November 25, 2003
Baby-Hater
Babies get in my way. Babies interrupt everything good, like morning coffee and TV, a phone call you like, sleep, sex when you?re finally not too tired to have it.
You leave your husband and go to the nursery at 2 a.m., painted so cute, go to them, and that?s the only place you want to be, and there?s no chance to leave, or trust they will be okay if you turn your back on them. They won?t. SIDS. Meningitis. A blanket kicked off and now the air-conditioning vent's blowing right on them. They are babies. They need you.
Do you need them? What do they do for you? They fill you up like an ocean inside a balloon. It?s too much water for one heart to hold.
They slow you down to just one worry when you are rocking them or watching them sleep that has nothing to do with you, your sick mother, your dead father, your out-of-work husband. The only worry is baby, baby, baby.
They sharpen your hearing so that you never again sleep without listening for the smallest hitch, for a nose that?s gone crusty in the middle of the night, for the sigh from a dream that is probably about you, some criticism about something you did or didn?t do for the baby, because you are in the baby?s face all day, catching the baby?s eyes with yours so you don?t get lost, so the baby never worries about being separated. It has to be a dream about you because what else can be inside the head of someone that new? You would kick the ass of anyone who gave your baby a bad dream.
It?s hard work being the baby?s world, the baby?s container. You were careful when you were pregnant, gave up coffee and wine, kept your voice down, played James Taylor CDs so that now you?re bored with him when you once loved him, even imagined yourself living with him on Martha?s Vineyard after he finally kicked heroin, and you never want to hear Fire and Rain again.
Anyone can be awakened by a scream, but by a tiny fingernail scratching the tightly covered mattress? It?s less of a sound than one bristle of a brush on a snare drum. It?s the only sound you need in an entire, noisy, dumb world, and this clarity is enough to make you crazy, because your brain is stuffed with important things you all of a sudden don?t care about anymore, and you empty out to love the baby as much as you can which is how much love the baby needs, and your life is ruined for anything but being a mother, being a prisoner of this baby?s who will have to leave you and the safety of you, or turn into a vegetable, a wimp, a mama?s boy.
It?ll happen right in front of your eyes, and there?ll be nothing you can do but pray (when you barely believe) that a car doesn't hit him while he's riding his bike, and hold other people?s babies and hate them, too, for having babies, for not being able anymore to give you their full attention when you are giving them yours, because you have time, your baby is now twelve. You hate your pregnant friends and sister for being taken up, suckered like you were by this unfair advantage whose small, soft head you keep smelling, just once more, and again once more, because it reminds you of the sweet baby you?ve lost out in the driveway shooting baskets, who if he ever comes back inside for dinner will smell like dirty coins.
You leave your husband and go to the nursery at 2 a.m., painted so cute, go to them, and that?s the only place you want to be, and there?s no chance to leave, or trust they will be okay if you turn your back on them. They won?t. SIDS. Meningitis. A blanket kicked off and now the air-conditioning vent's blowing right on them. They are babies. They need you.
Do you need them? What do they do for you? They fill you up like an ocean inside a balloon. It?s too much water for one heart to hold.
They slow you down to just one worry when you are rocking them or watching them sleep that has nothing to do with you, your sick mother, your dead father, your out-of-work husband. The only worry is baby, baby, baby.
They sharpen your hearing so that you never again sleep without listening for the smallest hitch, for a nose that?s gone crusty in the middle of the night, for the sigh from a dream that is probably about you, some criticism about something you did or didn?t do for the baby, because you are in the baby?s face all day, catching the baby?s eyes with yours so you don?t get lost, so the baby never worries about being separated. It has to be a dream about you because what else can be inside the head of someone that new? You would kick the ass of anyone who gave your baby a bad dream.
It?s hard work being the baby?s world, the baby?s container. You were careful when you were pregnant, gave up coffee and wine, kept your voice down, played James Taylor CDs so that now you?re bored with him when you once loved him, even imagined yourself living with him on Martha?s Vineyard after he finally kicked heroin, and you never want to hear Fire and Rain again.
