These Days of August

Last summer, sitting in the last row of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Rockland, I learned about imaginal cells. Every caterpillar in his cocoon has a butterfly blueprint waiting to become what they are. Its fate has already been written, if not yet expressed. A caterpillar’s time of crawling, while important, is not only temporary, but already outmoded, from the moment of its birth. This too shall pass, it says to itself, eating leaves and scrunching along on the ground being fuzzy. It may take hours, months, or years – my attention to the sermon was fading in and out – but metamorphosis is a destiny it cannot resist. A delicate flyer waits to manifest inside the humble insect. This is a good metaphor for the individual human experience, no? Our own slow and unsteady life cycle. Everybody likes it, thinks about the process and feels empowered, happy, certain that they can relate. One of these days, by God, I will emerge a beautiful fluttering creature and fly away, blithe and free. Maybe. Maybe not, though. Perhaps we’ll stay caterpillars until the day we die because we don’t possess those transformative and very real cells. Mostly we remain unchanged. The world moves around us and we hold on, hoping. Imagine.

Another Post

Los Angeles is a place of people, a city in population, a pantheon. It isn't a love-at-first-sight, concrete city. It's easy to understand why human beings from Poitiers, France, Des Moines, Iowa and Clinton, Ct are smitten from afar and upon arrival, agape at the bar graph city skyline, the uniform grid of streets, the up and up architecture, the bustling sidewalks of mismatched people, the smells of dirty water hot dogs, candied nuts, sewer, bum, and bus exhaust tingling the nostrils, the large-windowed shops of Midtown, the boutiques of the leafy, windy, ivy West Village, the height and breadth and vividity of New York City. I love New York. I love New York. I grew up two hours away from the city. If you were artistic or smart of weird or into art and books and clothes you believed you ought to be there and when strangers or teachers told you - you should go there, you thought, when you heard that, "You. Are. So. Right." That is where I belong. Where I will finally be understood. Or lost in the crowd. Or able to make my mark. Where I will feel a kinship to history and humanity and Patty Smith and the beating pulse of America. So I moved there. And it was hard. It was intoxicating, and I ran down the subway stairs after a dance class with a hundred girls as good as I was. I went to museums I had only read about in books, saw in movies, and visited on too brief field trips from school, and wandered lonely and mysterious and felt like I was breathing true air for the first time. I worked and lived in apartments and tried as hard as I knew how to make it there. It isn't easy to stay, but it's impossible not to fall and feel in wonder and in awe upon arrival. It is the jumping off point of the American dream. Almost all the people I still know there are in finance or are consultants.

Unlike compact New York LA is sprawling. Disconnected. It is not iconic. There are mansions and the beach, big, deep beaches that are very beautiful, and palm trees so tall and magnificent your head swims, the Hollywood sign, which, like the Mona Lisa, is much smaller in real life. There are things one must see. But it's hard to think of what they are. There are places to be discovered. But I don't know about them yet. Everyone is very happy that we are here. All the people I meet genuinely like living here and thinks it's an inspiring coup that I've escaped the brutal cold vortex of "back East". It's in the past, they seem to say. Welcome to your future. Cult members, all of them, from those who were born here to the newly indoctrinated. They last ones arrived are the first to want to leave their hazing mark on your poor skin, so unused to all this singeing sunshine. One of us, one of us. They're all eating lotus fruit I haven't found at Pavillions. I don't hate it, but it doesn't feel like home. I don't love it, but I hate saying I don't love it because it makes me seem, by comparison, awfully pessimistic. Maybe you shouldn't move anywhere so alien when you're over the age of thirty. My sense of adventure has succumbed to my desire for a house near the ocean with two bathrooms and a kitchen garden. But this is still my time to uncover. I'm here doing this and not anything else. I am compelled to figure out what is good about this city even if I'm not in the movies or hungry with desire to succeed in the spotlight. We all want success. And to feel integrated into the world as we imagine it. Some achieve this by never leaving their birthplace, others wander aimlessly forever.  My aim is true, if not, at this late hour, defined. I guess we'll just have to wait to find out how it ends. In the meantime, when life gives you avocados, make guacamole.

