100 Words on Love: Grief

The final few weeks, the illness had taken away nearly everything that made her. The form was still there, but the light had dimmed to near nothing. I stroked her head, her face, feeling the bones through thinned skin. Her final breath skittered ragged across my hand.

She is but ashes now, still in the box they handed back to me. I don’t know what to do with them.

Bee Knuckle

I didn't like her when I met her. She was wild, loud, given to bouts of social impropriety. Later I found it masked her sweetness, her loyalty, her desire to give and be loved.

She was a mis-match of parts, but somehow it all worked together, mostly. People were either attracted by her cobbled-togetherness, or repelled by it's crudeness, visible seams.

I used to lean in, asking for a kiss, knowing I was playing her game of Russian Roulette. Sometimes she would oblige me. Sometimes she would bite me, a square honk on the nose.

Goddam I miss that dog.

Yesterday on the Lower East Side

More on Commuting

One of my best friends had a very difficult delivery of her second child. Terrible complications, a mother dying of cancer, another small child at home, and her extended hospital stay was draining everyone. So I stepped in to help. I went to the hospital, help care for her newborn son, made sure she got her meds on schedule, guard her from unwanted visitors.

It was all I could do. She looked horrible. She was so frightened about what was happening to her body. She was wasted and so terribly ill. I would take care of her, then go home and cry, at how powerless I was to make her better, at how vulnerable she was.

Riding the subway home one day, it is off-hours, the middle of the day. There are not many people on the train, and I am sunk in a whirl of upset, fear, anger for and about my friend. But I notice the guy getting on the train downtown. He is dressed up in cheap suit with an exaggerated strut, and I smell that perhaps he is fronting hard, fresh from some degrading experience with a social worker, probation officer, court official. He has his hand inside a potato chip bag, awkward and conspicuously hidden and that makes me want to watch him for bad intent.

He sits next to a woman, odd because there are only maybe 7 people on the train, he could sit anywhere. He starts to talk to her, and she answers in a low tone, non-committal, trying to be polite and shrug him off. But he persists in talking to her, asking her questions, which I can only barely make out and I can tell she is getting uncomfortable.

Then he gets louder, purposefully, so the whole train can hear what he is doing to her: What makes a woman think her pussy is so important? What makes her think she is sitting on the goddam world if she has a cunt? Huh? Why is that?

He is bullying her, humiliating her in front of everyone, her head is down, I can feel her confusion, helplessness, shame…why is this happening? How is this happening?

And I am already full of fear for the day. And I have had enough of bullying. Without getting up, without making a physical move I yell: Hey! You don’t know her! You don’t talk to her that way! Stop it!

He gives me a look, sizing me up to see if he needs to pay any attention to me. Yeah, he does need to, I am fuck-all furious. I lock eyes with him and will not back down my glare. He gets up, shuffles to the door, leaves at the next station. The women in the car thank me with their eyes. But I did it for my friend in the hospital, because I could do nothing else.

The Last Time

Sometimes, the last time you see someone, you don’t know it is the last time. There is no way to predict what life will bring after you part. A bullet. A car accident. A final falling out.

I have not known when would be the last time, with not so many, but an important few. I strain to know, to remember. Was there sadness? Was it just routine? What did their face look like, the shape of their shoulders as they walk away?

It is true, on some level, that I expect to have joy snatched away. So each good-bye is perhaps a little more freighted, as I try hard to remember. Saturday on the street corner, a glorious light and wildly framed by garlands of fake flowers tacked to the fence. Thursday morning, one kiss, another kiss, and I look up into his face and am pinned, as I am on occasion, by the color of his eye, to be held in his regard, the intimacy of the curve of his eyelid. The things I will need to know, can never be enough but will have to be enough, if there is no more.

For Dagger A

His face is ravaged, he is so awkward, short-limbed. He hangs out on the periphery of my friends, too young to be interesting. I run with the smartest, craziest boys. I am feared for my wildness. I am reckless and tart.

By all reasoning, by high-school codification, he has no right to approach me. But there is noone else around, and I am looking at the ground in the Smoke Hole. So he approaches, uses a line I will later hear so many times. “Smile for me.” A blank look from me, turning hostile and he counters, “A dollar for a smile.”

School lunch is a dollar. A dollar that I don’t have, won’t have any time soon. And I am hungry. He gets my smile and my contempt. I get lunch, hard to choke down around my self-loathing.

100 Words on Honesty: Unintentional Revelation

I am trying to get the guy who sits behind me in Russian class to give me his sandwich. He is a soc, doesn’t like me, but I am flirty and persistent, goading him into giving me his lunch.

