It's one of the girl's birthdays, on Facebook my students arranged a hilarious broken-english thread arranging the details of yesterday's surprise party. Hilarious because they get jokes not because of their misused pronouns and verb forms. Getting jokes says a lot when you are learning a language. It is cheesy I get it but that's my first focus, we speak heart in my class. Lots of laughter so that even if the words don't translate the spirit does.
We are all homeless I am thinking when I walk through the door of class and see the hopeful looks of the two Japanese girls in the corner decorating Maiko's chair with gifts and streamers, they are relieved to see that I am not the birthday girl. What is a home? Is it the knowledge that, say, you have to be turning on to Fairfield by quarter of if you want to walk in to class five minutes before class starts? Is it the way your bed feels on Friday mornings, pillows stuffed with the zion of sleep and still cushioning your awareness when you settle back in with your first cup of coffee and books and blank pages? Is it the way the air, through the screen when the sun is almost down and you are drying your dishes, reminds you that there is life outside? How it makes you grateful, reminds you to pay attention?
There was sad news from the East Coast that came after other sad news from the East Coast. The kind of news that jolted my routine and knocked me off balance for a while, after already being a tiny bit off balance because my cousin was here for ten days. I had to pause and be firm enough with myself, my sleep was a mess, my caffeine intake off the chain. My diet for shit and no yoga. But totally obsessed with writing and studying, so really the past two weeks have been a madness of the poetic kind. Frenzy. The Poetry finally came back to me the night before last. So I am proud of myself. The golden tail tried to slip away under the door. I went after it. Wriggly little bastard. I mean seriously, I didn't let up. My poem muscles must be so lean and strong now. Poetry sounds like palm trees and feels like the sea. Or big bright magical flowers that only live in California and must have sparkle names. It feels like the bald light of the moon. Like the way that light must put invisible magic on your skin.
We're floating through space Brooks reminded me, a long talk under the palm trees them witnessing me letting him be my witness through the sun roof of my car. I sat under my purple mexican blanket because it was cold out and night but I needed the fresh salt air. That's when I felt the untying, when he said that. That's what made it all good...this is life is what he was saying. Which was enough for me to say, ohhh yea and I get a choice in the matter, to make it holy. To make it holy with my own special sunshine and rain.
We are all homeless and speaking a second language. I make a home my own home. I do it for us, using language, my first house. Also I don't really know what I am doing.
There is beauty in the knowing that no one really does.
Showing posts with label Adult Education. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Adult Education. Show all posts
May 4, 2012
April 4, 2012
And this is what I am trying to get through to him
Yes, teacher, yes... I believe you, he says, but I don't quit because we're not at his edge yet. I go on, certain to keep our gaze fixed.
Good, I'm glad you believe it, now try it. I promise if you practice your negatives you will be a better fighter. Understand? I promise~
From his gaze on mine I feel his whole sphere encompass then retreat and I know I got my in--that he's heard me. What he does with it is up to him, but without question what I have shared will sink in. The seed it waters, that may come later...maybe back home in Brazil, maybe in conversation with his mother. Who knows? But the concept saturated, and that's all that matters to me in the end.
He is twenty-something, with achingly good looks, the kind you feel in your muscles. He's easy to like and uses the charm of his smile and eyes, these gifts that have given him many passes in life, to keep class light. I like having him as part of the dynamic and so do all the ladies, which presents a whole other all the time behavior lesson of keeping male and female energies equated. Human dynamics and being in the heat of it, I love this stuff. I am a natural educator not by my trade but because I am always, all the time learning. If this is the case for you than you get it--you are all the time also teaching, too.
And this is what I am trying to get through to him. Plasticity. The stretchiness of the brain, literally. How when we challenge ourselves to a new concept, mental, physical, emotional, the details don't matter, it's the "newness" or "challenge" factor that engages a chemistry change. With practice, this new opening actually impacts all our current rhythms. We can even change our muscle memory, re-establish all new patterns this way.
So what I want is for him to learn the negative forms of contractions--this area where there is a gap just subtle enough in class for only I to see. He just quietly scoots around negatives, so that's the place I want his eyes forced open, and I am challenging him, and he is a cage fighter, obsessed with MMA, and obsession--passion--of any kind impresses and excites me so I know to appeal to this. And I know, enough to promise, that what I am saying is right. I hated grammar, hated it, the only reason I ever took english EVER was to write. Now, step by step with patience and quiet I have to learn each rule so that my students can understand. It hurts my head. And it's made my writing so damn clean but is it that or my commitment to the new postures in yoga I am coercing my body to learn? The connections are stunning and clear, as I write long hours away until the dark threads its rightness, its ease of night finesse right into my skin. I have whole stories in front of me or poems completed, and new ones charging to begin. This is yoga, and grammar, and human behavior lesson 101. So I take aim and he gets it. Learn your negatives. It will help you fight.
When I drop his gaze he smiles a to the side smile and gives me a pound. I get it I get it teacher...Open your mind.
He gets the concept, what he does now is up to him.
Good, I'm glad you believe it, now try it. I promise if you practice your negatives you will be a better fighter. Understand? I promise~
From his gaze on mine I feel his whole sphere encompass then retreat and I know I got my in--that he's heard me. What he does with it is up to him, but without question what I have shared will sink in. The seed it waters, that may come later...maybe back home in Brazil, maybe in conversation with his mother. Who knows? But the concept saturated, and that's all that matters to me in the end.
He is twenty-something, with achingly good looks, the kind you feel in your muscles. He's easy to like and uses the charm of his smile and eyes, these gifts that have given him many passes in life, to keep class light. I like having him as part of the dynamic and so do all the ladies, which presents a whole other all the time behavior lesson of keeping male and female energies equated. Human dynamics and being in the heat of it, I love this stuff. I am a natural educator not by my trade but because I am always, all the time learning. If this is the case for you than you get it--you are all the time also teaching, too.
And this is what I am trying to get through to him. Plasticity. The stretchiness of the brain, literally. How when we challenge ourselves to a new concept, mental, physical, emotional, the details don't matter, it's the "newness" or "challenge" factor that engages a chemistry change. With practice, this new opening actually impacts all our current rhythms. We can even change our muscle memory, re-establish all new patterns this way.
So what I want is for him to learn the negative forms of contractions--this area where there is a gap just subtle enough in class for only I to see. He just quietly scoots around negatives, so that's the place I want his eyes forced open, and I am challenging him, and he is a cage fighter, obsessed with MMA, and obsession--passion--of any kind impresses and excites me so I know to appeal to this. And I know, enough to promise, that what I am saying is right. I hated grammar, hated it, the only reason I ever took english EVER was to write. Now, step by step with patience and quiet I have to learn each rule so that my students can understand. It hurts my head. And it's made my writing so damn clean but is it that or my commitment to the new postures in yoga I am coercing my body to learn? The connections are stunning and clear, as I write long hours away until the dark threads its rightness, its ease of night finesse right into my skin. I have whole stories in front of me or poems completed, and new ones charging to begin. This is yoga, and grammar, and human behavior lesson 101. So I take aim and he gets it. Learn your negatives. It will help you fight.
When I drop his gaze he smiles a to the side smile and gives me a pound. I get it I get it teacher...Open your mind.
He gets the concept, what he does now is up to him.
December 9, 2010
It's Been A Good Year (but dont make her lift her skirts or I'll be pissed!)
It's been a good year. I am sitting in conversation with this guy at the door of a coffee shop in this place called Severna Park and I have not seen him since no shit 1995 (oh my god, how funny I just remembered we were Class Partiers together in the year book, that's why he was explaining so bummedly and borderline apologetically about having to quit smoking! Holmes my dad's got lung disease c'mon! We're grown up now it's alright...) and all I can think is it's been a good year.
I am kind, and ground myself and remind myself to be present. It is genuinely good to see him: he is one of the only people from my high school, or the one near where I worked as a teen, that via facebook or some other networking means hadn't been found and labeled: Married, Divorced, Parent, etc and I tell him as much. I admit I do, now I can check him off in my head. Our funny little ways of keeping track of one another that get complained about but that at the end of the day matter, afterall. Me, I have a Mama-Soul as part of my spirit, and a tight-knit tribe of Family which marked me deep in the place that gets marked by how we are nurtured, so knowing where and how people are adds to my security. I grounded in this, and was happy to connect again to this guy.
But It's been a good year, and that is the line that has the little wick attached. It's the line that when gionng through my head while walking out of Brian's house this morning in desperate strides towards the nearest wifi-having local coffee shop, triggered the light inside to tell me the Muses are near. There is no other way to explain this to you if it is not your experience--the best I can do is what I always do when I sit down and write. Just tell the truth tell the truth tell the truth and follow that little feeling of light. I do not know when it started but I do know that it is real, it is the most real thing I know. It is a feeling that comes on inside that alerts me to the inner creativity the boundless place and my duty, my calling here on this earth no matter what else is to bring it to the surface, to midwife it and breathe in to it the life it needs to fly. And when I disregard it I get short and turn in to an asshole and so help me if you cross my way when I am in the middle of my dance with the Muse. So help me, that is, should you make her lift her skirts and high-heeled or bare-footed run away.
But what a superstition that is, too? Writing involves discipline and the most clear lesson I learned in the past two years is to not underestimate what happens by simple alchemy of action. Showing up, not bitching, and doing what the hell's got to get done, which almost always is what's right in front of me. It's more than just saying ahhh yea I will start with It's been a good year because that is where the little light is attached. It's also bringing in to the coffe shop two books that really turn me on and reading a while this morning, and even more it's about sitting down especially when the light hasn't or doesn't feel like it's going to come.
It's been a good year. In November it was the Harvest New Year and starting out--the first week of the new year!--my bank account was in the red. So what was in front of me was get a better job and get your finances re-ordered, no matter what. So I did because after the last two years of my life dont ever underestimate my hustle. Turns out now I get to manage this way hip, way mellow local coffee shop in the Pines where I live. It's brand new and the boss needed someone with experience in community building and coffee-shop culture, which has nothing to do with caffeine and everything to do with supporting and growing your local tribe. Even the business model functions that way and I brought to this my barista-ing for Peggy those years back at Play It Again in Chestertown, as well as the local art, food and music movement we grew around The Oregon Dialogue. So far sooo good. It overlooks the Bay and River on the west side of the inlet of Ocean City. I watch the sun come up every morning and breathe and exhilarate in how fucking rad it is to be alive.
And I am writing, and chilling a lot outside, and that is that. It's been a good year. In November 2008 I left my relationship of 6 years. Right after that Josh and I tried to be lovers after a decade of being Muse to one another. I still believe he was a true love, but we ended too because just because something's true doesn't mean it's meant to be. Losing him, and leaving Brandon and Chestertown and Anngar Farm all at the same time was the single most painful part of my life and from start to finish it lasted until around the middle of this summer.
It's been a good year.
I worked for Chesapeake College when I left Bran, I was one of four people who started the GED and community English program that now serves all five counties on the upper and mid Eastern Shore. I worked my fucking ass off while I was there, and stepped down in May after living in isolation for a year out on the Choptank River and licking my wounds. I was lonely and needed family and friends. I went on a month long sabbatical in the Pac NW in May and June and while there had more than one other-world experience of being Called again. I moved back to mom's at the beach after that and partied like a rock star all summer long and still found that I had one more hall to cross to transition my life from Brandon-Josh-Chesapeake to the one that lay beyond. This stuff cant be made up, you know? The light within is real, what if that is our only choice, to surrender to the myth of what could be and give it our all to bring it to life? How about learning that the only way to do this is to do it!? And what about the struggle of being a woman and feeling this is the work you're meant to do? This is subject matter for another post (or a whole damn book, ehem...) but what about that? I know plenty of artist men whose art is their main and only priority. What about when you're a woman with the same compulsion, what happens then? When the pain is that bad I know now that actually it's my only choice, to believe in this mid-wifing and keep breathing and trusting in the birth about to come. The pain is my spirit--not a religious thing I am talking about the place inside of I AM--calling out a red alert to listen the hell up.
It's been a good year. Tuesday night I watched Candace, Jessica, Shanika and LaShae walk in their caps and gowns and receive their Maryland State High School Diplomas. They were four of 43 graduates from Chesapeake in just the last six months! And at one time I held each of those girls hand in hand. I hooped and hollered from the audience because I dont work there anymore so now it's okay for me to be wild and exuberant and un-professional even if it seems I'm acting a fool.