Anyone can be awakened by a scream, but by a tiny fingernail scratching the tightly covered mattress? It?s less of a sound than one bristle of a brush on a snare drum. It?s the only sound you need in an entire, noisy, dumb world, and this clarity is enough to make you crazy, because your brain is stuffed with important things you all of a sudden don?t care about anymore, and you empty out to love the baby as much as you can which is how much love the baby needs, and your life is ruined for anything but being a mother, being a prisoner of this baby?s who will have to leave you and the safety of you, or turn into a vegetable, a wimp, a mama?s boy.
It?ll happen right in front of your eyes, and there?ll be nothing you can do but pray (when you barely believe) that a car doesn't hit him while he's riding his bike, and hold other people?s babies and hate them, too, for having babies, for not being able anymore to give you their full attention when you are giving them yours, because you have time, your baby is now twelve. You hate your pregnant friends and sister for being taken up, suckered like you were by this unfair advantage whose small, soft head you keep smelling, just once more, and again once more, because it reminds you of the sweet baby you?ve lost out in the driveway shooting baskets, who if he ever comes back inside for dinner will smell like dirty coins.
November 24, 2003
Sister
I?ve only seen my mother cry inconsolably once, when I was in high school. She was talking about her older sister, Bernadine, how she had died of bone cancer six months after she came home from World War II. She was a Navy nurse. I didn?t know this. My mother was eleven years old. She described how she stood in the yard with her father and brothers and watched the sky; her mother stayed in the kitchen at the window. Three Navy planes flew low over their house on Burlingame to honor Bernadine, trailing red smoke like bloody cotton.
November 17, 2003
What I Always Wanted
When I was a young girl I wanted to be as beautiful as my mother and wear my hair in a ballerina bun, and have long, long legs and perfect grace. I imagined myself a June Taylor dancer, a trapeze artist, a barefoot modern dancer like Martha Graham.
When liking boys kicked in hard at ten and eleven, I wanted to marry Robbie on My Three Sons and steal him from Tina Cole who I also had a crush on.
When I was in high school I wanted to go away to college and start another life away from my parents? fighting and that small Mississippi town, but my father wouldn?t pay out-of-state tuition and I didn't work hard enough to get a scholarship.
In college, I wanted to write a letter to Julian Bond and offer to march in protests, or join the Peace Corps and work abroad. There I would fall crazy in love like a Van Morrison song.
Well, I never took dance lessons. I played the flute but was frightened of performing and hated people looking at just me. I had a string of boyfriends but staved off sex, kept myself to myself, storing the amazingness of me in some silo while I waited. I didn't change one bit of the world. I dreamed big from the safety of my bedroom, wrote in my journal, listened to the zillion relationship songs on the radio, checked the mirror, ready and impatient for the best part of my life to happen.
When I was married to my first husband and it was falling apart I imagined my next marriage would be to a wealthy older man.
When I was unhappily married to Malcolm I imagined I would steal Sting from his wife, and if not, then I certainly could fall in love with a writer or a painter. Because of this him, my life would finally bloom like a monster peony, and I would be able to show my lover ? an embarrassingly purple word, even now - the journals I?d kept private, dump my whole secret load on him, this safe haven, because, well, artists understand artists.
When I left Malcolm I stayed in the house, wrote in my journal, listened to jazz without words, looked in the mirror and pretended my face was thirty-one. Dreaming wasn?t as pleasurable now that I could do whatever I wanted. I noticed the forty years of life behind me, along with ten new beginnings in there that had never shifted out of second gear. I went back to Malcolm and asked him if we could start over, not sweat the marriage but be friends first, friends who have sex.
I finally figured out the stuff of self-help books without ever reading one: you can?t smell the coffee unless you make the coffee.
I?m growing my hair out so I can wear it in a bun. While Malcolm's at the office I write short stories, and I e-mail him early drafts, shoot him my heart so I can know right then what he thinks and he shoots back and tells me the truth. When I feel like dancing I take a break, strap on my iPod and flail around in front of the hall mirror.
