Closing Time

These past few days have felt like one continuous summer day. It's been so sunny and bright (though fortunately not crazy hot), and of course, it was just the longest day of the year. But that's not why. Since returning from Omega, I've been able to really put the "teacher" hat away and sink, sink, sink into words.

I have written for practically three days straight, sleeping very little, getting up, doing my practice, and then going right to the computer. In bed, I push the edges of the sheets away with my feet and scream. This is the birth. I love every timeless part of it. I have been carrying this book with me since I was 7 years old. Each day I write, I lose something. Each day I write, there is more space in my belly and my spine. Each day I write, my shoulder releases. I feel like I am literally losing pounds by finally getting this book done. I should have a full on draft ready for fine tuning in just a few more days. (Thank you to whoever established summer break!)

It is always the right time, though. The work had to germinate through adolescence and gigantic 20-something mistakes. It had to gather steam during years of different types of therapy and projects and education. It had to push against me from the inside out until I paid attention to unrecognizable aches and pains in parts of my belly I didn't know I had.

I have danced with this book, run from this book, analyzed this book -- practically any other verb you can think of I've done with this book. This is the end of it, and I know it this time because I feel the space and the freedom. I know it because I am crying and crying and crying and laughing and laughing and laughing. He asked me to write his story for him when I was seventeen. I hadn't known how to do it before this very week. I think I honestly didn't want to give him to anyone else. I had to first be able to stand in the space between him and me and find my own feet, my own spine, my own healthy, strong body unencumbered by his illness and his sadness.

The title of this blog is called Closing Time because of the Leonard Cohen song. The song sums up perfectly the place in between where I have felt I've been for 33 years.(If you can't hear Leonard's voice when you read the lyrics, you're missing a piece of that amazing angst) :-)

"Closing Time"
(c) Leonard Cohen

Ah we're drinking and we're dancing
and the band is really happening
and the Johnny Walker wisdom running high
And my very sweet companion
she's the Angel of Compassion
she's rubbing half the world against her thigh
And every drinker every dancer
lifts a happy face to thank her
the fiddler fiddles something so sublime
all the women tear their blouses off
and the men they dance on the polka-dots
and it's partner found, it's partner lost
and it's hell to pay when the fiddler stops:
it's CLOSING TIME

Yeah the women tear their blouses off
and the men they dance on the polka-dots
and it's partner found, it's partner lost
and it's hell to pay when the fiddler stops:
it's CLOSING TIME

Ah we're lonely, we're romantic
and the cider's laced with acid
and the Holy Spirit's crying, "Where's the beef?"
And the moon is swimming naked
and the summer night is fragrant
with a mighty expectation of relief
So we struggle and we stagger
down the snakes and up the ladder
to the tower where the blessed hours chime
and I swear it happened just like this:
a sigh, a cry, a hungry kiss
the Gates of Love they budged an inch
I can't say much has happened since
but CLOSING TIME

I swear it happened just like this:
a sigh, a cry, a hungry kiss
the Gates of Love they budged an inch
I can't say much has happened since
CLOSING TIME

I loved you for your beauty
but that doesn't make a fool of me:
you were in it for your beauty too
and I loved you for your body
there's a voice that sounds like God to me
declaring, declaring, declaring that your body's really you
And I loved you when our love was blessed
and I love you now there's nothing left
but sorrow and a sense of overtime
and I missed you since the place got wrecked
And I just don't care what happens next
looks like freedom but it feels like death
it's something in between, I guess
it's CLOSING TIME

Yeah I missed you since the place got wrecked
By the winds of change and the weeds of sex
looks like freedom but it feels like death
it's something in between, I guess
it's CLOSING TIME

Yeah we're drinking and we're dancing
but there's nothing really happening
and the place is dead as Heaven on a Saturday night
And my very close companion
gets me fumbling gets me laughing
she's a hundred but she's wearing
something tight
and I lift my glass to the Awful Truth
which you can't reveal to the Ears of Youth
except to say it isn't worth a dime
And the whole damn place goes crazy twice
and it's once for the devil and once for Christ
but the Boss don't like these dizzy heights
we're busted in the blinding lights,
busted in the blinding lights
of CLOSING TIME

The whole damn place goes crazy twice
and it's once for the devil and once for Christ
but the Boss don't like these dizzy heights
we're busted in the blinding lights,
busted in the blinding lights
of CLOSING TIME

Oh the women tear their blouses off
and the men they dance on the polka-dots
It's CLOSING TIME
And it's partner found, it's partner lost
and it's hell to pay when the fiddler stops
It's CLOSING TIME
I swear it happened just like this:
a sigh, a cry, a hungry kiss
It's CLOSING TIME
The Gates of Love they budged an inch
I can't say much has happened since
But CLOSING TIME
I loved you when our love was blessed
I love you now there's nothing left
But CLOSING TIME
I miss you since the place got wrecked
By the winds of change and the weeds of sex.

[ www.azlyrics.com ]

So I made a Wordle of the final scene of the memoir. (The lovely image you see at the top of the blog!)