It's been a good year. I dont live in fantasy anymore about a man who's love will finally change or set me free. I dont dream of someday when I get to do.....all these millions of different passion-fueled things. For the first time in my life I wake up now and just live today. Seriously. It's the first time in my life I've ever done that, you dig how crazy that sounds? The passing from then to now was long and great and so dark at times that I often forgot what path I was on. But I am me today and at peace with who I am. All I need to do now is trust in her day to day.
And pay attention to when the wick-light comes on, by listening and more, taking action on what's right in front of me. By practicing what I learned in those two years which is easy to say but takes a while to get the footwork right. It sounds silly maybe but what the hell is there other than saying yes ok, the next step is just be present that's how right now that I can Show up, and the peace is inside knowing that the rest will be what it will be.
I am kind, and ground myself and remind myself to be present. It is genuinely good to see him: he is one of the only people from my high school, or the one near where I worked as a teen, that via facebook or some other networking means hadn't been found and labeled: Married, Divorced, Parent, etc and I tell him as much. I admit I do, now I can check him off in my head. Our funny little ways of keeping track of one another that get complained about but that at the end of the day matter, afterall. Me, I have a Mama-Soul as part of my spirit, and a tight-knit tribe of Family which marked me deep in the place that gets marked by how we are nurtured, so knowing where and how people are adds to my security. I grounded in this, and was happy to connect again to this guy.
But It's been a good year, and that is the line that has the little wick attached. It's the line that when gionng through my head while walking out of Brian's house this morning in desperate strides towards the nearest wifi-having local coffee shop, triggered the light inside to tell me the Muses are near. There is no other way to explain this to you if it is not your experience--the best I can do is what I always do when I sit down and write. Just tell the truth tell the truth tell the truth and follow that little feeling of light. I do not know when it started but I do know that it is real, it is the most real thing I know. It is a feeling that comes on inside that alerts me to the inner creativity the boundless place and my duty, my calling here on this earth no matter what else is to bring it to the surface, to midwife it and breathe in to it the life it needs to fly. And when I disregard it I get short and turn in to an asshole and so help me if you cross my way when I am in the middle of my dance with the Muse. So help me, that is, should you make her lift her skirts and high-heeled or bare-footed run away.
But what a superstition that is, too? Writing involves discipline and the most clear lesson I learned in the past two years is to not underestimate what happens by simple alchemy of action. Showing up, not bitching, and doing what the hell's got to get done, which almost always is what's right in front of me. It's more than just saying ahhh yea I will start with It's been a good year because that is where the little light is attached. It's also bringing in to the coffe shop two books that really turn me on and reading a while this morning, and even more it's about sitting down especially when the light hasn't or doesn't feel like it's going to come.
It's been a good year. In November it was the Harvest New Year and starting out--the first week of the new year!--my bank account was in the red. So what was in front of me was get a better job and get your finances re-ordered, no matter what. So I did because after the last two years of my life dont ever underestimate my hustle. Turns out now I get to manage this way hip, way mellow local coffee shop in the Pines where I live. It's brand new and the boss needed someone with experience in community building and coffee-shop culture, which has nothing to do with caffeine and everything to do with supporting and growing your local tribe. Even the business model functions that way and I brought to this my barista-ing for Peggy those years back at Play It Again in Chestertown, as well as the local art, food and music movement we grew around The Oregon Dialogue. So far sooo good. It overlooks the Bay and River on the west side of the inlet of Ocean City. I watch the sun come up every morning and breathe and exhilarate in how fucking rad it is to be alive.
And I am writing, and chilling a lot outside, and that is that. It's been a good year. In November 2008 I left my relationship of 6 years. Right after that Josh and I tried to be lovers after a decade of being Muse to one another. I still believe he was a true love, but we ended too because just because something's true doesn't mean it's meant to be. Losing him, and leaving Brandon and Chestertown and Anngar Farm all at the same time was the single most painful part of my life and from start to finish it lasted until around the middle of this summer.
It's been a good year.
I worked for Chesapeake College when I left Bran, I was one of four people who started the GED and community English program that now serves all five counties on the upper and mid Eastern Shore. I worked my fucking ass off while I was there, and stepped down in May after living in isolation for a year out on the Choptank River and licking my wounds. I was lonely and needed family and friends. I went on a month long sabbatical in the Pac NW in May and June and while there had more than one other-world experience of being Called again. I moved back to mom's at the beach after that and partied like a rock star all summer long and still found that I had one more hall to cross to transition my life from Brandon-Josh-Chesapeake to the one that lay beyond. This stuff cant be made up, you know? The light within is real, what if that is our only choice, to surrender to the myth of what could be and give it our all to bring it to life? How about learning that the only way to do this is to do it!? And what about the struggle of being a woman and feeling this is the work you're meant to do? This is subject matter for another post (or a whole damn book, ehem...) but what about that? I know plenty of artist men whose art is their main and only priority. What about when you're a woman with the same compulsion, what happens then? When the pain is that bad I know now that actually it's my only choice, to believe in this mid-wifing and keep breathing and trusting in the birth about to come. The pain is my spirit--not a religious thing I am talking about the place inside of I AM--calling out a red alert to listen the hell up.
It's been a good year. Tuesday night I watched Candace, Jessica, Shanika and LaShae walk in their caps and gowns and receive their Maryland State High School Diplomas. They were four of 43 graduates from Chesapeake in just the last six months! And at one time I held each of those girls hand in hand. I hooped and hollered from the audience because I dont work there anymore so now it's okay for me to be wild and exuberant and un-professional even if it seems I'm acting a fool.
It's been a good year. I dont live in fantasy anymore about a man who's love will finally change or set me free. I dont dream of someday when I get to do.....all these millions of different passion-fueled things. For the first time in my life I wake up now and just live today. Seriously. It's the first time in my life I've ever done that, you dig how crazy that sounds? The passing from then to now was long and great and so dark at times that I often forgot what path I was on. But I am me today and at peace with who I am. All I need to do now is trust in her day to day.
And pay attention to when the wick-light comes on, by listening and more, taking action on what's right in front of me. By practicing what I learned in those two years which is easy to say but takes a while to get the footwork right. It sounds silly maybe but what the hell is there other than saying yes ok, the next step is just be present that's how right now that I can Show up, and the peace is inside knowing that the rest will be what it will be.
July 21, 2010
What hungers you. In quiet.
I can not count the good people I know who to my mind would be even better if they bent their spirits to the study of their own hungers... (M.F.K. Fisher)
Dawes is up there singing.
Dawes is up there singing.The only thing scarier than dying is not dying at all.
There is wetness on my eyes, I have been in a place for the past two weeks of protection and keeping close ties on my heart, trying to be with it as it goes through its ups and downs, and now I am delivered. I am in my heart again, of it: the drum pounds the bass keep my beat and courses out in my blood all the way through to the nerve endings, the guitar's my spirit stretching out past my body. Taylor Goldsmith's totally American boy singing is finally giving me words.
It starts to go through my head, it's just a muscle. The heart. To this I can submit, I can revel in the beating wonder of getting to feel it. To just feel it, the greatest gift of all. This is wisdom: to know I'll look back on this time with gratitude and reverent longing.
My girlfriend whispers to me during set break. She tells me after her last relationship she'd completely lost all of her music interests but didn't even realize it. Her man criticized, or at least disapproved of the indy stuff that turned her on...so she let it go. Who knows how that happens? Silently, in little increments. That's how you give you up your soul. How you turn your self off. Piece by piece. Until you're so absent that you're used to feeling like your taking part but not really, only just a little. Dull, sort of looking in from the outside.
The band is less than five feet from us and I am relishing the show. I forgot how much this spot defined that time for me of naming, of recall. The time just behind me in Easton, in my first and only glorious space all of my own, when I called myself, bit by bit, detail by detail, hunger by blessed sacred hunger back to myself. The Nightcat, its black high ceiling with the exposed beams, the way the air runs in light circles back there, the red lighting. I was grinning all day in anticipation of seeing Sonia Leigh and Dawes, but I forgot how gratifying the venue is. How important place. The intimacy of the fifty or so of us having such visceral experience together. The catalogue of signed indy CD's, the pictures, I have to show for it. How much music is was and continues to be a map that's drawn me back to my own life.
In the parking lot I hugged my girlfriend goodbye and stayed extra long in my cousin Collin's arms. It was cool out but still so you could feel the weight of air. He is mind-blown, totally, by the show. Earlier, over dinner, he told me that he wants to move to Brooklyn Park where our Grammy lived, where his grandparents on his dad's side still live. He's been canvassing on a political campaign there all summer, dust and sweaty and I envision him, freckleface, blond and golden, is he in a button down? I am reminded of our hike in the fall, me and him, and talking so fervently about the GED and English students I served. About the unquestioned nature of class that so securely underpins racism. About my belief that many of our GED students I was certain had undiagnosed learning disorders, because the money for those resources just wasn't there in their neighborhoods when they were young. He said to me then that though his major was government he was thinking of focusing on education policy. Because when I talk about government I have to think about it, but when I talk about education it just comes right out of my heart. I remember my footing when he said that, stepping over the wet dark dirt, feeling my heart bottom out over the wisdom of this teenager who I've known since literally birth. Last night he talked about moving to Brooklyn, impoverished, crime-ridden Brooklyn. Brooklyn, because that's where the people connected with his heart when he bangs on their doors. They are the ones who made him feel equally fired-up.
When I left Collin and my girlfriend I met the girls from my old work for a late night catch-up. It was already 11, but the server at Applebees let us close the place down. We literally stayed til 1, cackly screaming laughter, the greasy food, couple of tears, the updates on Adult Ed and on my own life (I read a lot, I sit on the beach. Poetry--big self-conscious grin at this--I'm writing a lot of poetry. Tomorrow I will sleep late. My stresses include I wonder if my table needs more rolls...Coffee? Coffee here? And hmmm do I have another little black dress as sexy as the one I wore last week?) It was all put wholly, and gratefully in perspective for me. But I realized too how passionate I was for Adult Ed. It was a justice thing for me. Making opportunities available where they weren't before. It turned me, greatly, deeply, on.
In all things there are tides, and I for one am quiet and amidst a tide of great still. Life's cycle right now is on the long slow retreat and how I so love this time of year, the thick buoyancy, the savory greens, the dark yellow slanted light. The shadows in contrast. The feeling of heavy breathing that makes you so aware of the intermittent shafts of air to highlight the stillness. I have been submitting to it, which is not easy for me this Aries full of fire and passion and heat. Humbling myself again and again to the larger nature of things, allowing the silence, the stillness, trusting towards the inner-listing, the tiny hungers, to in stillness eventually speak their fisted minds. To become the palm, flat-opening. Allowing. It is hard. But that sweet unanticipated space, that wild curve within, fleshless and still, is there. And this is as beautiful as anything else: this does not mean what hungers one is missing. It means only that in full satiation there is quiet in the bliss. There is message in the silence, when one surrenders to wait and hear.
May 19, 2010
Last words for Easton and Adult Ed
Oh, I am tired. But what a difference when that tiredness is just remnant sleep twinkling its way off from behind your eyes verses soul-deep, bonesludge exhaustion. Ahhh, it feels good to be light again.
I am moving today! Yea yea yea! I dont know what I want to write about, just that I had that little bit of line-feeling run through my body that always is precursor to the words. When I am paying attention, anyway. Do you know how amazing it feels to know that I am about to step in to a time and space in my life where I get to do that? Just pay attention? To my art? The emotional responsibility of my job, managing classes and responsible for new student intake for the GED program and the community English program at Chesapeake College was so huge and all-consuming, and thankfully was just the pressure I needed to shape me in to the woman that inside me I was yearning to be. I am so proud, so proud of the work I did there, of stepping up my game again and again, of learning how to really practice important things like diplomacy, practicality, picking my battles, trusting in taking the high road, treating others well again and again and not being afraid to stand in my truth. How to go to bed at night crazy or stressed or broken and trusting that this too will pass. How to learn to trust in the important stuff and to allow others to do their own good jobs. How as well to raise others expectations, and especially the students who I met each day, by keeping a high standard for myself. But learning the willingness and the ease with which I can be flexible. Seeing that at the end of the day no matter what I am still human, and fuck up! And beat my self up but also know how to love and nurture not just others but me, too. And then, especially, knowing when and how to let go, when to walk away, and to do so with my character gleaned whole and leading the way.