When liking boys kicked in hard at ten and eleven, I wanted to marry Robbie on My Three Sons and steal him from Tina Cole who I also had a crush on.
When I was in high school I wanted to go away to college and start another life away from my parents? fighting and that small Mississippi town, but my father wouldn?t pay out-of-state tuition and I didn't work hard enough to get a scholarship.
In college, I wanted to write a letter to Julian Bond and offer to march in protests, or join the Peace Corps and work abroad. There I would fall crazy in love like a Van Morrison song.
Well, I never took dance lessons. I played the flute but was frightened of performing and hated people looking at just me. I had a string of boyfriends but staved off sex, kept myself to myself, storing the amazingness of me in some silo while I waited. I didn't change one bit of the world. I dreamed big from the safety of my bedroom, wrote in my journal, listened to the zillion relationship songs on the radio, checked the mirror, ready and impatient for the best part of my life to happen.
When I was married to my first husband and it was falling apart I imagined my next marriage would be to a wealthy older man.
When I was unhappily married to Malcolm I imagined I would steal Sting from his wife, and if not, then I certainly could fall in love with a writer or a painter. Because of this him, my life would finally bloom like a monster peony, and I would be able to show my lover ? an embarrassingly purple word, even now - the journals I?d kept private, dump my whole secret load on him, this safe haven, because, well, artists understand artists.
When I left Malcolm I stayed in the house, wrote in my journal, listened to jazz without words, looked in the mirror and pretended my face was thirty-one. Dreaming wasn?t as pleasurable now that I could do whatever I wanted. I noticed the forty years of life behind me, along with ten new beginnings in there that had never shifted out of second gear. I went back to Malcolm and asked him if we could start over, not sweat the marriage but be friends first, friends who have sex.
I finally figured out the stuff of self-help books without ever reading one: you can?t smell the coffee unless you make the coffee.
I?m growing my hair out so I can wear it in a bun. While Malcolm's at the office I write short stories, and I e-mail him early drafts, shoot him my heart so I can know right then what he thinks and he shoots back and tells me the truth. When I feel like dancing I take a break, strap on my iPod and flail around in front of the hall mirror.
November 15, 2003
Quick Fiction
Here's a tense, short piece by Kathy Fish.
Maud Newton is in the neighborhood - Mr. Beller's.
And there are these beautiful scatterings of Roy Kesey's from China.
Maud Newton is in the neighborhood - Mr. Beller's.
And there are these beautiful scatterings of Roy Kesey's from China.
November 10, 2003
Trippin'
Perhaps my jealousy at your new ipod is inappropriate, but I shall hold it close anyhow. Though if you got an iTrip to add to your iPod, I would be most truly jealous. Indeed.
Scroll Wheel
I bought an iPod a couple of weeks ago and the simplicity and power of it scares and awes me, how white-and-silver-elegant it is, so slim 5.6 oz., and how much music it can hold. 5,000 songs. When I first saw that I thought, "That's nuts. Who can listen to 5,000 songs? That would be 500 CDs at 10 songs each. 333 hours of music. That's almost two weeks of solid tunes." Broken down like that it didn't seem as crazy. Apple offers three versions - 2,500 songs, 5,000 songs, 10,000 songs. Like the ambivalent middle bear, I went for the middle chair at the table, the middle bowl of porridge.
The buttons and scroll wheel are hyper-sensitive to my touch and they make these sweet little clicks of encouragement. The iPod clips on the waistband of my pants, or I can plug it into my car, or my computer. Anywhere I am is where it will go and how many friends can give you that much of their time? I wish they could. There are too many people to pine for, so much fine company to have for an hour or two and then miss. If only I could load them in my iPod.
I had this notion that I would copy the best CDs in my collection onto the iPod, and the music I love would be there for me, close at hand, and also in two places. A safe haven in case a hurricane rips the house off the slab. Thirty years of music would be contained in something the size of a pack of cards. Thirty years of songs associated with friends, lovers, cars, parties, sex, almost-sex, break-ups, dark days, risk, new days, possibility.