Here's the final scene: (Skeleton Woman, Lillian, Gabriel, Hannah, Frank, Claire, Helen, Zoe, Necahual are all characters in my novels)

Chapter 23

Characters as Teachers

The moon waxes outside my bedroom window. Thumb Butte mountain is silhouetted in grays. Tonight there are bats and coyotes and tiny biting bugs. I smell javelina, though I haven’t seen one rutting around the scrub brush in quite some time. I’m awake at my usual time – 3:45 a.m. I watch and listen. Sometimes I wake up and just use the bathroom. Sometimes I wake up and pull whichever cat is closer under the covers with me. I can usually get away with that for a few minutes before she gets sick of me and jumps away. But other times, I wake up because something has shown up – a solution to a scene in a novel – a new book idea – a sadness that seems real only at 3:45 a.m.

“Hey,” says Lillian, one of my characters. “Don’t let us keep you awake.” She presses her hand to my forehead, sinking me back onto the pillow. I burrow deeper under the down.

“Wake up!” It’s Hannah, another character. “I’ve still got more to say to you.”

“Shut up.” This one’s Zöe, the one who’s way too much like me. “You had your turn. It’s my turn now.”

“Ain’t none of y’all’s turn,” says Frank, from my newest novel. “It’s my time now. I’m still stuck in Chinatown.”

I could be asleep, but I’m not. The bed is heavy with all of them here. More are here than choose to speak. There are always more of them than are speaking. Always more.

Two black swans slide across a pond I can’t identify. I think of Freedom Park in North Carolina where we used to go when I was growing up to feed the ducks and crows. I wonder what those black swans are about. Janis Joplin cracks her heart open in Golden Gate Park in 1967 and twenty-year-old Helen feels the blood thumping in her own heart. In her belly, a baby who won’t live to hear Janis Joplin and make up her own mind about the radical nature of women. Outside of the park, Benjamin, another ghost, circles over Frank’s head in Chinatown. The ghosts of my ghosts.

Skeleton Woman dances on the dresser, her reflection in the mirror with the moon enough to make me so eternally grateful for this life. She nods at me, her jaw a constant grin.

Lillian, Hannah, Jay, Roberta and Gabriel – you helped me heal my relationship with my grandmother, even though she was dead long before you stopped by.

Zöe, Necahual, Fire Wolf, Bob and David – you helped me forgive my mother for being the one to survive.

Helen, Claire, Frank, Ellie and Benjamin – we’re still in contract negotiations. I don’t know yet what your gifts are.

A bat flies too close to the sliding glass door. The cats stiffen. They want to be outside hunting, but I don’t let them. I know they’ll become the hunted and I can’t bear that. Still, they clack their jaws and slash their tails through the air, barely missing the ghosts.

***

You don’t know, really, what each moment leads to. You don’t know what the threads are weaving. You just follow the needle and admire each color as it blooms. You stay as long as you can – you hover over your daughters, your wife. You wake them up when the air conditioning unit catches fire the month after you are gone. You ride trains in your daughter’s dreams. You leave a message for her on her answering machine a year after you died. You visit your mother and father, though you cannot speak to them, and if you could, you still don’t know what you would say.

You listen while you float and all the words you never spoke bubble up and dissolve into the air you no longer breathe. As each sentence flashes and vanishes, so does a fragment of you. As each piece of you becomes glitter, you move farther and farther away.

Your daughter’s pen is filled with the ink of your experience. She has waited for you to die so she can move. You have waited for her to let you go. You have work to do now. Your life, all your lives, have become the sparkle of rainbow. She writes with purple ink. With green. With gold. She writes you farther away; each word pushes you closer to your new home.

You see the crowd gathered in her bedroom. You didn’t see them before, but you see them now. You want to talk to her about them, but you know your role is finished. You showed her how to see them. It is up to her to write them.

***

Dear Daddy,

Summer’s here. I’m looking out the open window at the Wild Iris Coffee house. There’s water in Granite Creek. My shoulder doesn’t hurt. My fingers thrum with words. Good journey, Daddy. The words are fire, water, air and earth. The words are my body. Our bodies.

I am breathing still.

Still, I am breathing.

What a wondrous gift indeed, to be one of the haunted.

***

Skeleton Woman’s perpetual smile lights up the bedroom. The cats sleep in fluffy cat piles. The black swans slide across the surface of the lake. I close my eyes to dream a story.

Lillian sighs, her old hands gnarled as the tree branch where Gabriel hung. “Best let her get some sleep. It’ll be morning soon enough.”

Gabriel sings, his deep bass vibrating my sternum. “Swing Lo, Sweet Chariot…”

Helen grabs her Southern Comfort, touches Frank’s hand. “Come now, she’ll get you out of Chinatown when she wakes up.”

I sink into the feather pillow. Skeleton Woman sits next to me, then snuggles deep under the covers. “I’m here, love.”

My bones sing.

You don’t know how perfect the world is until you float above it, your own smile glistening in the night, the waxing moon, the constellations; you have become the eternity you have been seeking, and all you can do is shower the earth with gratitude for your own small, forty-six year piece of the whole.

“Comin’ for to carry me home…”

The handsome white horseman looks more than a little like Elvis. He opens the door to the chariot, bows low. “It’s no big thing,” he says to you. “Just the space between one breath and the next.”

A pause, a comma,

It’s no big thing.

The moon falls behind Thumb Butte. The moment between moonset and sunrise is electric with life. I inhale and exhale, sleep the closest thing to death for now. It’s no big thing. The pause, the comma,

You step into the chariot. Elvis closes the door behind you. “Hold on. The ride gets bumpy sometimes.” You hold on to the safety loop for only a moment before you let it go, knowing you want to feel every moment of whatever is next. Your legs have no polio virus. Your heart is not blocked.

