leaves now she might beat the storm, and so my mother makes the journey to pick him up.

We are happy because we can watch television, which is forbidden. On the commercial breaks I go into the kitchen to wash the dishes. Just because we are unsupervised and a little naughty does not mean we are not dutiful. One break, I notice a bright glow from the oven, where my mother has left my father’s dinner to stay warm. I open the door to a wave of heat, flames starting from the wrapped plate. Slam the door closed, tell my sister, who tells me I must be mistaken.

On the next break I enter the kitchen again, and now there is smoke coming out of the oven, a conflagration. My sister pays attention this time and she is good. She grabs the fire extinguisher, pulls the pin, and starts spraying the fire. Yells at me to get the baby and get out.

I do. Get the baby, run to the garage, where I am waiting barefoot, coatless, for a sign that all is safe. That sign does not come. The wind moans, blows snow under the garage doors. I can’t go back into the house to help my sister, can't put the baby down on the seeping snow and the cold concrete.

And so, I am running through a blizzard at night. I am carrying the baby, and the house is on fire behind me.

For Horses of Passover

Clippety-clop, coming through the window of my office. Rats, I have missed the police horses stationed all around for Passover. I was so looking forward to having new horse stories to tell. So a re-post will have to suffice:


I love fall in New York. All of the Jewish observant days means there is increased police presence in the neighborhood I work in. The fact that this is necessary would be sad, but it means one great happiness will be in abundance, the most enduring NYC cop public relations image since the toilet plunger: police horses!

And the horses are beautiful-- tall, glossy and irresistibly exotic. They always draw a crowd of kids and their parents, a seamless appeal spread over the immigrant Chinese families, the Nuevo Ricans, the orthodox Jews. Usually the parents are just as awed as the kids, and they all just stand there, no-one daring to get close, just admiring.

But I am prepared, armed. I stroll up, get quick eye approval from the officer, then approach the horse. Pet his smooth muscular neck, then turn to the kids, who are now goggle eyed. Pull a packet of carrots out of my pocket.

Who wants to feed the horse?

They giggle, shove their hands into their pockets, hide their hands behind their backs. But there is always one kid—a kid with long payes in a black holiday suit, a Chinese kid with a cartoon character backpack, a Puerto Rican kid in a slouchy hoodie, that has that gleam in his eye.

I show them how to let the horse smell them, lift your hand to the massive muzzle, tuck your thumb in so avoid miscommunications, keep the carrot in the palm of your hand. At the first chuff of breath on their hand they pull back. I’ll take their hand and hold it up, cradled and safe, and when the muzzle whiskers tickle their hand, they will laugh, when the enormous gentle lips lap up the carrot they will collapse back into the group.

Another brave kid will step up, sometimes another, until we are standing in a ring of smiles, fostered by this gentle act.

Twice a week I head to midtown for a quick trip to the allergist. These visits cut into my work day and a sense of urgency surrounding my own duties coupled with the general freneticism of the commercial district make me all business. I know exactly where to stand on the train to get onto the platform right by the stairs that lead to the street closest to my destination.

I am walking quickly, stepping around smaller people, running up the stairs if I can. Or shuffling along in a long line of step-to-the-right winding rows of other trapped and herded commuters. Then I am burped out, extruded into Herald Square with the tourists, the boutiques, the newspaper hawkers, idling trucks, honking horns.

In front of a nearby building is a huge planter filled with unnaturally early hyacinths. By now I am usually a little overwhelmed and they are such a welcome sight. Each time I pass I bend down and take, not a little sniff, but a long, extended vacation, my nose buried.

Today a nearby doorman calls me out. “Hey! I always see you! You smell the flowers!” He has noticed me, and how rare is that in this city? I drop my head, embarrassed and pleased.

Enough Already!

I love the color green. I love the idea of green. It is the magnet and the compass that drew me from dust and drought Oklahoma up north to cool summers, evergreens, venerable mountains.

I admire red--lush, reckless, unapologetic. It laughs too loudly, throws its head back, orders another round that tips an evening from polite over to raucous.

I don’t like yellow. The color laid over too many barren ugly institutional rooms trying to force cheeriness down my throat. It makes me angry, rebel, fuck you! I’ll be happy my own way and in my own time. The brighter the yellow, the more affronted I am.

I am thrilled it is spring. Don’t misunderstand. But out of the subway each morning there are drifts, rafts, platoons of assaultive yellow daffodils. Sentry double rows of eye-stab forsythia. I know I must be a real New Yorker, because it is irritating me mightily, enough already!

After only one week, I am jonesing for the next phase of spring: a slut of red tulips, a royalty of purple irises, a tizzy of pink magnolias, a Wall-Street-at-lunchtime of pinstriped dogwood blossoms.