The teacher, an elderly Holocaust survivor, overhears me, and shrieks horrified, What? Why have you no food? You are hungry? Where are your parents?

And with that she reveals to the entire class the shame I desperately do not want revealed: I am hungry, I have no family, and my provocative bullying is the only tool I know how to use.

Cheap and Immobile

Someone once asked Georgia O'Keeffe why she painted so many flowers. She said that they were cheaper than live models, and that they didn't move.

I want to be drawing more, a little every day, so I am reminded of this. After class, walking up Lexington Avenue, I think about drawing flowers. Tulips, yes, because they change every day. From the first day, fresh and straight, to a graceful elegant relaxing, to a revelatory dropping of petals. I am wrapped up in this vision, cold air snapping around me, walking fast in my excitement and I wind up at the subway station with empty hands.

Play Misty for Me

An 11 hour day, my knees hurt, and a huge commercial garbage truck is grinding at my heels. But I will stop at the closed florist’s window, look inside…and before I can settle my eyes I hear from the subway grate below a single trumpet starting a slow, woozy old standard:

“Look at me, I’m as helpless as a kitten up a tree.
And I feel like I’m clinging to a cloud, I can’t understand,
I get misty, just holding your hand…”

Nostalgic and blowsy like the hydrangeas, voluptuous as the tuberoses.

“Look my way, and a thousand violins begin to play.
Or it may be the sound of your hello, that music I hear,
I get misty, the moment you’re near…”

And then I see the red ranunculus, the loose tiered circles of ever so thin petals, so exactly pretty, quaint and sweet. And I feel my shoulders relax, I drop my fuck-you commuter attitude.

“On my own, would I wander through this wonderland alone?
Never knowing my right hand from my left, my hat from my glove,
I’m too misty, and too much in love…”

Beautiful. Perfect. Time to go home.

Commuting & Wondering 1-31

Out of the subway on Monday and the sky is such a beautiful blue. But I look down as I head to work. I pass the food pantry, where the elderly Chinese immigrants line up early, age-twisted bodies, shabby shoes. The line is a silence of fear, hunger, palpable misery on public display. I know not to look them in the face, cause them any more indignity.

In the looking down, I see stuck to the pavement the streamers of yesterday’s new year celebrations. Wet to the sidewalk from an overnight rain, brilliant streaks and blotches of exuberant blues and purples stretch all the way down the block. I follow them down the street to my office, wondering about how joyous those shuffling on the hand-out line had been yesterday, holding the hands of their grandchildren, the dragons, the red envelopes, the firecrackers

Commuting 3-21

A long subway ride this morning, but no one is telling me their story.

The balding guy who can’t be a native by the full-masted way he reads his Times.

The guy with a terrible toupee who is a native, by the polite vertical quartered way he is reading his.

The girl with the Playboy bunny-printed tote bag reading a glossy rag and I can only see an ad for “The Simple Life” on DVD.

The girl with the fetchingly torn jeans exposing a knee but I look at her face and she hasn’t been a girl in quite some time.

I get out at mid-town.

thanks a!

ooooohhhhh how cool is this for a map geek!

XXL

It's a big sale and the store is more than a bit of a madhouse.

“Do you have it in another size larger? Say, an XXL?” Hollers the boyfriend of one woman.

“Tsk! Imagine the insensitivity!” Cluck the saleswomen, after he has gone.

But I heard the whole thing. He asked her to come out of the dressing room to show him what she was trying on. He said that the color looked great on her. He told her that she looked beautiful. He was engaged, involved. I hope she doesn’t give a flying crap if the whole store knows what size she is, because she has a lover who wants to dress her, make her lovely.

Best Gift Ever

That year, I insisted, loudly, continuously, that I wanted nothing. I had love, family, my health, what more could I want? What an irritating drip I was. I had just bought my very first apartment, had a prestigious job, my sister was nearly through college and her triple girl-genius major made so proud like to burst. No, no, I don’t want anything I am so content.

She said she had bought me something, started ragging on my Zen crap on Thanksgiving. “You don’t know you want this, but you so want this.” No, really, there is not a thing I could want.

The day comes, she presents the gift. I probably barely contain my irritation at having my pious ass chapped like this. I am, however unwittingly, denying her the joy of giving, what a pill I am, so full of horse shit. I open it.

It’s a limited edition wrist-watch, Cruella de Ville from 101 Dalmatians. She freakin turned the state of Michigan upside down to get 1 of 100 for me. So cool.

Ah, god, she had my number. With that one act she was all grace and so gracefully punctured my pomposity and self-satisfaction. Point, set, match to baby sister.