Only a pause. No big thing. Skeleton Woman and I wait on the precipice.

Until we meet again,

Until then,

Dear Daddy, I love you. Bye-bye, Daddy,

Bye-bye sugar.

I am in my yellow swing in the backyard of our house. It is 1969. I am full of the joy of words. B-R-E-E-Z-E. The wind’s breath holds me up, flying in the space between your arms and the rest of my life.

How to Bury Your Father

How to Bury Your Father

First, make sure your father is dead.
It’s important to note that although he may no longer be breathing,
he may still be alive for you.
If he is alive for you, then no amount of digging, or
flower planting
or epitaph writing
will do the trick.

Second, ask yourself if you indeed are ready
for your father to be dead.
You may have noticed that people die
in the most unexpected times --
when you are a child, or a young adult, or a new parent;
in the most unexpected ways –
crossing the street after a puppy, falling asleep with too much gin, or
the simple slice of an attack of heart.
If you are not ready for your father to be dead,
then no amount of praying, or
crying,
or counseling
will do.

Third, determine what you need to take with you from your
father – though he is dead, surely, dead now.
Do you need the Timex he wound each night so time would not run out?
Do you need the LP of Elvis, Live at Madison Square Garden
so you’ll always know how to make yourself cry?
Do you need the money clip with his initials – GAH – to remember to always carry
twenty dollars because “you never know when you’ll need a cab?”
Do you need the weight of his life-long illness?
His rage at his body, his crises of faith?
Do you need his golf putter – the one he used to scratch the ball of his foot that
polio had
eaten away?
Be ruthless.
If you don’t need these things, box them up.
Bury them first.
If you do need these things, refer back to stanza
two.

If you have reached this place in the poem, then you are
ready to bury your father.
Take a deep breath.
Exhale the midnight chocolate cake eating contests,
the scream from the bedroom when the last stroke came,
the coldness of his hand in ICU.
Inhale again, and on the exhale,
drop his body into the earth.
You have taken what you needed.
The rest is up to him.

______________________________________

This poem came out of an assignment for a class I'm taking this summer with the amazing Peter Levitt. I wrote this in the way I usually write things -- a big dump, and then an editing. This was interesting for me in several ways, so I thought I'd post it for the purposes of "the writing process" and the notion of the poet/author as narrator.

I've noticed when I teach poetry that many students believe the narrator of the poem is the poet. They seem to struggle more with that distinction in poetry than in prose (though they struggle with it in prose too). This poem is written in the 2nd person, something I don't do very much, but I'm currently working with 2nd person in my memoir -- using the 2nd person as the voice of my dad the last five minutes he was alive. Obviously, I'm making that up -- although I was in the hospital room with him, I couldn't know what, if anything (he was comatose) he was thinking or feeling. That may be why this poem surfaced as 2nd person. Or it may be nothing besides what happened when I started to write. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar!

Some of the details in here are true (golf putter, polio, heart attack, died before I was ready, money clip). Some of the details are not true (alcoholic, running after a puppy). The loop in time (return back to stanza 2) and the progression of the process are very much true to experience. Just because someone dies doesn't mean we're ready for that. They may be gone, but sometimes we're still attached. I've been writing myself free of my father's illness and death my whole life. Maybe this newest book I'm working on will be the final huzzah. I really can't know. I just keep mining what shows up to be mined.

I've never written about fathers in a poem before without it being a direct experience of me and my dad. This was very freeing (and maybe a sign that this new book really is the final huzzah). I also appreciated being able to add the qualities I absorbed -- how pissed off he was at his body, how frustrated and angry he was because he was sick -- and move beyond the idealization of a relationship that ended too soon.

Ultimately, I wish he could talk about it with me, but that's the kicker, isn't it?

He's dead and I'm not, and today, I'm the one who is grateful to make a poem.

Tomorrow I may not have a poem.
Today.
Today.
Today.

Thank you.

Deer Candy

"Deer candy!" shouted an African American woman as she walked through the organic garden at the Omega Institute in New York. She was walking with a friend. "I hate them. Hate the deer."

I was sitting in an adirondack chair drinking coffee and journaling. It was my last day at Omega. I'd been teaching a week long workshop on Writing Begins with the Breath. It had been a glorious week, although temperatures in the early part of the week hit 100 degrees, with the full on shower of humidity I had forgotten about from 25 years in the desert. I laughed and caught their gaze.

"I want to know where the deer fence is," she went on. "There's too many deer in New York. Why aren't any of them in Omega? Why aren't they eating the vegetables?" This woman had obviously been wounded deeply by deer, but she had a point. Where were the deer?

Omega is a fantasy. It's a place with no smoking, no cell phones, no pagers. A place where everyone composts and recycles, takes their shoes off before entering a building, and eats organic vegetarian food three meals a day. It's a place with no deer, but woodchucks, bumblebees, squirrels, wasps, ants, mosquitoes, mice, chipmunks, and birds that are not (who knew?) brown. At Omega, it's OK to eat in silence. It's OK to avoid conversation and small talk. It's OK to just sit in the sun. It's delicious. But it's a bubble. A model, perhaps, of what the outside world could be, if you just took out that pesky human nature component. Don't get me wrong, it's a wonderful fantasy and I loved every minute of it. Twenty year old guys with beautiful long locks and guitars made the food or picked the veggies or served the most amazing ice cream in the cafe. What's not to like? They even (I kid you not) congregated on the porch of the cafe at night and played folk songs from the 1960s.