The First Days of California

The section of Magnolia Boulevard, from Buena Vista to Vineland, is a wide sidewalk-lined two way street between media-driven downtown Burbank and the North Hollywood Wasteland. We now live in this quiet neighborhood of vintage shops full of ladies clothing from the twentieth century, beauty parlors, and small, well-tended houses. I buy a loaf of airy, tough-crust bread from the familiar Pinocchio deli, where the old man smiles at us and gives Violet a slice of salami and a bread stick while we wait. We go to the playground, where Mexican nannies, twenty-something nannies, and the token dad and I all watch toddlers act like antisocial lunatics. They climb up slides and steal each others sand toys. Violet loves to hold hands and slide side by side. We visit our library branch. There's a tree in the children's room. And also outside trees are living, roses in bloom, austere, steep conifers, and of course iconic palms. It feels good to stand in the breeze. Between five and five-thirty parrots arrive, from where I don't know. I think it's mating season. They are noisy and beautiful as one would expect. Every day I've wished I had a dollar in cash to buy a rocket pop from the ice cream man. Perhaps tomorrow. Mostly I feel nothing.

Short Story: First Paragraph

The house always smelled of frying food and rose oil, a heady, Catholic combination that sticks to your hair. We never had money for haircuts and the bathtub was full of whip spiders, but I didn't think anything of it until the day that Daisy died. I came home from school, dropped my backpack, coat, and boots on the landing, and ran up the stairs feeling the thick carpet under my toes. Every day I went through this routine, and for five minutes I felt free. Unburdening myself, my eyes on the kitchen cupboards, anticipating a snack of three soft batch chocolate chip cookies and a glass of tepid water. Most kids preferred milk with their cookies, but I hated the way it coated my mouth with a rancid feeling, like the aftermath of a vomiting episode. Cookies and water in front of the television. Sitting on the floor, splayed on the brown carpeting that continued through the living room and down the hall to the bathroom and bedrooms, watching cartoons I was too old for. This was my bliss. For five, maybe ten minutes I was alone in the house and it was quiet. My brothers were still at school activities, and my mom, who worked as a crossing guard for the little kids at elementary could never quite make it back before my bus. I was so grateful I said a daily prayer to the gods in charge of this orchestration of events. As I finished the third cookie Mom would come in running, out of breath, fear across her forehead, the sleeves of her turtleneck pushed up, as if every afternoon she anticipated the worst.

Poem for River Girl

Mariachis always show up at bedtime.
With bulbous instruments, accordians they squeeze
and tug, guitars that mourn ecstatically, in matching black suits with flopping red ties
and hats that aren't absurd in their hometowns
somewhere north of here.
But in this cement house where I sleep irregularly
in a bedroom facing East to the sea,
outside in those splitting, convulsing streets
these players are joyless music makers
impelled to play all night
by some patriotic sense of duty
that keeps them bellowing in harmony
with tom cats, zorros, and other nocturnals.

Opening Sentence

If it was possible to induce a miscarriage simply by submerging oneself in a very hot bath there would be countless women and girls emerging from a steamy soak with scalded legs and pelvises. Housewives with too many children already, maybe even only one; naïve girls posing as virgins, Catholic virgins confused about the logistics of intercourse; college students, twenty-somethings, thirty-somethings, and the occasional perimenopausal forty-something anticipating no longer requiring birth control too soon.

Archetypes in Seuss

The Cat in the Hat is a classic trickster. He arrives unbidden, when you need him but don't know you need him. When circumstances seem bleak but you aren't aware enough to just ask. You can do that?! You can cry out, call up the godhead with complaint or supplication? Sure. Go ahead. Try it.

His moves are sudden and limbs akimbo, one minute he's juggling your fish and the next he's unleashing Things that run even more amok than he. They are chaos in dual aspects. He controls them; they are his minions. He is inciting a riot, an epiphany of unreason.

There is no control, or nothing to control, we learn over the course of an afternoon with The Cat. Our sense of order, tenuous at best, as expressed by the scolding Fish, is baseless. So why not let go, let it all unfurl into the atmosphere around us, with cakes, cups, and ships flying free. The Fish is constantly hectoring the children, reminding them of the specter of their mother, who must be The Unmanifest.

He tempts. He jokes. He makes no sense. He speaks nonsense. He riddles and makes ordinary things appear in other orders, for that is the reality of Reality. And that is why The Trickster comes to us, to children alone in a house on a rainy day, to a hero on his journey, a girl alone at the well.This manifestation of the divine psychological process is important because we seek to elude confusion.