So far, I have 788 songs, some rock, folk, classical, but most of them are jazz, the beauty and spareness of which makes me sad and reminds me of a hundred mistakes, fifty roads not taken. I can barely listen, but I do. My CDs weren't organized and I didn't realize how deeply I'd bought some artists: Keith Jarrett = 8 CDs; Brad Mehldau = 5 CDs; Jacky Terrasson = 7 CDs; Chet Baker = 5 CDs; Diane Reeves = 6 CDs; Cyrus Chestnutt = 6 CDs; Miles Davis = 7 CDs. They?re locked and loaded, but I need some joy in this iPod, 4,212 second chances.
I've asked my friends to give me their playlists so I can tag along and see what they like. I can't get close enough to the people I care about, is one of my problems, and music has always seemed like a way to do this, an intimacy, even if the intimacy doesn't involve me. Elliott Smith's name keeps coming up on their lists, and I downloaded one of his albums - XO - can't stop listening, wish I'd started my relationship with him before he killed himself. Someone else to miss. These are beautiful songs. Another friend gave me his song - "Hey, Ya!" - hip-hop that makes me jump around like the silhouetted people on the iPod commercial. Too bad I'm old enough to be the mother of them all. These lists pour in and my friends write me a few sentences about what these songs mean to them and it feels like Christmas around here.
Headphones. God, but it's lovely when the earbuds are snugly in place, and I'm caught in the middle of a song. The volume is there for me to caress with my thumb, and I turn it up as loud as is comfortable. Problem is, when I wear them and go out and about I feel drunk and have trouble walking, even after I've taken them off. Listening this way, for me, is a blinders-on attraction to one thing, best done in a chair with my family out of the house. My senses are not good at sharing. The intimacy of someone's voice in my head, the instrumentation split between left and right ear is pure sex, and switching gears discombobulates me. I resent when I have to stop listening because I'm now at the place where I'm supposed to be and, sure, it's odd to sit in a meeting with headphones on, but what is more important? Joni Mitchell singing "A Case of You" or designing a rack brochure?
I'm figuring this out. I may stuff my iPod with 5000 songs, but it won't be so I can forage through all of this music, note for note. I will be happy enough to have so much good music contained in one place where I can get my hands on it if I need to, like the First-Aid kit in the trunk of my car, but not quite. This is a new kind of relief. I will have access to what's just been released, to the sound of other people's joy, anger, sorrow, and I'm just a scroll-click away from memories that'll come back to me if I play their music. My iPod gives them a car to ride in, windows down, eight-pack of Miller ponies on the back seat, radio blaring; curfew's five hours away and the night's open for business.
The buttons and scroll wheel are hyper-sensitive to my touch and they make these sweet little clicks of encouragement. The iPod clips on the waistband of my pants, or I can plug it into my car, or my computer. Anywhere I am is where it will go and how many friends can give you that much of their time? I wish they could. There are too many people to pine for, so much fine company to have for an hour or two and then miss. If only I could load them in my iPod.
I had this notion that I would copy the best CDs in my collection onto the iPod, and the music I love would be there for me, close at hand, and also in two places. A safe haven in case a hurricane rips the house off the slab. Thirty years of music would be contained in something the size of a pack of cards. Thirty years of songs associated with friends, lovers, cars, parties, sex, almost-sex, break-ups, dark days, risk, new days, possibility.
So far, I have 788 songs, some rock, folk, classical, but most of them are jazz, the beauty and spareness of which makes me sad and reminds me of a hundred mistakes, fifty roads not taken. I can barely listen, but I do. My CDs weren't organized and I didn't realize how deeply I'd bought some artists: Keith Jarrett = 8 CDs; Brad Mehldau = 5 CDs; Jacky Terrasson = 7 CDs; Chet Baker = 5 CDs; Diane Reeves = 6 CDs; Cyrus Chestnutt = 6 CDs; Miles Davis = 7 CDs. They?re locked and loaded, but I need some joy in this iPod, 4,212 second chances.