It's very helpful for us, in this extremely fast world, to take the time to go to a place like Omega to quiet down and calm the mind. It takes people a few days to unplug from New York City, or Boston, or from wherever they came. Often when they hear themselves (from the inside not the outside) for the first time, they cry. They feel empty, raw. This is good, and Omega is a wonderful cradle for them to crack open and feel, truly feel, what it's like to connect with their deepest selves. But most of us can't afford to live in a place like this (those twenty-year old guys would get expensive after awhile!) and we need to come back to the world of deer. And many people could never afford to come to a place like Omega in the first place.

My students taught me how much they need permission to feel. They taught me how important it is to hold the silence for them, so they can surrender into it. They taught me how to open up into place of discomfort with them, so they can move into it, breathe it in, and then breathe it out. My practice of yoga and qi gong gave me a center. It continued to hold me through their resistances and emotional curves. It continued to bring me back to stillness so I could witness their motion. And by Friday, they had moved mountains. It was an honor to be with them in this bubble of a place.

Now, when they are back out in the world of deer, back with their deadlines and their voice mails and their work demands, maybe there will be a physical memory of what it felt like when they sat for twenty minutes in silence and counted their breaths. Maybe there will be a visceral remembrance of how the handwriting shifted in their notebooks when the voice became the real thing. This is my deepest hope for them, for all of us. The world of deer cannot sway you if your center is rooted and calm. As the Taoists say, "If a house falls on your head, be yourself!"

As the 21st century comes crashing down on all of us, use each moment to model acceptance. Don't resist what is in front of you. Each moment is a teaching, an opportunity to grow, even if it's ugly and hurts. It grows uglier if you hold onto it. Breathe it in, breathe it out. Breathe it in, breathe it out. In a sanctuary like Omega, we have a chance to get a glimpse of our true selves. The veils of roles and expectations fall away -- from the 98% humidity, the vegetarian diet, or the unrelenting discipline of growth.

You don't need to go to the mountains to find God. You don't need to fly 3000 miles across the country. You don't need to eat vegetarian food or sit in lotus position for six hours. These places and behaviors are just vehicles that can help make it easier, but these places are not God, are not anything but another facet of reality. You need go no further than your own breath and body to touch the work of God. You need go no further than your own fingertips to find divine possibilities. The journey isn't out, it's in. Writing doesn't take you out into the world, it pulls you deeper into your world so that your words can help another find a way.

No matter where you live, no matter how you live, bow deeply with awe and gratitude to all that is around you.

You'll find what you're looking for in the eyes of the deer.

The Tender-Tenderloin

San Francisco's ghosts are as vibrant as the rainbow flags that fly from the tops of buildings on Market Street. Its ghosts cling to the basement of the Hotel St. Francis during the fire after the 1906 quake. They holed up in the wine cellar with a tiny dog, waiting for the rocking and the burning to be over.

The city absorbs everything and everyone. The ruins of the Central Freeway (US Route 101) that collapsed after the 89 Loma Prieta quake have become a green backdrop for the laundry mats and hair salons of the newly gentrified Hayes Valley. The city remembers its opium dens and its slave trade in immigrant labor. The city remembers Mark Twain and has yet to forgive him for his "the coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco" comment. The city remembers the Beats. North Beach, which isn't what it was, still holds the sound of the pale, white alcoholics who tried to change the world -- or at least their perception of the world.

I walked through the Tenderloin last week with my friend, Dex, and my partner Keith. My current novel’s protagonist, Helen, lives there, and I wanted to get a visceral feel for the neighborhood. Helen is an alcoholic. Her baby, Ellie, drowned at her breast in 1969. Her daughter, Claire, has just packed up and moved to god-knows-where, she thinks somewhere in Oregon, and her husband, Frank, hasn't come home from work yet. He hasn't been late coming home in forty years. She rarely leaves her apartment, which she and Frank have lived in since the late 60's. Their marriage has become what many marriages become - a familiarity to be borne with a Catholic severity. She didn't know she relied on his presence until he didn't show up. This night, tonight, June 19, she is venturing out of her apartment. Forty years from the day she and Frank first landed in San Francisco and found themselves in the Haight at a Love-In, waiting for the wailing of Janis Joplin. She is stepping out, presumably to look for Frank, but even she knows that's only a story she's feeding herself. She is stepping out to find her city again -- the city that stole her heart -- first in the good way, then in the not-so-good way. The city that broke her on its jagged sidewalks and crooked streets. The city that summons her with the monotonous voice of the Muni announcer ... Approaching, outbound, four cars, J, J, in three minutes. The city that tricks her into believing she matters -- into believing that she has somewhere to go and someplace to be, simply because there are so many options for getting places. Who's to know that if she gets on a train she only rides from one end to the other, gets off, and waits for the train to turn around so she can reboard. She can ride all day like that in the underground. As long as she didn't come up the stairs into the light, she could ride forever. She thinks of a snippet of a song her father sang to her once -- something about someone riding forever through the streets of Boston -- but she can't quite remember the entire song. Something about the MTA.

