Black & Blue

No, not the Stones album, actually.  


So I fell down a week ago. Like, fell down as in ate it. Munched it.  Kissed the sidewalk.  It was...epic, at least judging by my injuries.  A bleeding, fat lip where I bit myself. A black not-quite eye, more like a black cheekbone, where my sunglasses shoved into my face.  Another small, greenish lump of a bruise near my jawline. And that's just the stuff above my neck.   


It wasn't a trip, wasn't a stumble, but was some kind of careening, out of control, headlong rush into a metal gate.  I was running, because my son likes to race me home from school. I usually resist his requests to race, at least until we're much closer to our house, because, duh, I hate to run.  But that day, in my boots, my cute, low-heeled, up to  my knees brown leather boots with no traction on the soles I thought, "why not?"  


Reader, I was running fast.  It's clear from the location and sheer number of bruises on all four limbs that I bounced off that gate more than once. Else, how do I have bruises on both my inner and outer forearms? All I truly remember is the feeling of things turning sour and south very quickly, a sickening panic of feeling totally out of control and being unable to correct what was going wrong.  And then, my face hurt.


All week long I've been making jokes about my husband taking a swing at me, to explain the red and purple and now yellowish bruise on my cheek. Ha ha!  And someone I know, and generally like, came up to me and said, "oh, I remember doing something like that and how stupid I felt afterward!"  But the thing is -- I didn't feel stupid. It wasn't that kind of fall, where you trip, and go splat, and recover and tuck your hair behind your ear and off you go, hoping you didn't look quite as stupid as you know you just did.  


Not to sound all melodramatic, but it was some fall, and it shook me, and made me feel alternately shaky and weepy and just generally vulnerable for a solid few days early last week.  What a charmed life I have lived so far, to go four decades on the planet without a serious blow or injury. No broken bones, no lying in traction.  Not even a sprained ankle!  (Such is the physical life of a lazy bookworm.)  Maybe I need to start climbing more mountains? 


In related news (sorta, you'll see): I am writing a memoir.   Though not exactly climbing mountains or snowboarding in the High Sierras, this feels like dangerous work.  It's dicey, dredging up the past, remembering all that stuff that people (read: family) wanted you to just forget and shut up about, already.    I think that's the danger of growing up in a family where people (again, read: same family) want you, expect you, require you to shut up and just put one foot in front of the other.  Trouble is, the child becomes an adult, an adult who still feels the need to ponder and mull and rehash and relive and puzzle out: just what the hell happened here, folks?  


When I crashed into that metal gate last Monday, part of me later wondered  if somehow, some part of my psyche is still trying to get me to shut the hell up. I thought of Carolyn See, and how after the wrenching business of writing her terrific memoir, Dreaming: Hard Luck and Good Times in America, she came down with a bad case of meningitis, or some other nasty viral disease.  The brain is powerful.  It know what it wants to do, what it has been conditioned to do for decades on decades.  So, again with the melodrama, but it's true that for just a moment or two, I wondered if perhaps my brain was trying to shut me up.  For good! (Cue the dramatic music: duhn, Duhn, DUHN!).  

Well. I am on the mend.  The lip is nearly healed, the bruises are fading, and I'm almost ready to step back into my cute boots that are now sorely scuffed on one toe.  The writing is going...well, the writing is going slow. December is a bad month for somebody who is already lax on writing discipline.  Still, my yellow legal pad is slowly filling up.  Maybe in some not-so-distant week, I'll even need to move on into a brand new legal pad. 


That is, if my brain doesn't grab the wheel and send me hurtling over some cliff. 

Old and Older: At the L.A. County Fair

 I love old stuff.  Old places, old cars, old houses. Old trains. Earlier this month, we went to the L.A. County Fair on its final weekend.  One of the first exhibits we visited was a collection of old trains.  The exhibit itself was sort of off to one side, annexed off, a quiet and relatively lonely area, compared to the the glitz and screaming lights of the nearby carnival zone.

 The peeling old paint, the bare bulbs.  It gave me a thrill and a chill that I always get, visiting and seeping in the spirit of old stuff.