Easton you were so good to me. I love you, and will likely love you deeply and completely with no funny business at all like the way I love Waldport, Oregon with his Alsea Bay the Suislaw trees and the rush on the air of the Pacific sea. Where I lived in a funny little trailor a mile off the coast, funny little fishing village on the central coast and my first taste of the first catch of chinook and it actually for real melted on my tongue because first catch of the season is truly that sweet. The trailor with the rhododenron bush bigger than the ceiling of the place out back, and the apple trees, and homemade apple muffins and apple crisp. A compost bin. The little things that connected me to me that fall of 2004 in to 2005 and the green wet very wet spring. God how I loved it there, but when it was time to go it was time to go and that was that. And Easton that will be you and me, knowing how to love and respect one another in all our individual splendor and knowing no matter what returning here will make each of us once more just more complete in that. Oh my god my walks, your night air, your flowers. The market and all the little quiet spots where poetry lives on your streets. Nightcat! Your music will sing to me I'll always know when to be back for more. Coffecat my favorite, favorite part will always be just sitting like a cat on a fat cushion in the sun.
It feels so good to leave whole.
Ocean Pines can you believe I am coming home?
It all feels so smooth now, so easy. I guess that's what it is when it's right. I say in prayer this morning, in my sacred silence and checking in. Thank you thank you thank you and hello world. And this day I choose this gratitude, and my actions to be gratitude in motion.
And then, thank you life, I love you, good morning Kel, I love you. Ahhhh yes, amen amen amen.
PS Bob thank you for singing to me and being my smiling last loving look around my apartment from my bed this morning as I finish typing this you remind me that I want to post some mix tape lists again. Oh blue light and my fabulous curtains and all the full packed cardboard boxes everywhere and looking forward to my walk to the coffecat for b-fast xoxoo.
I am moving today! Yea yea yea! I dont know what I want to write about, just that I had that little bit of line-feeling run through my body that always is precursor to the words. When I am paying attention, anyway. Do you know how amazing it feels to know that I am about to step in to a time and space in my life where I get to do that? Just pay attention? To my art? The emotional responsibility of my job, managing classes and responsible for new student intake for the GED program and the community English program at Chesapeake College was so huge and all-consuming, and thankfully was just the pressure I needed to shape me in to the woman that inside me I was yearning to be. I am so proud, so proud of the work I did there, of stepping up my game again and again, of learning how to really practice important things like diplomacy, practicality, picking my battles, trusting in taking the high road, treating others well again and again and not being afraid to stand in my truth. How to go to bed at night crazy or stressed or broken and trusting that this too will pass. How to learn to trust in the important stuff and to allow others to do their own good jobs. How as well to raise others expectations, and especially the students who I met each day, by keeping a high standard for myself. But learning the willingness and the ease with which I can be flexible. Seeing that at the end of the day no matter what I am still human, and fuck up! And beat my self up but also know how to love and nurture not just others but me, too. And then, especially, knowing when and how to let go, when to walk away, and to do so with my character gleaned whole and leading the way.
Easton you were so good to me. I love you, and will likely love you deeply and completely with no funny business at all like the way I love Waldport, Oregon with his Alsea Bay the Suislaw trees and the rush on the air of the Pacific sea. Where I lived in a funny little trailor a mile off the coast, funny little fishing village on the central coast and my first taste of the first catch of chinook and it actually for real melted on my tongue because first catch of the season is truly that sweet. The trailor with the rhododenron bush bigger than the ceiling of the place out back, and the apple trees, and homemade apple muffins and apple crisp. A compost bin. The little things that connected me to me that fall of 2004 in to 2005 and the green wet very wet spring. God how I loved it there, but when it was time to go it was time to go and that was that. And Easton that will be you and me, knowing how to love and respect one another in all our individual splendor and knowing no matter what returning here will make each of us once more just more complete in that. Oh my god my walks, your night air, your flowers. The market and all the little quiet spots where poetry lives on your streets. Nightcat! Your music will sing to me I'll always know when to be back for more. Coffecat my favorite, favorite part will always be just sitting like a cat on a fat cushion in the sun.
It feels so good to leave whole.
Ocean Pines can you believe I am coming home?
It all feels so smooth now, so easy. I guess that's what it is when it's right. I say in prayer this morning, in my sacred silence and checking in. Thank you thank you thank you and hello world. And this day I choose this gratitude, and my actions to be gratitude in motion.
And then, thank you life, I love you, good morning Kel, I love you. Ahhhh yes, amen amen amen.
PS Bob thank you for singing to me and being my smiling last loving look around my apartment from my bed this morning as I finish typing this you remind me that I want to post some mix tape lists again. Oh blue light and my fabulous curtains and all the full packed cardboard boxes everywhere and looking forward to my walk to the coffecat for b-fast xoxoo.
May 17, 2010
Long Letter to my Readers
Sometimes I want to start this blog the way I used to start my litmag Cantalma. Like I'm writing a letter. Dear Friends...Today it came out instinctively to write Hey Pals... so let's pretend that that's what I'm doing. Writing a letter to my readers, anonymous or otherwise, out there in the middle of the everchanging everthesame wide world of blogoland. Wherein I find comfort, and release.
Hey Pals,
It's something like 4:30 am. I woke up around 3 and couldn't get back to sleep, but didn't put the light on til a half hour ago. For a while I laid there, thinking the noises I was hearing are the giant fucking practically baseball sized roaches that have begun to show themselves at least daily since I started filling my apartment with cardboard boxes and all these magnificent little dark spaces for them to hide. God that ills me out blugghgghghghhgghgh but I am thankful for them because it's making it really easy to so want to leave this place. Then I imagined the bumping around was the ghosts of this old house that the across the hall neighbor Rebecca has seen, and often hears. In the end I turned the lights on to get some water and there were no bugs, and no haunts, at least that I could tell.
It was a long, sweet weekend. Friday was 12 hours long, I went in to my office for my last day and then up to the college for my exit interview which the HR person kept referring to in email as my Termination Interview. Which made me laugh but also mildly nervous to walk up there and turn my paperwork in, but wouldn't you know I came in and sat down and she said I hear you're moving home because your husband got transferred, I'm from Baltimore, too, Dunalk, hon. I explained that it actually is because really I have no friends or family here in Easton or on the midshore or a life really other than my job, and that I was originally from a town called Millersville outside Glen Burnie, that I am the exact oppositte of married and that first I am waiting tables at the beach to make money but before that going out to the PacNW for a month and then going to move home, then we got down to talking Hons. It was like talking to an old girlfriend that I didn't realize I missed even though Sue and me, the HR lady, had never really met before.
Later in the office trying to get my last bits of work turned in I finally gave up and just said I'd turn it in Tuesday when I have to return and give my work computer back. I was too excited and Mary's office on campus has too much of a blowing breeze. Soon it was almost five so Jackie the Executive Director of our whole department, and my immediate boss Elaine, and Mary they all drove me up to Kent Island for dinner on the water. Natasha came, and Carolee, and Jan all the way from Chestertown and some other teachers and of course Jason and Kim and Brenda, too. Then Cindy showed up, and she ended up taking me back to my car, where we sat and talked for two more hours while a nice round thunderstorm came through. Cindy is the woman I used to teach English with, nighttimes twice a week, at the elementary school in the country out near the Delaware line. This was 2006 and on. She also is the one who introduced me to Teena and had me do a catering gig for her back then, and Teena's the one who rented me the room on the Choptank River when I finally summoned the courage to leave Brandon and break his heart and move out and away to a place so isolated that even now that fast year I spent there still is surreal to me like a dream. Cindy and I, really, hadn't talked and really caught up since I very first moved out to Chop. We had lots, lots to catch the other one up on.
On Saturday I got up and couldn't get moving. I had to be in Pennsylvania first for a baby shower then a bachelorette party. The radio was danceable though and in moments it was so good and the sky was so blue, and I read this blog a long long while which I hadn't done in a long time. It made me feel good to have this, these archives of me because I, like all people, compelled as I am by my self and also very very deep, need to have a place to catalog and process me.
The drive up 83 especially was good. I listened to Rachel Sage and Ruut, both of whom I met last weekend when Brooks got to open for them. Rachel Sage especially is so deliciously good, and I thought how very much I like to hear the accordian. It makes me feel like a gypsy which probably is just to say it makes me feel more wild and whimsy and mystery like I really am. When I got to York I was proud of myself for knowing my way around even though my GPS got me lost at first, finally I just turned that bitch off and got there on my own instincts in the hot Pennsylvania concrete traffic and sun. I walked in to the basement at Aunt Lori's house almost an hour late and it was a huge commotion of people and when I walked in from the far side of the room I heard cousin Chels yell Wait where's Kelly? Chelsea is pregnant, and psychic like all the women in that family and I saw her in the corner and all the commotion was because she was about to open gifts. And I dont know how to put this part in words--that Chels, who's 19, is bringing our first grandbaby in to this world, or great grandbaby I mean, and my grandparents were both sick last year, but still are so robust. And when we are together, which we do more often now, mom her two sisters my brother and his fiance my grandparents and two cousins, we cry a lot and it is always hot and full in our chest because every breathing moment with them is awareness of life and how much we are blessed. So I walked in and Chels knew in her blood I just got there, and she waited for me to sit at her feet and then the gift opening began. Then a half hour later she goes Wait, where's Sean? and then of course we look up and he, my brother, walks in. We did well, Pap only really cried, which is what makes the rest of us bawl, really hard once and then we all were crying and gasping and laughing and wiping our faces with napkins and the other guests cried and laughed some, too.
Then I left, got out on to the rolling green hills and farmhouse lanes of Rt. 30 to drive to Fairfield right outside Gettysburg. My cousin Sarah on my dad's side, the Mc-clan, is getting married soon so next was to celebrate that. On Route 30 I got reminiscent but before it got overboard this song Lost in Pennsylvania came on and I laughed out loud, like really hardy belly laugh because Rt. 30 and me have history. York to Philly, Philly to York, York to Gettysburg and all that sky and green. I always always have such good reflection on that road and Saturday was no different. I was reflecting on the last time I made that drive and how much has changed since then. The last time it was July and Josh, who is the man that I fell in mad love with some years back and ultimately was the final reason I had courage enough to leave Brandon and follow me towards my own thing, called at the end when I pulled in to my cousin's driveway. I hadn't heard from him in like four months back then because of a hurtful falling out, and the thing about Rt. 30 is that's how I used to get from my grandparents over to his house. We always had that psychic thing too, Josh and I, among other connections, and so I was thinking back a lot on him. Next thing, over the glorious piano Ruut sings Lost in Pennsylvania and I'm like Whaaaaa? Did she just say lost in Pennsylvania because it was the first time hearing that CD. Then at that very moment mom called. Mom is from the PA hills and that was really on my mind, too, backroads and southern Pennsylvania and mom and her country people. She called to ask what I was doing. I told her driving and thinking about you and thinking about Josh and now cracking up becasue this lady is singing about Josh and I same time as me thinking about us. And mom reminded me of a time long ago going to work a bluegrass festival in those very hills and how she used to be in love back then with a well-known Nashville musician. Within moments I was at the very place, 8 miles east of Gettysburg, that the festival she was talking about is held. It was all so timely, and the conversation was good and sweet and I felt whole and clean, and happy to see Sarah the bride-to-be and the other cousins waiting to see me.
Now it is Monday morning, the birds are singing and Crow was just squawking, too. The sky out the window in my meditation room is blue and pink tinged so it's all resonant in that morning purple hue. Yesterday also was a long day and last night I wanted to finish uploading my old pics--late 80's through late 90's--on to my external hard drive so that when I move Wednesday and my couple things go in to storage that huge tupperware with all the old albums can just stay there. But I was tired, went late to Target to get a new swimsuit and that took a long time because for the first time in a long time I felt bad about how I looked which made me uncomfortable, but also grateful, because I almost never ever have to deal with that leftover teenage weirdness anymore. So when I got back home I went right to bed, didn't even keep my eyes open long enough to read my book.
I move Wednesday to Ocean Pines. Kelly Johnson, Sean, Bdubb and Brooks are going to help me. Thursday I'm taking Amy out for a pedicure to celebrate Maddie, her third child, due in July. Friday my cousin Timmy graduates college, Friday night we're all going dancing at Red Maple, Saturday's Eryka Badu. Then back to the Pines til Wednesday of the following week, when I fly to Oregon, and will be boundless, yet tall tree mountain coasts hot springs cities and hippies and Pacific ocean bound.