I've asked my friends to give me their playlists so I can tag along and see what they like. I can't get close enough to the people I care about, is one of my problems, and music has always seemed like a way to do this, an intimacy, even if the intimacy doesn't involve me. Elliott Smith's name keeps coming up on their lists, and I downloaded one of his albums - XO - can't stop listening, wish I'd started my relationship with him before he killed himself. Someone else to miss. These are beautiful songs. Another friend gave me his song - "Hey, Ya!" - hip-hop that makes me jump around like the silhouetted people on the iPod commercial. Too bad I'm old enough to be the mother of them all. These lists pour in and my friends write me a few sentences about what these songs mean to them and it feels like Christmas around here.
Headphones. God, but it's lovely when the earbuds are snugly in place, and I'm caught in the middle of a song. The volume is there for me to caress with my thumb, and I turn it up as loud as is comfortable. Problem is, when I wear them and go out and about I feel drunk and have trouble walking, even after I've taken them off. Listening this way, for me, is a blinders-on attraction to one thing, best done in a chair with my family out of the house. My senses are not good at sharing. The intimacy of someone's voice in my head, the instrumentation split between left and right ear is pure sex, and switching gears discombobulates me. I resent when I have to stop listening because I'm now at the place where I'm supposed to be and, sure, it's odd to sit in a meeting with headphones on, but what is more important? Joni Mitchell singing "A Case of You" or designing a rack brochure?
I'm figuring this out. I may stuff my iPod with 5000 songs, but it won't be so I can forage through all of this music, note for note. I will be happy enough to have so much good music contained in one place where I can get my hands on it if I need to, like the First-Aid kit in the trunk of my car, but not quite. This is a new kind of relief. I will have access to what's just been released, to the sound of other people's joy, anger, sorrow, and I'm just a scroll-click away from memories that'll come back to me if I play their music. My iPod gives them a car to ride in, windows down, eight-pack of Miller ponies on the back seat, radio blaring; curfew's five hours away and the night's open for business.
November 06, 2003
Links
Pasha Malla?s class is in session. Protect your children.
There?s a sad diner story by Kevin Fanning to read. Chances are you?ve been there.
Utahna Faith of 3 a.m. has published the first issue of Wild Strawberries, her new flash lit mag. Please subscribe.
And Maud?s indefatigable blog is featured in New York Magazine.
There?s a sad diner story by Kevin Fanning to read. Chances are you?ve been there.
Utahna Faith of 3 a.m. has published the first issue of Wild Strawberries, her new flash lit mag. Please subscribe.
And Maud?s indefatigable blog is featured in New York Magazine.
November 04, 2003
Cloudy
It's one of those overcast days that make me happy, homebound, productive. Today I'll fix soup out of abandoned stuff in the fridge - leftover chicken, mashed potatoes, lima beans, and write a piece of my novel, go downstairs to read old newspapers, wear sweats and socks and work on projects from home rather than drive to the office. Cloudy days are sexy in a low-key way. I do my best work when expectations are simple. Too much sun rattles me. I don't want to be pushed around by cheerfulness. We need rain and a front is on its way after so many days of high pressure, clear skies, temps in the 80s. Doesn't New Orleans know this is Fall? I don't know why I'm so hooked into weather, but I am. The sky's like some giant set and the sun's the director giving me cues. I hate cues. I've been craving low light. Which reminds me that a friend of mine just wrote a beautiful story called "Galveston" and I've had that song in my head now, so I found Jimmy Webb on the web and I'm listening. He wrote so many good songs, even MacArthur Park, which he sings plainer and sadder than Richard Harris. But what's with that up-tempo last part? He should've quit before that started. Which could also be said about this post. Oh well.
recently
Another Sweet Holiday Gift Idea.
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Awww.
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A request for Jim Shepard.
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Pia's Nifty Gift Ideas.
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My Favorite Runners.
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Story Quarterly Contest.
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Clickable:
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You Try and Choose.
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Pop Up Books.
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Container Houses.
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aviary
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Pia Z. Ehrhardt.
designed by Terry Bain.
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