My friend Dex is tall -- really tall -- which is great when you're walking through the Tenderloin at twilight and you're only 5'2". It's even greater when the twilight begins to deepen into dusk. Dex talks to us about the mayor's policy on homelessness. A motel painted in baby blue is blockaded with a black gate. There's a sign for a public hearing -- property to be changed from a tourist motel to a residence inn. A legless man in a wheelchair has the shakes across the street from us. New banners adorn the streetlights: Welcome to Little Saigon. The banners are professional and pastel and don't portray the street we're walking through. The street we're walking down has an occasional open Vietnamese restaurant, a barricaded half-way house.

"Got a light?" asked the skinny man in front of the building.

"You know I don't smoke," said a fat woman, walking into the building. "I tell you that every night."

I try to look without looking. Across the street is a perilously skinny woman, her limbs all angles and tattoos. She's pressed into the shoulder of a Latino man, larger, tattooed, and laughing. He pulls her across the street. She's wearing black hose that are ripped from knee to crotch. Her skirt is small enough to be a napkin. They touch, this man and this woman; they touch.

People group in fours and fives, rolling dice, pulling out cigarette after cigarette, puffing a few times, before crushing them out on the sidewalk. Hands slip into pockets and into the hands of men who appear and disappear faster than ghosts. The drugs move around us, a river we can choose to step into or step around. All of us feel the pull of the tide. I think of a warning sign at the Pacific Ocean in Oregon for "sneaker waves". Apparently these waves could emerge, fully formed, at the shore and crash over you, sweeping you out into riptides.

That's what the Tenderloin felt like. We (and I speak really for only myself here) were walking right along the edge of danger, armed with the illusion that we were immune to its siren call because we were employed and white, and separate somehow, from the reality that would give you a blow job for fifty cents. How many stars had to line up for the three of us to be able to walk through the neighborhood without being pulled into it? How many turns had to be taken correctly to be able to walk through it to the other side to our four-star hotel, (we got it for a steal on Travelocity, but it was still a four-star hotel), or to my friend's apartment in the Castro?

We're looking for Glide -- the famous Methodist Church. I'm thinking Helen might end up there. We walk too far in one direction, the literal truth that the higher we walked up the hill, the safer the neighborhood became. I wanted to see Glide, so we turned around and walked under bright green protected scaffolding down Eddy Street. The Tenderloin Police Station was on our right, the neighborhood patrolled by a young white cop, only a few inches taller than me. A woman is eating a sausage between two pieces of white bread. She's laughing and speaking to someone inside the building. It's Glide. The man has a bright yellow GLIDE STAFF jacket on. I peek as nonchalantly as I can into the room. It's decorated with pastel paintings and the one day at a time speech of recovery. The staff member is smiling and whistling. A lit cross is on top of the building. I imagine it can be seen for blocks. A man even taller than Dex approaches us. He is a cross between Jack Skellington and Edward Scissorhands.

"I'll stand on my head for thirty cents!" he declares.

Dex says softly, "Not today." We've been deferring all communication to Dex on this sojourn.

Jack Skelington looks shocked. "Shit!" he says, and mutters on down the street.

I walk between Dex and Keith, thinking what a raw deal it is for men to walk on the dangerous sides of things to protect me. I don't feel bad enough to trade places though; my feminist heart knows when she's out of her league. She also knows that if she'd taken this walk alone, there'd have been far more approaches by many more people, asking for more than thirty cents.

Does Helen know how close she is to Union Square? Does she know how close she is to the banking centers of the west coast? Does she only see 1967? Only see the Haight as it was with the Diggers and the electric light shows and the lost children looking for themselves in tie dye and glitter? Has she walked down the Haight since Ellie died?

San Francisco contains millions of worlds. Perhaps only small few are happening today. Many are happening decades ago, or continents ago; many are happening with long-gone relationships, long-dead friends. The Tenderloin is heavy. It isn't all cliched suffering and addiction. It's families trying to survive in one of the world's most expensive cities. It's first generation immigrants trying to make a better life for their kids. It's merchants and shopkeepers who don't, at least right now, have to compete with Target and Walmart and China Buffet to make a living. It's the glory of salvation in the cross and it's the glory of salvation in the needle and the pipe. It's the desperate, grabbing, love-me-now energy, which translates into see-me-now, see me please eyes and arms and feet.

I want to look everyone in the eye, but I admit to being afraid to be that vulnerable -- to give them an opening. Many of them are mentally ill. Many are our veterans. Team America. Fuck yeah.

The Tenderloin screams of what it could have been. Its streets hold the suffering of generations of men and women. You can hear the hunger, and it is far more than a physical hunger. The city's ghosts hang with the laundry that stretches across balconies. The slow suicides and the fast ones. The men whose shame fills the places in their bodies where love used to live. The breath of the Tenderloin is shallow and staccato. It chokes on its inhale and refuses to release all of its exhale.

It's getting darker. Shadows move in the park. Where would Helen go out here? Would she see herself reflected in the face of the homeless man who demanded a dime? Do I see myself in that man? I do. I have been privileged. I'm not hungry or homeless. I'm not addicted to drugs or alcohol. I'm employed. I'm educated. But when I walk down these streets (and yes, when you can walk through and out, you're not really in -- I know that) but when I walk down these streets I feel the two-steps away I am from being here. The fragility of our economy, of "America" and its hungry-ghost belly that is never, ever, ever satiated, the system I am a part of in educating people at a community college for low-wage jobs that I have never had to do. Yes, I do see myself in these streets. I see more than a passing "whew, thank god that's not me", and a more pressing "yes, yes, I am thou."