Commuting 4-11

Stuck in the tunnel, stalled out, re-routed, it takes half an hour to crawl three stations, people fuming and pissing, and I flee that train as soon as I can, leap across the platform to an unfamiliar subway line. The doors close, I pick my head up, and I am in another country. A country where they don’t let ugly people on public transportation.

I am a rusty crow, noticing three girls on one bench, all smart, young, hip in completely attractive and different ways. Their heads are bent over their reading, each at the exact same angle, and bing! bing! bing! each has a tiny gleaming silver stud in their right nostril.

A seat opens up across from them, next to a beautiful woman. Shiny, straight, jet black hair, luminous skin and huge dark eyes. And she takes out a huge compact and starts putting on make-up. What? She is drop-to-your-hands-and-knees-and-howl gorgeous. She is roll-on-your-back-on-a-bed-of-broken-glass stunning. I can hardly not do it myself. How could she possibly improve, what flaws does she see in that mirror? I watch her put on mascara, brushing the underside of her lashes, over and over. Then the top side, equally thoroughly. Then working the very inside corners, working the tiny brush, while the train is in full sway. Out comes a huge brush, and she starts puffing something all over her face…

I am, of course, transfixed. Until the doors open and a little blonde doll gets on. She is just so pretty. Stylish up to the second, lithe, a pointed chin like a kitten. She looks over her shoulder. Looks over her shoulder again. A third time. I do too…there is nothing there. She hitches her purse on her shoulder. Flips her hair. Re-positions her barrette. Fidgets. Examines her shoes. Adjusts her belt. Rubs her nose. (oh. now I get it) Takes of her coat. Puts down her bag. Re-positions her barrette. Does it again. Flips her hair. Looks over her shoulder.

I get off at the next stop.

She looks like an early-30’s back-to-graduate-school Bank Street kind of girl. No make-up, hair roughly pulled back into a ponytail, art-nerd glasses a watery, translucent lettuce green. She has a xeroxed coursepack article on BF Skinner balanced in one hand, earnest notes scribbled in the margins. She is determinedly clutching an orange highlighter and the subway pole with the other hand.

She is not the first woman you would notice at a party. Not the second one, or even the third, probably. She is not tall, elegant, sleek. But her face, as she concentrates on the words on the swaying train, could be home for someone. It is a face you would come to love, it has a kindness you should want to wake up to, take in for a quiet minute before the rumbling and tumult of the day.

Breaking Up is Hard to Do

With spring emerging all around me I keep dreaming of my old house. That tiny garden was hard won, but in the end brought me oh so many lettuces, strawberries, lilies, saffron, daffodils, the droning of bees slowly cruising heavy with pollen, the dart and call of fireflies amongst the flowering vines. So finally, with a warm weekend day, I am in the back of the new house, in my concrete un-garden, taking stock.

Taking stock with my sledge hammer, that is. I begin dismantling the low wall. It feels good to heft the sledge, let gravity pull it downward, gaining velocity until it hits the wall with a solid thump and chips of brick flying, a fissure starts, a brick moves. Sometimes a single brick comes loose, sometimes a chunk of eight or more, which I set on the ground and beat into more manageable hunks.

I continue until I have enough rubble to fill the 10 contractor’s bags I bought earlier. That’s all the work I will do today, just one small step. Sack it up, 10 bags at 50-60 pounds each, and that’s a quarter-ton of smashed brick and concrete to haul up the ladder, through the house, down the front steps, to the curb. I will have to do this twice more to get that wall down. Another 8 or ten times to remove the remaining walls. Countless numbers of times to remove the 2 inch concrete pad that covers the entire back.

There will be no garden this year, but, I hope, a gradually emerging idea of what can be, as I break it apart piece by piece.

Spring!

It seems like this week, suddenly, it is truly spring. The callary pear trees are blooming everywhere. They have tiny white flowers and are beloved by the city’s urban planners because the branches grow up in a graceful oval shape, without spreading or drooping. Of course, they only last about 20 years, before the weight of all the upward growth splits their trunks in half, but until then, there are years of dizzying swirls of their petals when the wind blows, drifts of snowy blooms in puddles after a rain.

There are trees that make me swoon. Transport me, transfix me, make my eyes go wide with delight. I tend to like the under-canopy trees, the ones who have to grab their attention before the bigger trees leaf out and cut out their sun. Those strivers burst forth early, risking the blight of a late frost to get their early glory. A redbud and oh, a dogwood, will make me stop dead in my tracks. And, for some reason, a weeping cherry is simply magic. I saw one around the corner from me on Friday, a huge old tree, to the tops of the surrounding brownstones, four stories tall. It was sending cascades of flowering branches from its very top all the way to the ground, a wild tumbling rush of pink blossoms that had me clinging to the chain link fence, craning for its loveliness.

Marathon (from 9/05)

On my way home tonight and I notice that the banners for the marathon are up and the blue direction lines have been painted on the street. I live one short block from the marathon route, at mile 8. I never paid much attention to it, until I moved onto the route.