Yaaaaay!!!! When I get home it will be summer time and all that hotass Marilen mug. I'll be a waitress again, a writer for sure, babys will come, weddings will happen, and I will stare and smile a lot at the sea. I will swim. For now, I am sleepy, pals. Thank you for reading and always journeying along with me. Thank you all for the love and support even when you dont comment thankfully the blog counter tells me you still read. I am contented, awed, and eager because I feel certain the best is yet to be....
My wishes and prayers for the same to all of you xoxo.
Love, kel
Hey Pals,
It's something like 4:30 am. I woke up around 3 and couldn't get back to sleep, but didn't put the light on til a half hour ago. For a while I laid there, thinking the noises I was hearing are the giant fucking practically baseball sized roaches that have begun to show themselves at least daily since I started filling my apartment with cardboard boxes and all these magnificent little dark spaces for them to hide. God that ills me out blugghgghghghhgghgh but I am thankful for them because it's making it really easy to so want to leave this place. Then I imagined the bumping around was the ghosts of this old house that the across the hall neighbor Rebecca has seen, and often hears. In the end I turned the lights on to get some water and there were no bugs, and no haunts, at least that I could tell.
It was a long, sweet weekend. Friday was 12 hours long, I went in to my office for my last day and then up to the college for my exit interview which the HR person kept referring to in email as my Termination Interview. Which made me laugh but also mildly nervous to walk up there and turn my paperwork in, but wouldn't you know I came in and sat down and she said I hear you're moving home because your husband got transferred, I'm from Baltimore, too, Dunalk, hon. I explained that it actually is because really I have no friends or family here in Easton or on the midshore or a life really other than my job, and that I was originally from a town called Millersville outside Glen Burnie, that I am the exact oppositte of married and that first I am waiting tables at the beach to make money but before that going out to the PacNW for a month and then going to move home, then we got down to talking Hons. It was like talking to an old girlfriend that I didn't realize I missed even though Sue and me, the HR lady, had never really met before.
Later in the office trying to get my last bits of work turned in I finally gave up and just said I'd turn it in Tuesday when I have to return and give my work computer back. I was too excited and Mary's office on campus has too much of a blowing breeze. Soon it was almost five so Jackie the Executive Director of our whole department, and my immediate boss Elaine, and Mary they all drove me up to Kent Island for dinner on the water. Natasha came, and Carolee, and Jan all the way from Chestertown and some other teachers and of course Jason and Kim and Brenda, too. Then Cindy showed up, and she ended up taking me back to my car, where we sat and talked for two more hours while a nice round thunderstorm came through. Cindy is the woman I used to teach English with, nighttimes twice a week, at the elementary school in the country out near the Delaware line. This was 2006 and on. She also is the one who introduced me to Teena and had me do a catering gig for her back then, and Teena's the one who rented me the room on the Choptank River when I finally summoned the courage to leave Brandon and break his heart and move out and away to a place so isolated that even now that fast year I spent there still is surreal to me like a dream. Cindy and I, really, hadn't talked and really caught up since I very first moved out to Chop. We had lots, lots to catch the other one up on.
On Saturday I got up and couldn't get moving. I had to be in Pennsylvania first for a baby shower then a bachelorette party. The radio was danceable though and in moments it was so good and the sky was so blue, and I read this blog a long long while which I hadn't done in a long time. It made me feel good to have this, these archives of me because I, like all people, compelled as I am by my self and also very very deep, need to have a place to catalog and process me.
The drive up 83 especially was good. I listened to Rachel Sage and Ruut, both of whom I met last weekend when Brooks got to open for them. Rachel Sage especially is so deliciously good, and I thought how very much I like to hear the accordian. It makes me feel like a gypsy which probably is just to say it makes me feel more wild and whimsy and mystery like I really am. When I got to York I was proud of myself for knowing my way around even though my GPS got me lost at first, finally I just turned that bitch off and got there on my own instincts in the hot Pennsylvania concrete traffic and sun. I walked in to the basement at Aunt Lori's house almost an hour late and it was a huge commotion of people and when I walked in from the far side of the room I heard cousin Chels yell Wait where's Kelly? Chelsea is pregnant, and psychic like all the women in that family and I saw her in the corner and all the commotion was because she was about to open gifts. And I dont know how to put this part in words--that Chels, who's 19, is bringing our first grandbaby in to this world, or great grandbaby I mean, and my grandparents were both sick last year, but still are so robust. And when we are together, which we do more often now, mom her two sisters my brother and his fiance my grandparents and two cousins, we cry a lot and it is always hot and full in our chest because every breathing moment with them is awareness of life and how much we are blessed. So I walked in and Chels knew in her blood I just got there, and she waited for me to sit at her feet and then the gift opening began. Then a half hour later she goes Wait, where's Sean? and then of course we look up and he, my brother, walks in. We did well, Pap only really cried, which is what makes the rest of us bawl, really hard once and then we all were crying and gasping and laughing and wiping our faces with napkins and the other guests cried and laughed some, too.
Then I left, got out on to the rolling green hills and farmhouse lanes of Rt. 30 to drive to Fairfield right outside Gettysburg. My cousin Sarah on my dad's side, the Mc-clan, is getting married soon so next was to celebrate that. On Route 30 I got reminiscent but before it got overboard this song Lost in Pennsylvania came on and I laughed out loud, like really hardy belly laugh because Rt. 30 and me have history. York to Philly, Philly to York, York to Gettysburg and all that sky and green. I always always have such good reflection on that road and Saturday was no different. I was reflecting on the last time I made that drive and how much has changed since then. The last time it was July and Josh, who is the man that I fell in mad love with some years back and ultimately was the final reason I had courage enough to leave Brandon and follow me towards my own thing, called at the end when I pulled in to my cousin's driveway. I hadn't heard from him in like four months back then because of a hurtful falling out, and the thing about Rt. 30 is that's how I used to get from my grandparents over to his house. We always had that psychic thing too, Josh and I, among other connections, and so I was thinking back a lot on him. Next thing, over the glorious piano Ruut sings Lost in Pennsylvania and I'm like Whaaaaa? Did she just say lost in Pennsylvania because it was the first time hearing that CD. Then at that very moment mom called. Mom is from the PA hills and that was really on my mind, too, backroads and southern Pennsylvania and mom and her country people. She called to ask what I was doing. I told her driving and thinking about you and thinking about Josh and now cracking up becasue this lady is singing about Josh and I same time as me thinking about us. And mom reminded me of a time long ago going to work a bluegrass festival in those very hills and how she used to be in love back then with a well-known Nashville musician. Within moments I was at the very place, 8 miles east of Gettysburg, that the festival she was talking about is held. It was all so timely, and the conversation was good and sweet and I felt whole and clean, and happy to see Sarah the bride-to-be and the other cousins waiting to see me.
Now it is Monday morning, the birds are singing and Crow was just squawking, too. The sky out the window in my meditation room is blue and pink tinged so it's all resonant in that morning purple hue. Yesterday also was a long day and last night I wanted to finish uploading my old pics--late 80's through late 90's--on to my external hard drive so that when I move Wednesday and my couple things go in to storage that huge tupperware with all the old albums can just stay there. But I was tired, went late to Target to get a new swimsuit and that took a long time because for the first time in a long time I felt bad about how I looked which made me uncomfortable, but also grateful, because I almost never ever have to deal with that leftover teenage weirdness anymore. So when I got back home I went right to bed, didn't even keep my eyes open long enough to read my book.
I move Wednesday to Ocean Pines. Kelly Johnson, Sean, Bdubb and Brooks are going to help me. Thursday I'm taking Amy out for a pedicure to celebrate Maddie, her third child, due in July. Friday my cousin Timmy graduates college, Friday night we're all going dancing at Red Maple, Saturday's Eryka Badu. Then back to the Pines til Wednesday of the following week, when I fly to Oregon, and will be boundless, yet tall tree mountain coasts hot springs cities and hippies and Pacific ocean bound.
Yaaaaay!!!! When I get home it will be summer time and all that hotass Marilen mug. I'll be a waitress again, a writer for sure, babys will come, weddings will happen, and I will stare and smile a lot at the sea. I will swim. For now, I am sleepy, pals. Thank you for reading and always journeying along with me. Thank you all for the love and support even when you dont comment thankfully the blog counter tells me you still read. I am contented, awed, and eager because I feel certain the best is yet to be....
My wishes and prayers for the same to all of you xoxo.
Love, kel
April 29, 2010
Adult Education
She's spunky, and youthful, though if she hadn't told me her age I would've placed her in her mid-sixties anyhow merely because of comments she's made this year and because I know she's a widow. She doesn't remember it but I do: when I first got home from Oregon and worked for Mediation she was one of our mediators. She never mentioned it back then but the boss told me that her husband was ill, and falling more ill, while she caregave at home.
It's some years later tho; and according to her New England lilted words Well if you all will have me I plan on staying here as long as I am able. I consider this a calling, it's not teaching to me or even a job. I had just finished telling her about the new mother I assessed and counseled for placement in her GED class. The new student is 31. Mom of 7 kids. Last husband a military man who abused the hell out of her and the kids. Her own mother would leave literally weeks at a time; she was seven when she first remembers being removed by DSS for neglect--she had for several days been caring for a disabled sister because mom was missing. She has the most level head on her shoulders, and an 8th grade education. Her initial assessments with me show that she will likely have her high school diploma by the end of the year.
People are so infinitely able of survival. It is a primal drive, and again and again this year I have been levelled by the young women and men, and the aged out of work or laid-off women and men, by this huuuge un-named population of working poor that have put their lives on the table before me and again and again demonstrated unwavering spirit in the face of life stories that I can not imagine nor comprehend.
In the middle of telling the teacher about her new student, I started to get choked up and had to take a small pause. I stopped what I was doing, put the student file on the desk and just looked at her. We are so lucky, Carolee, we are so blessed to be among these students. To get to do the work we do.
Adult Education, at the risk of reiterating some trite expression, has educated me beyond what I ever expected or knew could happen. It has shaped the adult woman I have both slowly and startlingly learned to become. My first year teaching, the winter of 2002 in to 2003, I lived five doors down from the mentor Instructor I'd been recommended to spend time with. She is a jolly, warm-hearted Catholic with three kids and as many dogs and she used to make me iced coffee and laugh this enormous river of acceptance and forgiveness around me when we would get in the car and I'd have to blow in my hummer-breathalyzer in order to get my damn car to go. She told me Whenever you have more resources then somebody, more money, more wisdom, more education, it is never your job to look down or judge or even sympathize. Look them eye to eye, then remember it is your job to share, and your work is to lift them up. It makes me choke on the heaviness in my chest to say it aloud now...Then she'd say Never forget that all of us, all of us were lifted up. All of us are standing on a long, unseeable chain of the giants that went before us. Whoever they were...
I shared this with Carolee yesterday before I left the Family Center for my thirty minute drive through the rural farm country back to the little Eastern Shore metro of Easton and my office. Accessible education. Meeting people on leveled ground, then giving them tools to be lifted up. I had no idea what it would feel like to get to be someone standing down here, on the shoulders of people like the teacher yesterday, or my mentor back then, and students in a line towering above me.
March 11, 2010
Letter to Mike, from the Detention Center, for the last time
I haven't been here since 2004.
Wow & now I remember how it used to be so easy to talk to you from in here. I miss you so much--the most out of all the ones I said good bye to--your freckles and white play dough skin. The time you insisted on walking in Kittyhawk, along the strip, in the 80 degree sun, til Mandy & I found you drenched--your jeans even wet w sweat, on a concrete slab outside 7-11. There is no room, no time in here to dream, I didn't know enough back then, 25, 26, to bring hope in.
I barely had my own.
I guess I did tho. One of my boys got his diploma when he got out--another learned all about Ghandi, X & King. Other success? They learned metaphors, wrote stories for me of their lives. One guy we started on his multiplication tables I was so gentle when I talked to him and he softened and was even shy--tho I bet they teased him about fucking me when they got back to their cells. I was proud of them, sent post cards when I went on the road. There's a health care debate in the US right now--that there can even be debate about basic human rights : health care--tells you, proves, just what we're all still about. If health care isn't available bc it's not affordable rights aren't equal, that is just a common sense equivalent, a fact. So it goes. A white grl private school kid gets locked-up for drugs what happens? Another addict punished for crime bc of her disease. Yes. She gets out tho, makes good. She dreams well & she blvs she can chnge the wrld. Black man almst done hghschl, poor fifty-seven yr old white woman frst chld by 9th grade. They get out, what's her path to make good? What's his? What will they blv?