See me. See me please.

The too-skinny woman and the Latino man cross the street in front of us. They hold tight to each other. I stand between two men, all three of us passing through. All three of us, in our own way, saying "see me" in our fragment of the millions of worlds on the planet we circle in. All three of us appreciating the safety of an arm around our shoulders when the dusk becomes dark.

The lobby of our four-star hotel is just as hungry, just as frantic. Travelers pulling too many suitcases, searching for more to pack into them. People waiting for hours to eat at Michael Mina's for a minimum of $100 a plate. People drinking the acceptable drinks, from clean glasses with olives and tiny straws and $12.00 per drink prices. The acceptable addicts. The well-washed hungry ghosts. My shoes cost over $100. I'm wearing far more than that in jewelry. My Visa and I are welcome everywhere I want to be.

The doorman hopes we had a nice evening. The concierge hopes our stay has been pleasant. The manager of the hotel left us a voice mail welcoming us and telling us not to hesitate to ask if we need anything during our stay. The sheets are 400 thread count, white. The remote control isn't bolted to the nightstand. Neither is the flat screen plasma TV. The honor bar has $4.00 packs of peanut M&M's and baby cans of Pringles. Keith and I take off our $100 shoes and climb into the very white bed, two blocks from the Tenderloin. We touch each other in the darkness.

See me.

See me.

Sacred Listening

This is an excerpt from a chapter that I'm currently working on in Gathering Ghosts.


It begins when you first try to write. You take your #2 soft lead pencil and make fresh marks on the newsprint paper. A looping “P” can turn into an “R” which can become a “Q.” If you never lift the lead from the paper, you can join them all together in a song of harmony and grace, but then you show the world what you have made and they tell you it is jibberish. The beautiful loops and lines you dragged from your heart are worthless to them.

So, you learn, there is a way. There is a way to do things and a way not to do things. Your heart is sad, but you cover it up because when you make the loops and lines their way they smile at you and bring you juice. They tell you you are smart and show your paper to other people. The juice is cold, sweet, and sticky.
It no longer matters that you cannot understand what you wrote because your letters are mirrors of theirs.

***

I worry a lot about rules. I want to stand in the right line, drive in the right lane, and say the right things. I was raised to believe that if you did the right things you’d be rewarded. I could see the benefit of not driving in the lane facing oncoming traffic. I could see that it would be more efficient if only people with fewer than fifteen items went through the express checkout line. Healthy compromises of community living.

I do understand that we have to communally agree on what a “g” is – what it looks like, what sounds it can make, what words it’s a part of – in order to have communication at all. But I came of age in the last throes of grammar education in grade school. I learned odd things, such as:

Never begin a sentence with a conjunction.
Never end a sentence with a preposition.
Each new paragraph should begin with a transitional word.
A paragraph contains five to seven sentences and always begins with a topic sentence.
An essay’s final paragraph must sum up all that has come before it.

Odd things, that had very little to do with writing, and very much to do with constructing.

***

It’s a hot day in Charlotte. I’m in the seventh grade. Our text is Warriner’s English Grammar. My English teacher, Mrs. Peeler, is a formidable woman who also happens to attend our church. She is the clichéd English teacher – gray hair pulled back into a bun, glasses on a silver chain around her neck, red lipstick which occasionally stained the surface of her teeth, and nude pantyhose and high heels, no matter how hot the day. She made us memorize poems and come to the front of the class and recite them. I still remember mine. William Wordsworth’s “The Daffodils.”

She taught us to diagram sentences (a miraculous feat that has somehow fallen out of favor) and with that, she showed me that every word in a sentence has a purpose. You could see in your diagram if you had too many modifiers for your noun or verb. You could see if the subject of the sentence had no object. You could revise it and make a brand new structure – a brand new picture. Most of the kids loathed diagramming, but I thought it provided a door into language I’d never walked through before. (Oops, there I go, ending a sentence with a preposition – oops, no, “before” is used as an adverb there. How does one keep it straight?) In order to diagram a sentence well, you had to communicate with the words themselves. You had to ask the adjective, “What are you modifying?” And the adjective would answer. You had to ask the prepositional phrase which verb it connected with. You had to listen to the answers of the words. You couldn’t just randomly assign words to each other. They simply wouldn’t fit.

Contrary to what many students thought, I didn’t think diagramming sentences force-fed rules down our throats. I thought diagramming sentences taught us to listen to the beauty of an individual sentence – and even deeper than that – taught us to focus on the importance of each word choice and ask ourselves, “Does that word belong there? Is another word a better choice? If we take out the word, does the sentence change in meaning or aesthetics?” We couldn’t make those choices with our intellects. The choices come from our connections to the desires of the sentence itself.

How do we know what a sentence desires? We have to ask it. How does a sentence know what it desires? It asks the paragraph? And the paragraph? Well, yes, it asks the chapter. And the chapter must ask the work as a whole what it desires.

Huh? How the heck do you get there?