Last year I got up extra early to stand in the cold to watch the elite runners and the other-abled runners who get a head-start on the regular runners. The elites whooshed past glossy and taut like a pack of thoroughbreds. Then the wheeled racers, athelete and machine working together in a thrum and then gone, making the turn north on Bedford Avenue.

And what I wasn’t expecting, what was so moving, I can only recommend you experience for yourself. The blind runners. The runners with mental disabilities. The runners with musculo-skeletal impairments. The runners with one leg. The runners with no feet.

Last year I saw him, way up Lafayette Avenue, towering over the other runners. So tall, I could not quite figure out what I was seeing. As he came closer I saw why, he had prosthetic feet, specially made for running. They were big, springy metals C’s where his feet once were. I was in such a state of awe, blinking stupidly, and when he ran past, he took off his sweat-soaked marathon jersey and threw it over to me.

I wear it when I go running sometimes. With my two good eyes, my straight limbs, my healthy lungs.

In the shower this morning, I was trying to decide whether I should go running today. My hip still hurts from my last run. What do I tell my doctor if the pain does not let up…I dislocated my hip 25 years ago, it hurts when I run, but I don’t want to stop running?

It made me wonder what I was trying to do by playing football with boys who were much bigger than me, boys who had gone away for the summer, to camp, to stay with relatives, and had come back so changed. Those boys were my neighborhood friends, my baseball team, my bike riding partners, my camping in the backyard buddies.

Throughout my younger life, I have always been friends with boys, taken on a boy’s physical bravado. I would fist fight the biggest boys at recess, ride a bike down the stairs at the school, be on the end of the whip ice-skating on the pond.

I thought that if I acted like a boy, no one would think I was a girl. I could hide from the very specific ways that a boy or a man could hurt a girl, things darkly hinted at, things I already knew too much about. So when I tackled that boy when I was 14, and felt something go wrong with my hip, I got up and walked home. I kept my back as stiff as I could, and tried not to limp, I didn’t want to be excluded from playing the next time we organized a sand lot game, I didn’t want to be called a girl, didn't want anyone to know I could be hurt. But really, that hip crunched out of its socket, that was the beginning of the end.

That was freshman year in high school. The year of that strange transformation, as I got breasts, traded glasses for contact lenses, got my braces off my teeth. The year boys who had been my friends started trying to look up the skirt of my mandatory school uniform. The year a boy who was in my group of friends tried to trick me into coming to his house when his parents were gone overnight, to get me alone and vulnerable, and all the other boys helped him deceive me. The year a boy with whom I had spent so many summer evenings playing soccer until it was too dark to see, him and his sisters against me and mine, pinned me to the ground, put the weight of his body on my face and forced something strange and horrible down my throat.

Recent Highlights

"She ate my heart like a ham on rye."

"It's not just sex sex sex sex sex sex sex sex filthy hard-core unprotected sex!"

"Reflection is the greater part of pallor."

Create

I am leaving for work in the morning, standing on the high stoop for a moment, relishing the solidity of the house at my back. It has just rained and the air is so fresh, perfectly chilled, and the sunlight is brilliant, bouncing from windows to puddles. The garbage is tucked to the curb, as is my beat-up car. The guys across the way are chatting and sweeping the sidewalk, bobbing their heads to those headed to the subway.

I had awoken in the middle of the night with a sensation of drowning, lungs full of the seawater of loss. But now I step off for a day with my head up. Not with the confidence of being beloved, as I would like, but with the assurance that today I will build and create, and for that I am so grateful.

Commuting and Crying

He is sitting across from me on the train. Plain, fifty-ish, an immigrant day-laborer. He is compact, solid, with heavy boots and rough clothes. A copy of El Diario is wrung in his hands and he is weeping, his face crumpled into itself. My own chest constricts as I watch his loss.

Commuting Together

I like to watch couples who commute together in the morning. I am, perhaps, overly romantic about this, never having had my life synchronize with another's in this way. But the idea of having those extra moments, having someone to quite literally watch your back, to hold you in the hustle and sway of the train, it seems so delightfully sweet and desirable.

So, of course I notice them, sitting close, whispering. They are drawn into each other, their dark heads pressed together. She gets up at her stop and moves to the door and he does not look up. As the train pulls into the station she calls to him and he does not look up. She says goodbye, loudly, as the doors slide open. The doors close and he still does not look up, and I can see now, his eyes and hands focused on the Playstation in his lap.

(this photo for my bloggie friend who likes her words well-balanced)

More of Friday's Walk to the Subway

Moving

I moved my bedroom to the back of the house, away from the street. Now, I can leave the curtains pulled back, and in the blue hour, watch the windows of my neighbors glow warmly against the darkening evening. The warm weather anticipates summer and the lights in the windows now blinking off and on portend summer's lovely fireflies.