Yesterday I enrolled new mom's from the early childhood program in to english class. One from Guatamala, one from Mexico. When it was done I drove to my office & inside one of the guys from Workforce grabbed me and said you have a student she just walked in. She was pregnant. Another mom from another early childhood program this one meant to help with her GED. I been trying to track you down you're hard to get a hold of she said, then out of the blue at lunch today It said to go so I said to my mom, I gotta go now I gotta go see the lady from the college now.
& Why? Why does It talk to some of us but others never know? Why do only some of us listen, or believe?
After you died I dscvrd diPrima. Even called her one day on my own. It didn't take long then for my words. After you left & the jail & the family center broke me & then I went to Oregon to cry. How did I get here? How?
One thing I never talk about is how I called you the day you shot yourslf. You never called me back. You were looking at pictures of us when they found the blood chunks of your head.
After all that I went on the road again it took me back to Chestertown, it was April 05 we were fighting in our little seafront apt Lincoln Beach when I knew he needed to go home.
Did he? Or was it I? I talked to Patty & Brenda it'd been a long time since we talked heart to heart & I alwys scrtly felt bad when it came to them like maybe they thought I'd done smthng wrong when I left Brandon. But they hugged me & loved me & it was just like when I was young--like before--when my heart broke ovr our students again & again & they just kept teaching me the ropes & saying let god fill your heart when you've got nothing left. They were like moms to me when it came to Adult Ed back then. But when there's nothing left in there what do you follow how do you know in what direction to go?
When I turned 30, that was the spring I learned or started to be willing to learn to be true. I was studying Gandhi then, again--Gandhi who started his adult life in London dancing fox trots & eating 4 star meals dressed in the finest hand-tailored suits. That nagging that ache that heart that said I was on the wrong path doing all the wrong thing. I told Patty then--whtvr it is I will go inside & I will listen & I will end up going where I need to be. That was when I turned 30. First thing that happened is Brandon said he would never move. I was back there Truslow Road under the pines trees it was about to be spring. & second thing--the poetry came back to me--it was Josh this time--I hadn't had words since you, Mike, since I stopped finally talking to you. & this time it was to Josh & when I stopped fighting the words just came & came, they just flew...
It's all different now--I've done my best to listen to & follow me & it has been hard & led me here all these yrs later. I used to think or be convinced but now I know--there is nothing or no one to blame. It takes a whole life to make good. It takes a long, long while.
I miss you but I am glad you went on & never ended up in here. Detention centers are one thing--prison totally something else. So much worse. Mayvbe it is better to un*see. To pretend you cant, or choose to not. I dont know? It is sad, so sad here. Basic human rights. It'll be different some day? Basic rights to what? Human rights. Food. Clothes. Shelter. Health.
Pursuit of happiness?
Been a long time coming. Can one be an activist & blv in both? The opportunity & the "right" to choose? Life daunts you, no? And love breaks your dreams. Are words contraband? Are visions, song, illegal as dreams? I dont care Mike. Even after all that's been done. All the places I've gone all that I've seen. Pursuit of happiness=vision of what could be. I used to tell my students in here QUESTION EVERYTHING. Dig a little deeper--dont just believe. But sometimes you've got to--in order to know what to choose. To know you have the right. I still will, I still will believe, I will choose hope.
Wow & now I remember how it used to be so easy to talk to you from in here. I miss you so much--the most out of all the ones I said good bye to--your freckles and white play dough skin. The time you insisted on walking in Kittyhawk, along the strip, in the 80 degree sun, til Mandy & I found you drenched--your jeans even wet w sweat, on a concrete slab outside 7-11. There is no room, no time in here to dream, I didn't know enough back then, 25, 26, to bring hope in.
I barely had my own.
I guess I did tho. One of my boys got his diploma when he got out--another learned all about Ghandi, X & King. Other success? They learned metaphors, wrote stories for me of their lives. One guy we started on his multiplication tables I was so gentle when I talked to him and he softened and was even shy--tho I bet they teased him about fucking me when they got back to their cells. I was proud of them, sent post cards when I went on the road. There's a health care debate in the US right now--that there can even be debate about basic human rights : health care--tells you, proves, just what we're all still about. If health care isn't available bc it's not affordable rights aren't equal, that is just a common sense equivalent, a fact. So it goes. A white grl private school kid gets locked-up for drugs what happens? Another addict punished for crime bc of her disease. Yes. She gets out tho, makes good. She dreams well & she blvs she can chnge the wrld. Black man almst done hghschl, poor fifty-seven yr old white woman frst chld by 9th grade. They get out, what's her path to make good? What's his? What will they blv?
Yesterday I enrolled new mom's from the early childhood program in to english class. One from Guatamala, one from Mexico. When it was done I drove to my office & inside one of the guys from Workforce grabbed me and said you have a student she just walked in. She was pregnant. Another mom from another early childhood program this one meant to help with her GED. I been trying to track you down you're hard to get a hold of she said, then out of the blue at lunch today It said to go so I said to my mom, I gotta go now I gotta go see the lady from the college now.
& Why? Why does It talk to some of us but others never know? Why do only some of us listen, or believe?
After you died I dscvrd diPrima. Even called her one day on my own. It didn't take long then for my words. After you left & the jail & the family center broke me & then I went to Oregon to cry. How did I get here? How?
One thing I never talk about is how I called you the day you shot yourslf. You never called me back. You were looking at pictures of us when they found the blood chunks of your head.
After all that I went on the road again it took me back to Chestertown, it was April 05 we were fighting in our little seafront apt Lincoln Beach when I knew he needed to go home.
Did he? Or was it I? I talked to Patty & Brenda it'd been a long time since we talked heart to heart & I alwys scrtly felt bad when it came to them like maybe they thought I'd done smthng wrong when I left Brandon. But they hugged me & loved me & it was just like when I was young--like before--when my heart broke ovr our students again & again & they just kept teaching me the ropes & saying let god fill your heart when you've got nothing left. They were like moms to me when it came to Adult Ed back then. But when there's nothing left in there what do you follow how do you know in what direction to go?
When I turned 30, that was the spring I learned or started to be willing to learn to be true. I was studying Gandhi then, again--Gandhi who started his adult life in London dancing fox trots & eating 4 star meals dressed in the finest hand-tailored suits. That nagging that ache that heart that said I was on the wrong path doing all the wrong thing. I told Patty then--whtvr it is I will go inside & I will listen & I will end up going where I need to be. That was when I turned 30. First thing that happened is Brandon said he would never move. I was back there Truslow Road under the pines trees it was about to be spring. & second thing--the poetry came back to me--it was Josh this time--I hadn't had words since you, Mike, since I stopped finally talking to you. & this time it was to Josh & when I stopped fighting the words just came & came, they just flew...
It's all different now--I've done my best to listen to & follow me & it has been hard & led me here all these yrs later. I used to think or be convinced but now I know--there is nothing or no one to blame. It takes a whole life to make good. It takes a long, long while.
I miss you but I am glad you went on & never ended up in here. Detention centers are one thing--prison totally something else. So much worse. Mayvbe it is better to un*see. To pretend you cant, or choose to not. I dont know? It is sad, so sad here. Basic human rights. It'll be different some day? Basic rights to what? Human rights. Food. Clothes. Shelter. Health.
Pursuit of happiness?
Been a long time coming. Can one be an activist & blv in both? The opportunity & the "right" to choose? Life daunts you, no? And love breaks your dreams. Are words contraband? Are visions, song, illegal as dreams? I dont care Mike. Even after all that's been done. All the places I've gone all that I've seen. Pursuit of happiness=vision of what could be. I used to tell my students in here QUESTION EVERYTHING. Dig a little deeper--dont just believe. But sometimes you've got to--in order to know what to choose. To know you have the right. I still will, I still will believe, I will choose hope.
March 9, 2010
A Place Of My Own
Have I mentioned lately how much I love my apartment?
When I first moved in here all I did was sit around in wonder, with a pure-eyed peace-feeling stare. I loved the lines of the walls, the smoothness, the light. I used to open up the great tall window in front of my writing table and smoke cigarettes sitting on the ledge with my feet on the roof and my heart in the tree. I would talk to the moon, or just listen in a satiated way to the traffic going by.
We moved out of the suburbsprawl that had tangled its way down route 2 from Baltimore and in to a house in the woods when I was a pre-teen. We went from a neighborhood full of kids with rat tails and kickball games and swingsets and snowball stands and dancing under the street lights in driveways purple boomboxes pumping to no one, just Sean and me, and the woods. And Lindsey and Darby who lived across the street in this big old farmhouse that had secret cellar tunnels cemented off but that you could access through trap doors in the field. My dad left three months after that he moved to New York. Manhattan always terrified me and repelled me after that. I started smoking cigarettes then and stealing from the liquor cabinet they kept downstairs with the heavy-hinged door. I put a sign on the door to my room, it was a manilla envelope with a fake address and it said Kelly's place on it and I think maybe that is when it started, my need and ache to always have a room or place of my own.
Later, after I graduated college mom was selling the house. I stayed on in Chestertown where I got my degree and got clean, it was 2002, for what was meant to be only the summer. I was working three jobs, two in town and one two hours away at the beach. My dad's best friend died and my dad was suddenly back--just like that, 12 years later. I was an adult now or supposed to be so I made decisions like an adult should. He was depressed and didn't get off the couch at my grandparents and aunt and uncles little wood house at the beach. I worked there at the beach it was beautiful fall and pulled doubles at a seafood house uptown three days a week and tried to feed dad peanut butter and jelly but my father, who loves food second only to gin and golf, wouldn't even eat. Then I drove to Chestertown to be a coffee shop barista in the days and wear a button down tux top at a white linen the other nights of the week. At the coffee shop I fell in love with a quiet boy who had soft brown eyes.
He was from Chestertown and so it was that I stayed.
By December of that year they offered me a job teaching night classes ESL. I didn't want to I had no background for it but she kept pressuring so I agreed. The first night I was coming up one hall there were students coming towards me from another, I closed my eyes and took a breath and relaxed so I could feel my heart open then just said a prayer in my head: Direct my thoughts and actions. Help me to love. Hola! I shouted to the little Mexicans with strong bright eyes and they smiled so warm and that was it, eight years ago, I was done.
In November, last year 2009, I moved here to this place finally for the first time in my life, my little tiny place all of my own. I love to be here and revel in how much I've I enjoy my own quiet home. It took me a long time. On Friday last week I stepped down from my job. That two nights a week gig teaching ESL eventually led to full-time at a Community College, where I worked hours on end with three other people to establish the community english and high-school diploma program. I poured every last bone breath and blood in to that job since they took it from the public schools in 08. It carried me through one of the most difficult transitions of my life, but now I am through, through the change of being my own woman, being single, being strong, being alone. May 14 is my last day and then soon I will leave the Eastern Shore.
It's been a long, long time coming. Who knew all along I just needed a little tiny place of my own?
When I first moved in here all I did was sit around in wonder, with a pure-eyed peace-feeling stare. I loved the lines of the walls, the smoothness, the light. I used to open up the great tall window in front of my writing table and smoke cigarettes sitting on the ledge with my feet on the roof and my heart in the tree. I would talk to the moon, or just listen in a satiated way to the traffic going by.
We moved out of the suburbsprawl that had tangled its way down route 2 from Baltimore and in to a house in the woods when I was a pre-teen. We went from a neighborhood full of kids with rat tails and kickball games and swingsets and snowball stands and dancing under the street lights in driveways purple boomboxes pumping to no one, just Sean and me, and the woods. And Lindsey and Darby who lived across the street in this big old farmhouse that had secret cellar tunnels cemented off but that you could access through trap doors in the field. My dad left three months after that he moved to New York. Manhattan always terrified me and repelled me after that. I started smoking cigarettes then and stealing from the liquor cabinet they kept downstairs with the heavy-hinged door. I put a sign on the door to my room, it was a manilla envelope with a fake address and it said Kelly's place on it and I think maybe that is when it started, my need and ache to always have a room or place of my own.