Remember when they told you how to write a paragraph? And they gave you rules such as don’t start a sentence with “and”. And they told you writing comes from somewhere out there involving sources and citations and documentation. And they told you that there were nine patterns of development for your work, and that the thesis statement is the last sentence in the opening paragraph. They told you these things not because they’re wrong or bad. They do, in fact, work, and they make a solid piece of writing for a composition student who has no interest in what language can do. But for a student who is a writer – for a student who loves what sentences do – the rules are the stones in the pockets of your jeans. Clear out your mind so you stop hearing the rules before you hear the writing. When you don’t know where to go next, look to the sentence you last wrote for clues. What does the verb denote for you? What image does the noun conjure up for you?

When I was seven, I went to visit my pediatrician, Dr. Huff, for my final dose of the polio vaccine. The vaccine was liquid. The doctor handed me the plastic packet of vaccine and told me to put it in my mouth. I did exactly that. A few minutes later he came back in the office. I still had the liquid in my mouth. He and my mother laughed at me.

“Why didn’t you swallow it?” he asked.

I swallowed, but I was bewildered. “You didn’t tell me to swallow it. You told me to put it in my mouth.”

My literal interpretation of the doctor’s instructions shows you how strongly I wanted to follow directions – how strongly I wanted to do everything right. My ninth grade English teacher counted off points if our cursive letters didn’t have all the appropriate tails. If she couldn’t tell our periods from our commas, she marked the whole sentence wrong. The church we belonged to taught me I was born in sin. My Southern culture taught me not to wear white after Labor Day, and that a lady should always wear a hat.

“Why didn’t you swallow it?” What a provocative question. I did swallow a lot of it. I swallowed rules and sins and fears and contractions. But all that swallowing left little room for listening. When you take the time to first be still and listen, the first things you’ll hear are the things you swallowed into your belly. You’ll hear the things you absorbed in utero. You’ll hear the scratches of your mother’s fears and your father’s rage. This chorus of uninvited voices is an avalanche of shoulds and shouldn’ts, dos and don’ts. Sit a while longer. What are you underneath that din? The clanking of other’s agendas is enough to make many a writer get up and decide this gig isn’t for him.

Stay. What’s under your mother’s sadness? What’s under your grandmother’s alcoholism? What’s under the programming of never beginning a sentence with “and”? The ideas you’ve swallowed built a wall. Shake it down. Move into your lungs and break the sadness off.

Stay. Stay longer than you ever thought you could. Sit cross-legged or not. Sit in a chair or on the floor. Sit in your bed or in your car. But sit. Stay. Look at each thing you’ve swallowed and ask yourself: Is it mine? Does it serve me? Then ask yourself what you feel is the next step. Ask your body not your mind.

***

This morning we stare at each other, my work and I. The winter weather has broken, likely only for a blink, but this week it's in the 60s and the ice and snow is melting and pouring into the creekbeds that have been dry for months. I am easily 50% feline, and can stare down the best of them. But I can't outstare my work. Today it's so close I feel I can reach out and snatch it up with one hand, and I want to. I want to grab it and keep it tight so I don't have to keep wondering about it. But instead I watch it watching me. I try (ah, so foolish!) to figure out what it's thinking. What it wants me to do.

My brain is beginning to swim with topic sentences, basic grammar, and the beginnings of student stories. Yesterday I spent two class periods working on paragraphs with my developmental students. What detail can we add here to make this memory more vivid? Can you see how we've got two separate thoughts here, joined only by a comma? Let's look at chapter 16 in the book - Run on Sentences. Do you see how your topic sentence is about how cell phones have changed in the past five years, but what you've written about is why you love your cell phone?

It's a slippery slope once we reach this point in the semester. I adore teaching, but I find myself stuffed with 90 different minds -- 90 different ways of thinking -- and it grows harder to hear myself and nearly impossible to hear my writing. I don't know any writers who teach writing full-time who don't struggle with this every semester. We must practice emptying out before going to work. Empty out after work. We have to shake the day off, shake the other minds out, so we can listen once again to our own work.

Today, the work glitters. It's a beautiful mirage -- Las Vegas like -- all glitz and facades. But Vegas lights mask the heartbeat of Nevada. I see shimmering covers for the book. I see glowing reviews. But I open the book and I see emptiness. I even think I hear laughter. What are you doing? What are you thinking? You're not even remotely ready to go where I want you to go, it says. Not even close. But there's all that sparkly red and purple glitter. There's the seduction of the writing itself. The "I love you-go away" push pull of the process that slams us, addicts all, up against its walls.

"What do you most not want to say?" It shouts. "Go on! Coward!"

I open my mouth. Nothing. I decide to click over to Zappos.com and look at expensive shoes. I click back. It's still waiting. What do you most not want to say? I feel it, whatever that answer is, banging against my ribs, pushing up underneath my tongue. I sneeze and cough today. It is beginning to move. It is beginning to eke out, letter by letter.

What do I most not want to say?

First, I'll listen. Then, I'll sit with it. And at last, I'll shake it free.

The Ghosts We All Are

"Writers are often ghosts to their own cherished or bedeviling childhood homes."
- Brian Kiteley

I've been writing so much about home the past few months. What is it? What has it become? What could it be? Can we ever "find" one? Is this notion of home just one more piece of American mythology that's about as accurate as the cowboy out here in my not so wild wild west?

I received my $600 tax rebate (aka economic stimulus) yesterday. I don't think for a millisecond that this plan is going to save America from itself, but nonetheless, the check arrived electronically in the middle of the night. It'll just about cover my trip back home in July, so thanks, W.; I'll use it to do some serious ghost chasing and sweet tea drinking. I'll throw it at the myth. I'll use it to do my work.