 As soon as I saw this, my brain immediately started playing Judy Garland, singing "on the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe," from her movie, The Harvey Girls.  Because old movies, and old MGM musicals, are also things I love best.

What's that? You say you can't stand old musicals --- they're cheesy, corny and unrealistic, and in real life, people don't ever just break into song and start tap dancing on tables?   I would banish you from my world -- except that, as it turns out, the love of my life, my soul mate, my dear husband, feels the same as you.

Ah well. Such is life, such is love.  The ying and yang of it, and all that.  I'm a night owl, and he's up before the sun.  I like looking back to the dusty, forgotten past, and he gets all tingly imagining the future.

 But, he does like old trains, too. 

Even if, as I'm snapping pictures of bare light bulbs, he's admiring, like, the engineering marvel that made those trains move. And stuff.

Old and older: that's us. Quite a team!

Finally...

 A bit abashed to admit this, but lo these many years after earning both bachelor and masters degrees in English, I've finally gotten around to reading Jane Austen.  I'm just a contemporary American Lit kind of girl at heart, which is my excuse. But really, for a bookish chick who claims to be a bluestocking at heart, is there really any excuse? No.

It took me me a few days to get into Pride and Prejudice, but once I fully committed, I was hooked.  I think what I enjoyed most was the (re) discovery that human nature hasn't really changed all that terribly much in the 200 years since the book was published. Kind of the same delight that I felt when reading Shakespeare. (At least I DID do that as a good English major.)

A favorite passage, spoken by Miss Elizabeth Bennett:

"There are few people whom I really love, and still fewer of whom I think well.  The more I see of the world, the more am I dissatisfied with it; and every day confirms my belief of the inconsistency of all human characters, and of the little dependence that can be placed on the appearance of either merit or sense." 

Amen, sister.

Next up, perhaps Emma, or Sense and Sensibility.   I would like to read Henry James, also.  However, a few months ago I checked out The Wings of the Dove (I liked the movie, with kooky dear Helena Bonham-Carter), and felt completely illiterate trying to plow through the dense prose.

I highly recommend it, if you're troubled and can't seem to fall asleep. Works like a charm! 

Pet Peeve

It was really hot here this weekend. Really hot. I think the high was 108 degrees today, according to the weather sites.

Okay: So it's hot, and it's the end of September. Turns out that typically, for Southern California, our hottest month of the year is October.

Still.

Some people seem surprised, even taken aback, by our heat this weekend.  And if you just moved here, from say...Idaho? New England? Canada?  It would be okay to be surprised at our Indian summer heatwave. But those of you who have lived in California all your life? Have lived specifically in SOUTHERN California all your lives?

Y'all need to get a grip, and like, get a longer memory, or keep a daybook or something.  Because, people! It gets this hot, at this time of year....every year!  And still, I have to hear: "Can you belieeeeeve this heat?  And it's FALL."  Yadda yadda. You can't really blame folks, what with Halloween costume catalogs arriving, and my magazines full of robust and hearty autumn stew recipes for those chilly September weekends in...Vermont?  Wisconsin? 

Tomorrow is supposed to be even hotter.  And then it will cool down later in the week, and probably return to a normal 83-ish degrees by next weekend.  And then, in a week or two, the Santa Ana winds will kick in, and it'll heat up again, and you'll all start talking about the end of the frickin' world again.  It's a CYCLE, people. It's what autumn looks like, in our part of the world.  Write it down. Remember it for next year.  All right, I'm done.

Peace out, homies.  (And no, the above pics weren't taken this weekend. Are you kidding me? It was HOT out.)

Paranoia (The Destroyer)

I could say lots about where I've been for the last eight weeks since the last post.  Detail my very real social anxieties and dread of other people, fill you in on all the charming anecdotes of the kids' first few weeks back at school (the cause of most of said social anxieties)  and how I internalize my utter failure to make relevant, chatty small talk as an utter failure at being a good ...mother,  citizen and human being. I'm not really quite that bad.  But some intense few hours can feel like that, sometimes. 