Later, after I graduated college mom was selling the house. I stayed on in Chestertown where I got my degree and got clean, it was 2002, for what was meant to be only the summer. I was working three jobs, two in town and one two hours away at the beach. My dad's best friend died and my dad was suddenly back--just like that, 12 years later. I was an adult now or supposed to be so I made decisions like an adult should. He was depressed and didn't get off the couch at my grandparents and aunt and uncles little wood house at the beach. I worked there at the beach it was beautiful fall and pulled doubles at a seafood house uptown three days a week and tried to feed dad peanut butter and jelly but my father, who loves food second only to gin and golf, wouldn't even eat. Then I drove to Chestertown to be a coffee shop barista in the days and wear a button down tux top at a white linen the other nights of the week. At the coffee shop I fell in love with a quiet boy who had soft brown eyes.
He was from Chestertown and so it was that I stayed.
By December of that year they offered me a job teaching night classes ESL. I didn't want to I had no background for it but she kept pressuring so I agreed. The first night I was coming up one hall there were students coming towards me from another, I closed my eyes and took a breath and relaxed so I could feel my heart open then just said a prayer in my head: Direct my thoughts and actions. Help me to love. Hola! I shouted to the little Mexicans with strong bright eyes and they smiled so warm and that was it, eight years ago, I was done.
In November, last year 2009, I moved here to this place finally for the first time in my life, my little tiny place all of my own. I love to be here and revel in how much I've I enjoy my own quiet home. It took me a long time. On Friday last week I stepped down from my job. That two nights a week gig teaching ESL eventually led to full-time at a Community College, where I worked hours on end with three other people to establish the community english and high-school diploma program. I poured every last bone breath and blood in to that job since they took it from the public schools in 08. It carried me through one of the most difficult transitions of my life, but now I am through, through the change of being my own woman, being single, being strong, being alone. May 14 is my last day and then soon I will leave the Eastern Shore.
It's been a long, long time coming. Who knew all along I just needed a little tiny place of my own?
February 18, 2010
Dreams
I'm dreaming again.
It happened last moon cycle, too. I woke up at 6:39 this morning to the traffic on Goldsborough, barely squinted through one eye at the clock and sighed and covered myself up deep under the covers and was out again almost immediately--but fell asleep with this light, laughing sense remembering the dream I'd just had. A bonfire with old friends from Catholic school in the rubble driveway in the woods at Ocean Pines. It was very pagan.
Then I had a second one, with my brother in it and Jamie, his girl. There were turtles, big ones, they were happy for the snow wanted us to see they were still there but scrambled over this funny scrappy wall Sean made and was proud of, of wood posts cross-hatched and leveled in this very crafty way. The turtles made sure we saw there big bodies flop over the wall. On the other side of the wood wall the turtles covered them selves in leaves. You could still see them, but at the base of the fense the snow had melted, the soil was super moist and the leaves generated enough heat to act as a thermal for them and they were happy to be covered there. The leaves and snow, the cycles, it all was a good thing.
There are bluberry muffins in the oven, I am squeaky body-tired and my consciousness is hairy, lots of little crevices in there where I've been slipping all day. Some days are just like that. Some days I miss things, I am tired, I get full of doubt. I have to work at noon today and then tonight and it will be all new students new students new students Hi dont be nervous You can do it Relax relax it's not a test it's so we can help and also Bienvenido hola, he-llo. Ugh I am so tired--and I was off for the snow a full week last week!! I will come home tonight, hopefully before 10, then Erika and I have a phone date to discuss our latest submissions to each other.
Erika, who just got the best news news that made me smile smile smile, Erika who on days like these makes me swoon to remember 7th grade Catholic school in the mildew basement where we could see people's feet on the concrete parking lot out the vented windows near the ceilings top of some of those rooms. Sr. Francis's class and we were all afraid, Ms. Fouse's class and under the desks Erika's long scrawl, on fringed loose leaf, characters even then seeped deep in the history of another time. My precious friend who holds roots in there, the way plants and trees are connected deep under ground in ways we will never, by the light of day, ever see.
O mama if I could I would write and laugh and cook all day breathe the smells of your frozen earth my face in the tall window here in your sun. I would smile, happy to remember all my dreams. I would talk to the maple tree let the crevices inside grow wide and whole until they weren't cracks anymore but simply whole new landscapes of me.
what i am listening to: The High Strung
It happened last moon cycle, too. I woke up at 6:39 this morning to the traffic on Goldsborough, barely squinted through one eye at the clock and sighed and covered myself up deep under the covers and was out again almost immediately--but fell asleep with this light, laughing sense remembering the dream I'd just had. A bonfire with old friends from Catholic school in the rubble driveway in the woods at Ocean Pines. It was very pagan.
Then I had a second one, with my brother in it and Jamie, his girl. There were turtles, big ones, they were happy for the snow wanted us to see they were still there but scrambled over this funny scrappy wall Sean made and was proud of, of wood posts cross-hatched and leveled in this very crafty way. The turtles made sure we saw there big bodies flop over the wall. On the other side of the wood wall the turtles covered them selves in leaves. You could still see them, but at the base of the fense the snow had melted, the soil was super moist and the leaves generated enough heat to act as a thermal for them and they were happy to be covered there. The leaves and snow, the cycles, it all was a good thing.
There are bluberry muffins in the oven, I am squeaky body-tired and my consciousness is hairy, lots of little crevices in there where I've been slipping all day. Some days are just like that. Some days I miss things, I am tired, I get full of doubt. I have to work at noon today and then tonight and it will be all new students new students new students Hi dont be nervous You can do it Relax relax it's not a test it's so we can help and also Bienvenido hola, he-llo. Ugh I am so tired--and I was off for the snow a full week last week!! I will come home tonight, hopefully before 10, then Erika and I have a phone date to discuss our latest submissions to each other.
Erika, who just got the best news news that made me smile smile smile, Erika who on days like these makes me swoon to remember 7th grade Catholic school in the mildew basement where we could see people's feet on the concrete parking lot out the vented windows near the ceilings top of some of those rooms. Sr. Francis's class and we were all afraid, Ms. Fouse's class and under the desks Erika's long scrawl, on fringed loose leaf, characters even then seeped deep in the history of another time. My precious friend who holds roots in there, the way plants and trees are connected deep under ground in ways we will never, by the light of day, ever see.
O mama if I could I would write and laugh and cook all day breathe the smells of your frozen earth my face in the tall window here in your sun. I would smile, happy to remember all my dreams. I would talk to the maple tree let the crevices inside grow wide and whole until they weren't cracks anymore but simply whole new landscapes of me.
what i am listening to: The High Strung
November 24, 2009
Rush hour on the Eastern Shore
Dad called at 7:15. Who in the hell is calling me this early I thought which proves I was still mostly asleep since dad's the only one on the road at that time that would think to call while he's sitting in rush hour and he does this periodically so of course, really I knew it was him.
I had been laying here there since 6 anyway, partly awake, partly asleep, mostly listening to traffic. I am not used to so much noise in the morning and it wakes me up everyday the workers going to work in this large small country town, this busy little town road on which I live. Gives me body memories of Seattle and Larry's old place four blocks from the Pike Market, the shrill mechanics of the idling trucks and the air plunging gear shifts that woke me up every morning, and the smell of deisel fumes and the immediate waking craving ahhh sacred hunger for carbohydrates from the market and the fresh seagull air of the Sound.
I worked 12 hours yesterday enrolled close to 20 new students that's a half hour an ESL learner and three each for GED. I make it so the hours overlap but even so, when you have a day like yesterday where four of my six GED learners were disabled, two undiagnosed and two with IEPs, it's all that additional time on the phone and tracking down records and knowing, and hoping you know, who to call. I got home late and for the first time my apartment is whole, unpacked, and clean.
It was so quiet, and so empty of "stuff", so void of projects I didn't know what to do.
I thought about all the spinach in the fridge and how good it would be wilted with garlic and olive oil and sea salt over noodles and some mozzarella cheese. But it was near 9:30 already and so I wound up with some trisquits and soon before I knew it I was out, asleep and snuggled on my own soft couch. I awoke with the most tender feeling of love and awe for me, and my life. So aware sometimes and with the wonder because of the awareness at how precious, how frail, how soft this sweet little flash of a human life.
How grateful I am how grateful I am. I've never ever lived in a place so quiet, uncluttered, so mine--so noisy with the traffic and life and at once, so still. Mama's in the trees and moon right outside my window and thank goodness there's no screens cuz at Chop I got so used to stepping out to the earth barefeet and sweet green, breathing, and saying hello.
Hello, hello, hello.
I had been laying here there since 6 anyway, partly awake, partly asleep, mostly listening to traffic. I am not used to so much noise in the morning and it wakes me up everyday the workers going to work in this large small country town, this busy little town road on which I live. Gives me body memories of Seattle and Larry's old place four blocks from the Pike Market, the shrill mechanics of the idling trucks and the air plunging gear shifts that woke me up every morning, and the smell of deisel fumes and the immediate waking craving ahhh sacred hunger for carbohydrates from the market and the fresh seagull air of the Sound.
I worked 12 hours yesterday enrolled close to 20 new students that's a half hour an ESL learner and three each for GED. I make it so the hours overlap but even so, when you have a day like yesterday where four of my six GED learners were disabled, two undiagnosed and two with IEPs, it's all that additional time on the phone and tracking down records and knowing, and hoping you know, who to call. I got home late and for the first time my apartment is whole, unpacked, and clean.
It was so quiet, and so empty of "stuff", so void of projects I didn't know what to do.
I thought about all the spinach in the fridge and how good it would be wilted with garlic and olive oil and sea salt over noodles and some mozzarella cheese. But it was near 9:30 already and so I wound up with some trisquits and soon before I knew it I was out, asleep and snuggled on my own soft couch. I awoke with the most tender feeling of love and awe for me, and my life. So aware sometimes and with the wonder because of the awareness at how precious, how frail, how soft this sweet little flash of a human life.
How grateful I am how grateful I am. I've never ever lived in a place so quiet, uncluttered, so mine--so noisy with the traffic and life and at once, so still. Mama's in the trees and moon right outside my window and thank goodness there's no screens cuz at Chop I got so used to stepping out to the earth barefeet and sweet green, breathing, and saying hello.
Hello, hello, hello.
November 20, 2009
RANT
We had a thunderstorm last night, a thunderstorm. I was walking home from this writer's gathering at a restaurant 2 blocks from here and the haze on the air was balmy--It's like Miami out here I shouted to the lady beneath the yellow street light walking towards the corner and her car, her name is Marty and she came the latest and was also a first-timer like me but showed up with a definite sweetness of self that settled right in. I was up late with the books and my own catalogs of catalogs of writing and then standing in the bathroom with the one low light on dim and the lace curtain started blowing then I heard the cackle of leaf-wind, and thunder, and rain.
Now it is gorgeous out the yellow morning sun on my back and it is Friday and the last place I want to go is to work which is where I soon have to be.
It was lovely to see Mike who organizes these meetings and how he gently directed the flow of information--the steering or trying to back to the topic of writing and writers rather than just an information exchange between charged and similar minds. He left though and then it was just us the women and we were off and soon it was my favorite topic of race on the shore and I posited mildly tho it's not mild when I talk about it and this is because as my cousin Collin says I care so inherent about it that I dont have to think, it just comes out and if you know me you know then it comes out all gold and fire--that racism is blurred with classism on the shore and that until the subject of race is addressed in this place that desegregated in 1969 the topic of class will always be underscored and so the divides will grow and community value, whole inclusive community value, to allude us and then next we were talking Ruby Payne and the light was on in me and I was pumped and ordered again from within and there it was...
And which is the Work that counts the most?
O, exhausting exhausting world of education and ethics and reform. O stumble stumble path as we turn again and again towards some kind of dirty version of walking heaven. O trying day in out this worrisome worrisome being the change? And this is Poetry? Inherant of living?
The Real Work.
I got home and the emails between these folks were already going and Mike wrote about Hem's Moveable Feast and the circulation of ideas and essentially the tribe that existed between them. And then, of course, I was off and it was all about diPrima and sacrificing everything to the clean line. Which brings me dear reader to the third time in a week that Rant, and the ethics, indisposable to which she and her peers held themselves and those hardline scrappy virtues indelible in this poem. Two weeks ago I read it aloud all firey jazz and crazy at 2am to Brooks we went to sleep with stars in our eyes and here it comes back again, a good morning surprise.
Sacrifice everything to the clean line. This was my twenties. Now I, in my little perch on the corner of life and Poetry and fabulous and outrageous and refusing to back down in my thirties, yet again challenge myself to Learn to Negotiate with the Vegetable body of the Poetic Mind.
click here
Happy Friday.
Now it is gorgeous out the yellow morning sun on my back and it is Friday and the last place I want to go is to work which is where I soon have to be.