Home: Nostalgic

Where you can sit on the deep front porch and watch the sprinkler rainbow into the thirsty air.

Cut the perfect sugar of a sweet potato pie with the perfect sour of a cheap beer.

See the whole world turn green and vibrate with a coming tornado.

Drive to the highest point and watch the transformers blow out under the weight of the annual ice storm—goodnight Owasso, Sapulpa, Turley, Coweta.

The place where the wide blue sky seemed to seal you in, the gentle hills blocked any long view, the round eye of the sun burned pale and blank.

Bliss

Tonight, I am standing in front of a store window. A siren screams down 86th street. An idling bus blows exhaust farts. But I am looking at a pot of Siberian irises, deep purple with vivid yellow throats, marked with black spots like tiny velvet buttons. The wind blows stray newspapers to slap and tangle against my ankles, but I have this image of flowers as I head towards the subway.

Grace: 100 Words

I am awkward. I say the wrong thing. My laugh is coarse. My feet turn in, my hair is rough.

But I do contain beauty. And joy. Compassion. Loyalty.

If you can find me in that place, if you can see me there, then you help me create that which I so greatly desire. You and I can make grace.

Intimacy

I am having a nightmare. In that odd, murky way that happens as you re-surface from a dream, I can hear myself making painful noises. Mewling, crying, scrabbling to get awake, to get safe. Not very loud, but loud enough to stir him, in his own sleep. He rolls towards me, puts his leg over mine, puts his arm around me, and draws me into him.

Envy on the F Train

I see her on the subway. She is pretty, not like me.

I think, I always wanted a dimple like that.

Does she think, I always wanted to be that tall?

I admire her shiny straight hair.

Does she likewise covet my long fingers?

I love the green of her eyes.

Does she want the freckles on my shoulders?

How funny to think it.

He made me feel so small. The sound of thin glass, like that of a light bulb, being crushed under his boot heel.

Girl Watching in the Laundromat

She has never been beautiful. She has never even been pretty. Cute is the best she can hope for and she knows it, working her youth, animation, hard on the cell phone call to her friend from the laundromat.

I listen to her over-enthused voice, watch her jerk-puppet gestures as she hustles her round body about, chattering. And later, I watch her, her eyes lifted to the commercial for Weight Watchers playing silently overhead, slipping pistachio nuts, one after another, into her mouth.

I may seem cool and appraising, secure in being tall, fit, symmetrical, my face in its public mask under this harsh lighting. But my heart is breaking for us both.

Back to School

Back to teaching again after a month's respite. A month's respite from slamming out of my office at straight up 5 o'clock to make it on time, leaving shivering stacks of undone deskwork. A month's respite from standing on a traffic flurried street corner on the deep gloomy Lower East Side, craning my neck and hopping up and down straining for a cab about as common as a golden fleece. A month's respite from the dark wait, snapping cold, winter drizzle.

I gird myself for the unpleasantness, hunch my shoulders. But tonight the air is soft and warm. Looking west through a gap in the projects is the hazy orange chemical glow of sunset over New Jersey. The eastern sky is a clear shot of waxing moon. Look up, and it is the coming of the blue hour, those gorgeous moments when everything looks so different.

Now I see, we are on the back end of winter's long days. And look! Here's a cab!

The Gift

My father built me the most wonderful doll house when I was 11. A yellow Victorian farmhouse.

It was truly lovely, magnificent, even. He covered the staircase and hallway in coffered paneling he hand made. The wrap-around porch had tiny turned spindles on the balustrades. The double-hung windows opened and closed. Together we laid a wood floor, and he showed me how to use a miniature miter box and I built elaborate period moldings.

There were four steps up to the front porch, and the space from porch to ground was covered in lattice work. Beautiful. My father insisted on putting a replica dead cat under the porch, because that was authentic, they always crawled under there to die.

Behind the gorgeous coffered panels of the staircase he also entombed a representation of a little boy. The little boy would starve to death there, for having hidden there to take a nap while he should have been working, he was unwittingly sealed in, and no one heeded his cries for help.

I begged him not to, to not leave these black marks on this gift to me. But the gift was from him, and necessarily, unavoidably, contained his ghosts of abandonment, punishment, shame. I polished the wooden floors, ran electricity through all the rooms, but neither light nor cleanliness worked as a purgation.

Commuting with Cleavage 3/7

I notice the cleavage first. I am clearly supposed to. If my eyes weren’t already bugged out from four shots of espresso, they surely would be now.