Instead, I'll summarize all that inner turmoil with this droll little poem, that I re-discovered the other night:

We who are
your closest friends
feel the time
has come to tell you
that every Thursday
we have been meeting,
as a group,
to devise ways
to keep you
in perpetual uncertainty
frustration
discontent and
torture
by neither loving you
as much as you want
nor cutting you adrift.


Your analyst is
in on it,
plus your boyfriend
and your ex-husband;
and we have pledged
to disappoint you
as long as you need us.
In announcing out
association
we realized we have
placed in your hands
a possible anecdote
against uncertainty
indeed against ourselves.
But since our Thursday nights
have brought us
to a community
of purpose
rare in itself
with you as
the natural center,
we feel hopeful you
will continue to make unreasonable
demands for affection
if not as a consequence
of your disastrous personality
then for the good of the collective.

HA. Poetry, a mighty good dousing of cold, fresh water on all my hand-wringing, head-banging self obsession of late.

The poem is by Philip Lopate, who also wrote the mighty words: "They fuck you up/Your mum and dad./They may not mean to/but they do."   Ah.  Truer words, and all that.  And (this time) I don't even mean me own dear mum and dad, but myself, as a parent, as a stay-at-home mom -- one who has volunteered herself way out onto new and scary precipices.  And so early in the school year! 

Ah well.  Here I am folks.  Been reading, been nesting, been thinking of the blog and then losing the train of thought, or the will.  That paranoia, it eats up the hours.  But if nothing else, it's gotta be a good omen to title the first post-dry spell post after a Kinks song.  Ray Davies rocks.

Which reminds me: barely three months left in the year, and we haven't seen a live show or concert.  How to fix that? 

Back

I'm baaaack.  Actually, I've been back home for about a week and a half.  One thing I like about vacation is unplugging, literally. I logged onto the internet maybe once  in the 10 days that we were gone, and rejoiced in how Facebook completely fell off my personal radar. (I guess it goes without saying that a soul as conflicted as mine feels totally conflicted about the wonder evil that is Facebook.)  

So I've been lying low and being very lazy, living in both denial and increasing anticipation of the fact that the kids will start back to school in less than 2 weeks. Crazy!  A 9 week summer vacation isn't at all the 3-month season that I had as a kid.  We were out of school mid-June and didn't return until after Labor Day.   And we liked it that way, sonny! 

I took the photo above at a rinky-dink little amusement park called Oaks Park, located a little southeast of Portland, Oregon.  It's very retro, in a boardwalk/carnival sort of way. It even has a roller rink!  My children loved it.  I loved that my 5-year-old son, who can be a bit of a nervous nelly, mustered up the guts to ride on the kiddie roller-coaster with me -- and then rode another 4 times with his big sister. Such joy on his face! 


I also loved that when I was standing there, taking the above shot of the colorful "Rock & Roll" spinny ride, the PA system was blaring Manfred Mann's version of "Blinded By the Light." Something about that song just sorta screams 70s summertime to me, and it was a good moment. 


We were in the Portland area for 6 days, visiting my in-laws. My in-laws fled the arid high desert of Southern California for green, drippy rural Oregon about 20 years ago (before I was on the scene) and they seem to love it.  As for me, I like Portland plenty -- especially the miracle that is Powell's bookstore, where I got to spend a couple of glorious hours alone one evening -- but I doubt I could take the weather for too long.   I will probably always live in California, and if not, I would still opt to move somewhere in the southwest or south -- something in me just drifts that direction, as opposed to the chilly and bundled up north.  Give me my palm trees!  

This final week and a half before school will be a weird combo of lazy and ambitious: sometimes staying in our PJs until noon, sometimes me taking 2 kids alone to the beach, the local pool, the San Diego Wild Animal Park.  Double scoops of ice cream still need to be consumed!  Same for peanut butter sandwiches, eaten with grains of sand crunching in our mouths at a beach picnic.  


As for Cherry Icee induced brain freezes? 

Check.