It was lovely to see Mike who organizes these meetings and how he gently directed the flow of information--the steering or trying to back to the topic of writing and writers rather than just an information exchange between charged and similar minds. He left though and then it was just us the women and we were off and soon it was my favorite topic of race on the shore and I posited mildly tho it's not mild when I talk about it and this is because as my cousin Collin says I care so inherent about it that I dont have to think, it just comes out and if you know me you know then it comes out all gold and fire--that racism is blurred with classism on the shore and that until the subject of race is addressed in this place that desegregated in 1969 the topic of class will always be underscored and so the divides will grow and community value, whole inclusive community value, to allude us and then next we were talking Ruby Payne and the light was on in me and I was pumped and ordered again from within and there it was...
And which is the Work that counts the most?
O, exhausting exhausting world of education and ethics and reform. O stumble stumble path as we turn again and again towards some kind of dirty version of walking heaven. O trying day in out this worrisome worrisome being the change? And this is Poetry? Inherant of living?
The Real Work.
I got home and the emails between these folks were already going and Mike wrote about Hem's Moveable Feast and the circulation of ideas and essentially the tribe that existed between them. And then, of course, I was off and it was all about diPrima and sacrificing everything to the clean line. Which brings me dear reader to the third time in a week that Rant, and the ethics, indisposable to which she and her peers held themselves and those hardline scrappy virtues indelible in this poem. Two weeks ago I read it aloud all firey jazz and crazy at 2am to Brooks we went to sleep with stars in our eyes and here it comes back again, a good morning surprise.
Sacrifice everything to the clean line. This was my twenties. Now I, in my little perch on the corner of life and Poetry and fabulous and outrageous and refusing to back down in my thirties, yet again challenge myself to Learn to Negotiate with the Vegetable body of the Poetic Mind.
click here
Happy Friday.
September 7, 2009
"You can be inspirational in any part of the world...
...but not every part of the world can inspire you."~JTA, 5 sept 09
Me and cousin Joey to the far right. 1984. Wow, I am so taking a little break from the madness of student files right now. Since yesterday morning it's been non-stop organizing of and placing ESL students by assessment levels. Making new student folders. Class lists. Lots of derangely exciting stuff, I mean real pulse-racing kind of activities...
My cousin Collin is sitting across from me, right now, I have one class left to go and then two GED classes and then I am done this drone of skull-numbing torture; he is working on an essay for his gened English first semester ever college class. For a book he didn't read. This summer. He looks at me with that great, eighteen-year-old dryness he is famous for and says "Cuz I mean, all my stoopid cousins kept coming up to me on the beach this summer, you know, trying to have fun and all..."
Saturday night I got up with my other cousin. He's in his late 20's, born in Africa, raised in Germany, educated at Oxford, working currently on his PhD in England. Actually worked a while for the UN in Liberia. Huh? He was the first of us, our generation, to marry and is now expecting his first kid. He's in town this past week and I drove two hours to see him at 10:30 at night. Because that is what I now love to do. Get out and about, find some action. I snatched him away and off we scooted to see friends of mine play muse-ac and catch up.
Damn, I miss him. It'd been two years and last time we were together he wasn't married yet but I surely was, or for all intensive purposes my lifestyle two years ago certainly looked a lot different and included a fine and gentle long-term companion. So cousin Joe and I had lots of lots of sharing to do. Which is what I've done all summer, kicked it with fabulous folks from back in the day and shined my heart clean again and again in their love.
It was the first time that I recapped all my own personal changes from this past year and didn't feel like I was partly trying to sell it, looking to be affirmed that I'd done what was right. Instead it felt real and understandable and as normal as anything else about my self I've come to accept and even take for granted. Say my cheesy high-school tatoos, or eyesight that's blurred. Joey is the kind of person that I have such an intrinsic organic connection to. So much so that without expecting it, merely by virtue of sharing my self with him and he as well in exchange, a greater part of the landscape of me clears a bit more, the horizon spreads and clarifies in to more natural view, something in the bedrock part of me just clicks. After talking a while about my job, telling him about working our everloving asses off this past year to build from scratch a program that now serves a thousand students--he responded with his own details of his most recent work and projects.
And then it clicked. And I felt so happy and full of love to be snaking the backroads with firesmoke on the air and Joe chugging water to sober a little bit up.
I was definitely a little salty but with the sass that night and so I did something I rarely do. I asked him specifically two questions, asked him specifically for advice.
And here was one of his answers, which came after a pause and some puzzlement, which might of just meant he was thirsty....Kel, I dont know what to tell you. But you know what I am thinking about, that you love to dance. And dance is a form of communication that is ancient, far older than words. And you love to dance, you naturally know how to communicate with this form. So I think tonight you should just dance, and listen to the language of your self. Now, seriously. The only other person who ever would have possibly said something like this is me! But with that European swiftness that some mistake as curt but really is just minus any bullshsit, and with the deep intellect that courses this guys blood--my freaking radass cousin Joe answered me with the best advice, ever. And it made me beam!!!!
And god, he's so, so right. I spent earlier that day in fact at a festival, with my barefeet on the earth, so it was kinda like he was just affirming what I already in fact did know...
What I am listening to: def and kweli, both new and old
blah. back to the books i go.
if i can walk i can dance if i can talk i can sing.
(amen, cuz.) (amen amen.)
September 2, 2009
list: random thoughts and change
- i'm working A Lot these days it is fall semester re-enrollment time and all i do is get new students registered hola hola bienveindo or how are you welcome i'm going to test you but it's so i can help dont be scared. last week i passed my one year anniversary at this job.
- bob dylan keeps singing to me i feel a change coming on. in life, this is all there is, change. perenial as the breeze.
- i haven't written anything all week, except for friday poetry day the day i spent in pjs with books all day because the night before the calling moved in me sudden like it does which is when i so love it the most. so thursday night after i worked late i came home all charged and pumped and just kept moving got tea climbed in to bed, in to soft, cool, happy bed my sweet little nest of me pillows and softness and my precious sheets, my arms full of books my heart with the illustrious light. this little poem that came out of all that meat i come to bed carrying arms full of you and i love you every one, we will make love, arms full of us, all night, in the morning i will prop up and revisit you with a smile And how good that felt to wake up and do just that, and it's only a few days later but i haven't been writing or on the net at all, so i had to come here, and just let some of it download out.
- it is fall out, how i love to lie still in the quiet air in the morning. i got home tonight and mat and pat or else ruth or the wacky neighbors to my other side were having a fire. o smoke smell that i love...sweet prayers that linger but go eventually above. and the air coming off the river is cool and with no balm. the peepers speak loud to the deep clear night and tomorrow is september's full moon. have you heard it, the first geese calls?
- i want to blog about this, about passings, the earth walk, the time outside and our connections. i want to blog about my grlfriends and how they save my ass again and again. i want to blog about classism and seeing from the bottom up instead of the established and oft unquestioned view of the elite out, or down. i want to blog about memoirs and starting again and again and writing even though it makes your heart hurt. i want to blog about spiders and flowers and how that is the saddest part of fall when the flowers start to disappear. i want to blog about change and the difference one year can make, about last year this time and all that longing spent staring at the corn, hearing the paper stalks shake, seeing the fall sky spread, driving and driving the yellow backroads in the dry afternoons. how different it all is, how much has, and so of course how little has, changed. i want to blog about how i still cant believe and keep forgetting that i am 32.
- the desiderata has been showing up again, and again, to me. it is so good, it's own magnificent prayer.
- i'm taking a lot of new stuff on. creatively. it all lives in me and is always there, like air, even when i dont see it or cant remember it.
- i'm tired of my job, there is no joy left in the chalky burnt ruin at the wick of me. the people that i work with i am posting pics of them to remember that before we are workers we are mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, sons, daughters, lovers, friends. they are shining stars.
- i work hard. i try to do good work. we all do. and like me, we all let people down. we are all unique, and ascending, and all also so very much the same.
May 18, 2009
I lay me down
I used to call them babyfaces. Not so they'd hear me, but in my head lived a slew of them: I could let their names drop out of my mouth easily and endlessly as falling rain. And with the girls I sometimes would. They all, punk rock or thugged out or beach hood, had one thing in common: a bright, boyish face and that light in their eyes.
I wanted to, want to, save every one of them. These boys, these sweet angelheaded boys I want to save and will by any means necessary. I will save them by taking them to my bed. I will save them by taking them to my mom's table, or late late in the night in through the back siding glass door.
I will save them loud and quiet, I will save them when they show up sweet and I will save them when they dont show up at all and forget to call. I will save them a million nights, and a million different mornings. I will save them best when they come with the weeds and so drunk that they're part crying but cant even tell.
When did this happen? When did I trade my purple boots and flannel shouts for dubsacs and dime bags, blunts and nickel hits a coke? When did I rush to trade me in to save nightmares posed as a dream?
Today there were three of them. I forgot, I'd long forgot, that they used to be my means. Why tonight, why tonight to come back to me? I had to doublelook at the birthdates, they looked SO young, the sparkling freshface, sweet skin and shiny eyes. One continues to put Miss before my name even though I tell them all, call me Kelly. How could two of them already a been locked up? Already done time? Sweet little babyfaces not one a day over 19.
They want to get their GED's. Two will by July, the other, if he sticks around and doesn't go back to jail, could by the end of the year. Why tonight?
Because one of them I know he doesn't get it, and I have to tell him, cuz if I dont no one else will. And then it's back, it's all back because the I inside that I kept tucked away deep has been blending in lately with the Me that I used to be, and together this dynasty of I's and Me's are surfacing and merging and growing out again not from how I used to be but comfortably as one now within the whole of Who I Am.
So I tell him. Look, maybe no one's ever told you this before but these scores you got tonight, it takes someone special to come in off the streets and do this well, I want you to know how much potential you've got, I want you to seriously think about what you've always secretly thought of doing in your life. I want you to think about it and meet with me again on Wednesday so we can talk more.
Then, to get his attention, I lean back and say you know why I think most young people drop out of high school?
And he stops looking at his shoes and looks up with a twinkle in his eye, why? Cuz their too smart for high school and they're bored. And also they think that it's a waste of time cuz their extracurricular life, you know the one out on the street, is way more real. And they want the real life. They're insulted by how fake school and that whole scene seems.
He smiles wide. Yeah, yeah.
I stop. Sometimes I go on and tell the story about me and my dean the one where three weeks before my high school graduation I chased him around the desk in his office threatening him but luckily Dean Perry liked me, which is exactly what he told me later, and had been telling me for years, and also why he decided to cut me a break. I had just been suspended for skipping a week before. He liked me because in the 9th grade I was making my own zine, or independant magazine, fashioned after the riot grrrl zines that were steady influencing me, my music choices and lifestyle opinions at that time and I was eagerly selling it at school. All the Queens Men was my zine and in addition to it I had several photocopies of Fantastic Fanzine and whatever latest copies of Riot Grrrl I had in my possession. As was the punk rock grass roots way I was giving these zines away to whoever showed mild interest in what they had to say. Some time after lunch one day I got called down to the Dean's Office and I was all quivery inside, flushed and redfaced and ready to launch a defensive attack, and sort of out of control with the frenzy of adrenaline same reaction like I get even to this day. But more, inside what I remember is a staunch and quiet strong feeling of injustice. A simple how can he stop me from distributing these, speech and expression about real life is my right.
The very same real life that can so insidiously make you lose your power. The real life that can without warning or seeming reason slowly shut you up.
Dean Perry condemned me for peddling smut: these were the first days of female musicians using their thrash heavy music to take political stands. Rape, incest, prostitution and freedom of sexuality was all over the pages of both Fantastic Fanzine and Riot Grrrl; by comparison my All the Queen's Men was tellingly more tame. But I stood up for it, I defended it, I stood calm as I could while unfalteringly standing my ground. In the end I was reprimanded for selling goods during school hours. And regardless the hell I would raise and raise from that point on in my good Catholic school, Dean Perry made it clear that he respected me from that day of our very first encounter for my little showing of my own self respect.
That, and he knew I was way too smart for my own good.
When did all that change? All that pride and stalwart conviction in what's right? All that self-respect and belief in me. The grl power and Revolution Grrrl Style Now when did it turn to the men, the men the men the babyboys all wrapped up in tangled meaning in my cusps.
Babyfaces. Babyfaced. With eyes of a fool.