The deep V of her top exposes a broad swath of each of her impossibly cantilevered, smoothly engineered breasts. Over that is a black sequined jacket, more 3am clubbing than 8am F training. In case I didn’t get the message, flashing between her clavicles is a huge pendant, a glittering cheap diamonte heart.

She is digging in her bag and I see the usual stuff, pens, ipod, tissues and she takes out, looks like, a make-up bag. For what? More Look-At-Me? More sparkle lip gloss?

A crochet hook. Yarn. Something half-finished—white, fluffy, achingly delicate. And she sets to work, steady, quick fingered.

Flower Shopping

Spring is nearly here, but truly, I can't take it any more. My new backyard will be barren for months to come and there is the riotous bursting from flower vendors and I have my week's allowence in my pocket. Oh, yes, now you can have. The hyacinths as pink as they are fragrant. The rilled brilliant splash of daffodils. Loosely layered sleepy roses. Tulips which are sex no matter what shape or shade. No, I pick sea holly, a spiky unadorned elegance from foliage to flower.

Girl Watching on the C Train

It’s a rough week, and I’m having a hard time finding my sustenance, my daily scrap of beauty. And then she steps into the train. Oh, so beautiful. Not common, not obvious, something much more subtle, a sum greater than the parts.

She was probably teased in school, the face awkward on someone younger. She probably ducks cameras, having seen too many careless shots where her interesting angles are splayed ugly. She may still sting from her family’s attempts to dampen her style, keep her still and quiet, not the gorgeous and smart that emanates from her now.

In the ugly grubble hustle that is this morning’s commute, she is a glorious spot to rest my eyes. I am awed and grateful.

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Originally uploaded by ttractorpull.

A Memory of Horses

“What is that?” she said, pointing.
I guess I can’t blame her. It looks weird, out of place. We are 9 years old, sitting on the bleachers in the gym, swinging our feet. She is pointing to my arm, to the large ropy tricep snaking towards my elbow.

I don’t know what it is either, really, so I shrug. But I know how it got there.

My sister and I took the girl-love of horses just about as far as it would go. Riding lessons, jumping competitions, hanging out at the stables for no purpose just wasn’t enough. When we read the article in the local paper about the jockey, retired from the local track, who took old racehorses, walker ponies, and track companions and boarded them out until their end, and depended solely on donations and volunteer help, that was it. That’s where we spent afternoons every day and weekends too.

These horses, we would never be able to ride them. They were too old, blind, lame, spooky. We took care of them just to honor the animals they had been. We loaded hay and straw into the hayloft. We threw down the daily rations, twisting the wire baling off to loosen the leaves, tining them on pitch-forks as tall as we were. We mucked stalls, pushing wheelbarrows full of sodden straw and manure up, onto, over, hills of detritus that grew into veritable mountains before it was carted off.

We let the horses out to pasture, and gathered them in again in the evening. Once one of them did not come back to the sound of sweet grain rattling in a pan, and I went looking for her. She was cold already, and lying on her side she had a monumental bulk that she did not have in life. I was stunned by the suddenness, the silence of the act of death that happened on the long slow slope to the pond.

Cherokee and Francis were best friends. They would not pasture without each other. One deaf, one blind, and both ancient, they savored every day outside and were loathe to come in. They had to be collected by hand, urged, herded indoors. I saw many sunsets with the silhouette of Cherokee and Francis on the hill out back, catching the last of the sun, them standing head to flanks in a kind of horse 69, scratching each others rumps with their remaining teeth.

Eventually, my sister got a job at another stable, exercising horses for rich people too lazy or disengaged or busy to work their beautiful animals as much as they needed. Our base of operations moved to a new, clean, bright stable, with young people and shining full tack rooms and foals being born, and we left that dark, decrepit old stable full of geriatric, honorable horses behind.

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First Pet

We are maybe 5 and 7, my sister and I. In the spring, braving leeches and various unknown creepy things, we scoop up a bucket of scummy pond water and tote it back home. That bucket has precious cargo: untold dozens of tadpoles. We dump them into a terrarium, and begin the watch.

Polliwogs are great pets. They don’t eat anything but their own tails. You can watch their tails and bodies get slimmer as they are ingested and turned into four little nubbies, then four little leggies, then real legs, with teeny toes, smaller than your own teeny 5 year old’s eyelashes.

Of course, there are casualties. Not all of them make it. Their numbers are severely depleted by the time we realize they need a rock in their terrarium, so they can start spending time out of the water. Something does seem to go wrong here, though. They climb out of the water, hang out on the rock…and get stuck. We keep having to pry them off with a butter knife. Tiny frogs, 7 years olds with knives, well, you know what happens to many of those brave survivors.