Last night I found the Kiteley quote above in a book called The 3 A.M. Epiphany. I had a particularly good and most welcome day of writing yesterday. Summer's so close I can taste it. I've finished most of my student papers. I've turned down four different freelance gigs for the summer so I can be at peace with my own voice for three beautiful months. I began to weave a book yesterday at last. If I were that gospel and blues singer I wrote about in my last post, I'd have sung "Glory, glory hallelujah/'cause I laid my burden down", but instead I had a 20 ounce iced coffee and let that drug wiggle a little in my veins. When I returned home with enough caffeine in my body to stay up until 3 A.M. reading, Kiteley's quote hit me in that "no duh" way kids have of making you feel like a moron.

Writing about ghosts isn't just about the ghosts of others. It isn't just about the literary weight of ghosts as social issues, or ghosts as ancestors, or ghosts as spirits of long faded places. Writing about ghosts is also about (and perhaps more importantly about) the places I continue to haunt. Where have I left parts of my spirit hanging out and waiting? Instead of trying to pull places and people to me, maybe I need to go back to where I've left breadcrumbs. Maybe the foundation of Gathering Ghosts is my own fractured self. Maybe it's not the red clay mud of North Carolina that I can't get out of my body. Maybe the itch is the piece of me that still hangs out at Idlewild Elementary after school with her red 10 cent notebook from Family Dollar. Maybe the itch is the fragment of my belly that hasn't left my childhood bedroom on Springfield Drive. The portion of my spleen that hangs in the willow trees over our family cemetery at Masonboro Baptist Church in Wilmington. It's time to scratch and find out.

I want to leave you with this poem that came to me today courtesy of Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac.

Posthumous

Would it surprise you to learn
that years beyond your longest winter
you still get letters from your bank, your old
philanthropies, cold flakes drifting
through the mail-slot with your name?
Though it's been a long time since your face
interrupted the light in my door-frame,
and the last tremblings of your voice
have drained from my telephone wire,
from the lists of the likely, your name
is not missing. It circles in the shadow-world
of the machines, a wind-blown ghost. For generosity
will be exalted, and good credit
outlasts death. Caribbean cruises, recipes,
low-interest loans. For you who asked
so much of life, who lived acutely
even in duress, the brimming world
awaits your signature. Cancer and heart disease
are still counting on you for a cure.
B'nai Brith numbers you among the blessed.
They miss you. They want you back.

"Posthumous" by Jean Nordhaus, from Innocence. © Ohio State University Press, 2006.

The places we've left ourselves linger long after we're gone. Let your writer's eye look deep enough to see where you've scattered yourselves along this life. Write about it. Bring it back to a new idea of home.

Six Things You Might Not Know

I was tagged this morning by Andi (http://www.andilit.com) to participate in a 6 Things You Don't Know About Me posting.

I started thinking about audience. There are lots of things the average person in my life doesn't know about me. Lots of things my mother doesn't know about me. But they aren't the same things. For this post, I chose friends - not lovers or family - as the audience. We'll see if I can hit anything new for anyone.

1) My first award in writing came in the 7th grade. I wrote a short story called "A Heartbeat From Happiness" in which a black cat loses his family after the family moves west. (Hmmm... this was the last year we lived in NC before we moved west, and yes, we had a black cat named Charley, and yes, we left him in NC with friends). The cat in my story walked all the way across the United States. When he got within feet of the door of his family, he died. I won 1st place among all the 7th - 12th grade entries at my school. My dad helped me with the title. I still suck at titles. And, I still have issues with happy endings in fiction! (Charley never walked across the U.S. to find us. I think I'm still a little mad he didn't!)

2) When I was in the 9th grade I believed I used to be an oak tree in a previous life.

3) The first ghost (other worldly energy) I ever saw was when I was five. The ghost of a wolf was outside my window. No one believed me. I've never seen another wolf-ghost, but I've seen others. Very few people believe me still. :-)

4) More than anything else in the entire universe, I want to be a blues and gospel singer. This is one desire that won't be fulfilled in this lifetime. Maybe next time around! I always have someone singing in my novels, though.

5) For six months after my dad died, I put nothing in my body but plain M&Ms and diet coke. This "diet" gave me the opportunity to experience, albeit for a very short time, what it feels like to be a size 3. Haven't seen those days (or those jeans!) in many a moon. I got to experience how men look at a woman when she's a size 3 instead of a size 12. I got to experience the bones of my body without my flesh. I got to experience a whole year of going to the doctor without the doctor telling me I need to lose 20 pounds. I got to spend a year being able to pull ANYTHING off the rack I wanted and know it would look fabulous. (That part was pretty cool...)

Funny, though, the people I drew to me when I was tiny and empty were people with tiny and empty hearts. The people I draw to me now when I am my natural size are full and fluffy and large, no matter what their physical body size is.

6) I want to have a tail. I think about this at least once a week. How fabulous would it be to have a fluffy orange feline tail that curled around my waist, or swished behind me, or stroked my cheek. Think of the accessorizing I could do! Bracelets for tails! Flowers! Glitter! It's too thrilling to think about for too long. Losing the tail is an evolutionary error, I think. Perhaps we'll have it back one day. Until then, I try to walk like I've got one anyway!

My wish for you this weekend: Do the stray cat strut! Walk like you've got a tail and know how to use it!