One makes it all the way to maturity, a brilliant green tree frog, no bigger than your adult thumb nail. Every day we catch him three ants (two for breakfast, one for spare), with the utmost care and fixed attention of children who know they are in the presence of something precious. We name it after the only other tiny rare thing we know: Bon Bon.

I grew up pretty rural. The "corner store" was a half mile away, and had a hitching post for your horse.

We don't have stoplights. The streets are laid out in 1-mile grids, with a stop sign at each corner, each mile. The speed limit is 55 miles an hour on these narrow 2-lane roads, making them an insane stop-and-go speedway that stretches for tens, hundreds, of miles.

Some meth'ed up cowboys resent having to stop every minute, on their way to Coweta, Okmulgee, Nowata, and take out their frustration in a curious way you have probably heard of: shooting stop signs. You have seen pictures of them, riddled through and rusting like old lace, their shamed faces listing downwards.

My sister's friends take this one step further (not mine, we are too busy doing SMART kid stupid things, like having hot sauce eating contests). They beat the stop signs up. Beat them to the ground. With their fists, their feet. Stomping, punching, bloody knuckles, spit and swears flying.

I don't know what makes them do this. Inchoate fury, pure testosterone, trapped frustration. I just think they are wildly stupid and their wildness scares me.

The Banana Comes in Second

My grandfather and grandmother ran the family’s pharmacies in a small upstate county. Real, old-fashioned ones, with wooden thump-echo floors, mortar and pestles they used to grind compounds, high tin ceilings.

We loved to visit our grandparents, not only because we could walk in the cool mountains, but because we could visit the pharmacy and pick one piece of candy. That’s ONE, for both my sister and I to share.

At three years old, the Life Savers display is eye level and a sumptuous riot of possibilities. I could stand there all day, delicious agony and anticipation, savoring my place at the threshold of decision. My sister will make the choice. We both like Butter Rum, satisfyingly homogenous throughout the roll. But also Fancy Fruit, with the breathless drama of each piece being different, each one a potential joy or disappointment. We have rules, the two of us: we open and very rigorously take turns picking off the top candy, no skipping, no whining, no trading if you get the dreaded, awful, sick lymph-colored pineapple. We know what we each are secretly hoping for, yearning with the singlemindedness of the very young, that spiked moment of joy: the one and only coconut. Or secondly, banana (of course).

Urban Hunter Gatherers

We parted on the street corner, necessities of modern life pulling us apart, and I wandered off to find my car, urban hunt and gather for food. Jaywalking across the street I see one of the neighborhood hustlers pick up his pace, jogging, angling his path to intersect mine.

“Hi! I’m Robert! I live in the neighborhood! I haven’t seen you around! Can I be your boyfriend?”

I imagine you ambling towards home, hands jammed into your pockets against the first of winter’s bites. The smell of you is on my skin, a smile pulled on all over me like a bodystocking.

“No, thank you. I already have one.”

Sometimes Music Just Happens

Standing on the high stoop of the new house, surveying the new neighborhood, appraising it now as a member, I hear a car alarm go off. A simple, deep beep…beep…beep, laying down a bass drum beat.

At the stoplight, sound is leaking out of one cars’ rolled up windows, a complicated high-hat trill of latin music, smoothing right over the car alarm beat.

Then, the mosque around the corner sets off its call to prayer, the minor-key free floating vocals swirl like smoke, and thread all the sounds together.

And there it is, urban car alarm, latin percussion, muslim prayer, the sound of my new neighborhood.

100 Words: Regret

I sued for custody. And I lost. We lost. I took you away too soon, before the legal case was iron-clad, to catch you before you were broken. I regret I did not let her beat you more, threaten to kill you again, starve you. I regret I did not let him possess more of you with his hands, call you over again to see what was in the dark nest of his lap. I regret I did not let you run away again, your luck in truckstops off the highway better than one more night with them. I regret.

Local Improvements

Lately I have been tortured by insomnia. Brain buzzing, nauseous, memorizing the ceiling in the middle of the night. Up in a fuzzy gray dawn with shaking hands and I know not to look at the clock, to start down that gut-churning slope of checking, checking. So I lie there, knotted with dread, and when I hear the first call to prayer from the mosque around the corner, I know it is 5.40AM and I am fucked. I will have another day where I struggle for civility, my teeth razors to cut my mouth and anyone else.

Today it is brilliantly sunny and I walk to the train on the bright side of the street. I pass the mosque, and realize I have not heard first call for several days in row. There have been local improvements, for sure.