Why tonight? Because why not? Because two years ago this week Kevin finally went to the drugs. My prince, sweet fucking Kevin babyface beachboy love with the sharp sharp jaw. Like my old buddy Konan said when he told me all about it, it was kinda good though, you know? At least his parents didn't have to wait anymore to get the call.
Too fucking smart for our own good.
Because here I am and I didn't even realize it? Still laying my body down. Convinced I can save them all...
Ocean City 1995April 20, 2009
Adult Education: Little Explosions OR Beautiful, Amazing
Ok. So here goes me, keeping my perspective. I walked in to the middle school tonight where I was scheduled to do intake and the teacher of the fifth grade, whose room I use, must've had her students paste stickies on the wall with examples of metaphors. She was a great potato of a woman jumped of a post-it on the wall right at me and made me giggle. She was a great potato of a woman. Lumpy? Full of starch? Little eyes all over her body? What?
Here I am, same place I always am third Monday of the month. It's been a slow day--slow on new student intake for the GED program, lots of no-shows and actually even a couple of open time slots, which is nice, and also not normal. I am used to kicking it in to overdrive when I am on the clock for my job: going so fast that it's like a dance, muscle memory, peak experience. Rolled in to one. But today, well today has been lagging. Laborious even, with the clock on a slow honey roll.
Which is kinda the perfect description of my life since I finally completed my move off the farm. Slow and gentle, rolling ever so easily, taking it carefully with me. And I've been so aware of being in the middle of my process. It's as if there was this outter life that I was steady keeping up, and at once also this inner one that only I, and like a couple close friends or so, were truly aware. And basically what's been happening is I've been watching the inner life slowly moving up and out, and the outter one, who I thought I was or at least used to be, is sort of dismantling and fading back in to the surface, sort of composting and disappearing, like the water leftover when a wave crashes, how it seeps with a gurgle and a bubble in to the land. And this weekend I had nothing but quiet time to see the process, to really with open-eyes walk along and be so aware of it all unfolding.
About mid-day today I got some news that I was expecting, that in my soul I sorta new already, but it still made time, and my breath stand still. Like the silence after a bomb when you can see everything blown to pieces but are aware of your own inner silence, and at once of each and every piece. There was a moment of great stillness, which in turn made me even more hyper-aware of each moment that came after it, right up til right now. Which is good, cuz the old me would've ducked and run.
Since none of my students were showing, I decided to sit in on GED class for Jason's lesson on elements and the periodic table. Dig this. Everything, everything in life comes back to being calm. Or what I mean is that the deal with atoms, see all they want out of life is to be content which in atomic terms means neutral. In its natural state an atom is perfect in equal positive and negative charge. But bang an atom with the same amount of protons up against a different atom with a different amount of protons and therefor different amount of electrons--and they're gonna start matching up, all those on and off charges, banging around against and reacting to one another, seeking neutral but likely causing chaos until they can separate back out again and be calm, be one again and natural in who they are. Because in the atoms most natural state, and compelled by the finest fundamentals of life, it is a perfectly equal number of protons and electrons, or positive and negative charge. And all of life is compelled by the fact that they always seek to return to that neutral stasis.
Edward Carpenter said All that you have within you, all that your heart desires, all that your nature so specially fits for you--that or the counterpart of it waits embedded in the great Whole, for you. It surely will come to you. Yet equally surely not one moment before its appointed time will it come. All your crying and fever and reaching out of hands will make no difference. Therefor do not begin that game at all.
It is thunder, and lightening out right now. At our most base substance is perfection, and the elemental code for chaos. It will all go and go, compelled by those most basic and fundamental charges. Amazing. Beautiful. The life of a potato: Saturday I put under the ground these spuds with eyes poking out. Eventually they will grow crazy mats of roots and great breathing leaves with fine white blossoms of flowers glowing atop the brown ground. And all that too, all that wild disruption of growth and life too will eventually fade back into and under the soil. Chaos. Peace. The hyper states in between.
And the process: getting to see it all....
Here I am, same place I always am third Monday of the month. It's been a slow day--slow on new student intake for the GED program, lots of no-shows and actually even a couple of open time slots, which is nice, and also not normal. I am used to kicking it in to overdrive when I am on the clock for my job: going so fast that it's like a dance, muscle memory, peak experience. Rolled in to one. But today, well today has been lagging. Laborious even, with the clock on a slow honey roll.
Which is kinda the perfect description of my life since I finally completed my move off the farm. Slow and gentle, rolling ever so easily, taking it carefully with me. And I've been so aware of being in the middle of my process. It's as if there was this outter life that I was steady keeping up, and at once also this inner one that only I, and like a couple close friends or so, were truly aware. And basically what's been happening is I've been watching the inner life slowly moving up and out, and the outter one, who I thought I was or at least used to be, is sort of dismantling and fading back in to the surface, sort of composting and disappearing, like the water leftover when a wave crashes, how it seeps with a gurgle and a bubble in to the land. And this weekend I had nothing but quiet time to see the process, to really with open-eyes walk along and be so aware of it all unfolding.
About mid-day today I got some news that I was expecting, that in my soul I sorta new already, but it still made time, and my breath stand still. Like the silence after a bomb when you can see everything blown to pieces but are aware of your own inner silence, and at once of each and every piece. There was a moment of great stillness, which in turn made me even more hyper-aware of each moment that came after it, right up til right now. Which is good, cuz the old me would've ducked and run.
Since none of my students were showing, I decided to sit in on GED class for Jason's lesson on elements and the periodic table. Dig this. Everything, everything in life comes back to being calm. Or what I mean is that the deal with atoms, see all they want out of life is to be content which in atomic terms means neutral. In its natural state an atom is perfect in equal positive and negative charge. But bang an atom with the same amount of protons up against a different atom with a different amount of protons and therefor different amount of electrons--and they're gonna start matching up, all those on and off charges, banging around against and reacting to one another, seeking neutral but likely causing chaos until they can separate back out again and be calm, be one again and natural in who they are. Because in the atoms most natural state, and compelled by the finest fundamentals of life, it is a perfectly equal number of protons and electrons, or positive and negative charge. And all of life is compelled by the fact that they always seek to return to that neutral stasis.
Edward Carpenter said All that you have within you, all that your heart desires, all that your nature so specially fits for you--that or the counterpart of it waits embedded in the great Whole, for you. It surely will come to you. Yet equally surely not one moment before its appointed time will it come. All your crying and fever and reaching out of hands will make no difference. Therefor do not begin that game at all.
It is thunder, and lightening out right now. At our most base substance is perfection, and the elemental code for chaos. It will all go and go, compelled by those most basic and fundamental charges. Amazing. Beautiful. The life of a potato: Saturday I put under the ground these spuds with eyes poking out. Eventually they will grow crazy mats of roots and great breathing leaves with fine white blossoms of flowers glowing atop the brown ground. And all that too, all that wild disruption of growth and life too will eventually fade back into and under the soil. Chaos. Peace. The hyper states in between.
And the process: getting to see it all....
April 16, 2009
Politicin'....
Tonight I drank black cherry floats with Haitian-Creole refugees. One woman with a red badanna over her grey braids proudly showed me how she can now count to ten. The last time I visited we each had tears in our ears because she wrote her name for the first time in her fifty some years of life. The students from Haaay-tee ( I love the way they say the name of their country, it makes me melt inside) wear their jackets in class, heavy winter ones, even on days like today when it was sunny out and 60 degrees. I think this is because the climate is so very different where they're from and many of these folks haven't acclimated yet. In Caroline County you're driving along the backroads: farmfields, woods, farmfields, woods and swamp, farmfields. The swamps smell like sulfur and in the spring the farms are covered in cow shit. It doesn't matter though when it's bright out like today it still makes you smile where your heart is.
You're driving along, and then in the middle of a farmfield you turn right and then next thing you know you drive up on some projects. Lots of little kids out front, screaming and laughing and playing on the lawns and speaking fine english in the street in front of the Community Center. And inside their parents are in heavy winter coats drinking floats and learning to write their names.
Last night Jason, a coworker, sent this over email:
I was doing intake & assessment in Federalsburg today and when I asked the question "Why is getting your high school diploma important to you?" This person responded that it was because of something President Barack Obama said during his address to Congress in February. This person quoted word for word the portion of the speech in bold below. I included more of the text from that portion of the speech just to be sure it was not out of context and I felt it evoked an even more powerful response.
"It is our responsibility as lawmakers and educators to make this system work. But it is the responsibility of every citizen to participate in it. And so tonight, I ask every American to commit to at least one year or more of higher education or career training. This can be community college or a four-year school; vocational training or an apprenticeship. But whatever the training may be, every American will need to get more than a high school diploma. And dropping out of high school is no longer an option. It’s not just quitting on yourself, it’s quitting on your country – and this country needs and values the talents of every American."
Jay goes on to point out that he is not a Democrat and didn't vote for Barrack. Which, though we've never discussed it I think I already knew from mild comments he's made before. Now politically I try to stay the hell out of it, part of this is because my politics would likely fall so left of radical that they’d circle back around again to the right and this sort of confuses people. But mostly because I think the system, so long as it is motivated by money, will never be based in integrity. So I consider it ethically, thus fundamentally, flawed, and find that debate usually is only ever about making oneself look mighty at the expense of debunking another's right to their own beliefs, and often never really about open-minded discourse. In fact, I find that once a person finds out a couple of my own beliefs they usually then assume they know me downright up and down, and so goes polarity and the lac of bridge-gapping. And in truth, most us humans want the same things, love and security, safety and wellness, to be treated kindly and with respect. I dont know it's all so sad to me sometimes, even though this pigeonholing, I do it, too, believe me!
I believe in deep and vigilant personal responsibility. Insofar as ethics go I believe this, if practiced, extends naturally in to social responsibility. Inner-principal-values walking, or ethos of matreo-centred agroegalitarian deep voodoo, (haha ooops there I go again confusing people.) But anyhow. Here is this guy, this buddy at work Jason, who openly admits he's not a democrat but who works vigilantly and committed and for stoopid piddly compensation as a student advocate. He is without question the number one resource in the county at least that I know of for social service referrals, and is this gentle easy-going teddy bear of a guy who is absolutely adored by his students and committed to what he does. But my favorite thing about him, now, would be his walking ability to totally bust my own extreme lines of political stereotyping and illusion just by being the change he wants to see. Card officially, though gentely, pulled. I am grateful. His walking fires in others the ability, the courage to do the same, as this email above states. And he's mellow as hell, too! Thank god for this, for people like him and our pal Kim, who keep it going and going. I can't say I'll do this forever, but so long as there's black cherry floats involved, and students who can quote their president, I'll get in the ring at least one more day.
And that my friends is as political as it gets.
You're driving along, and then in the middle of a farmfield you turn right and then next thing you know you drive up on some projects. Lots of little kids out front, screaming and laughing and playing on the lawns and speaking fine english in the street in front of the Community Center. And inside their parents are in heavy winter coats drinking floats and learning to write their names.
Last night Jason, a coworker, sent this over email:
I was doing intake & assessment in Federalsburg today and when I asked the question "Why is getting your high school diploma important to you?" This person responded that it was because of something President Barack Obama said during his address to Congress in February. This person quoted word for word the portion of the speech in bold below. I included more of the text from that portion of the speech just to be sure it was not out of context and I felt it evoked an even more powerful response.
"It is our responsibility as lawmakers and educators to make this system work. But it is the responsibility of every citizen to participate in it. And so tonight, I ask every American to commit to at least one year or more of higher education or career training. This can be community college or a four-year school; vocational training or an apprenticeship. But whatever the training may be, every American will need to get more than a high school diploma. And dropping out of high school is no longer an option. It’s not just quitting on yourself, it’s quitting on your country – and this country needs and values the talents of every American."
Jay goes on to point out that he is not a Democrat and didn't vote for Barrack. Which, though we've never discussed it I think I already knew from mild comments he's made before. Now politically I try to stay the hell out of it, part of this is because my politics would likely fall so left of radical that they’d circle back around again to the right and this sort of confuses people. But mostly because I think the system, so long as it is motivated by money, will never be based in integrity. So I consider it ethically, thus fundamentally, flawed, and find that debate usually is only ever about making oneself look mighty at the expense of debunking another's right to their own beliefs, and often never really about open-minded discourse. In fact, I find that once a person finds out a couple of my own beliefs they usually then assume they know me downright up and down, and so goes polarity and the lac of bridge-gapping. And in truth, most us humans want the same things, love and security, safety and wellness, to be treated kindly and with respect. I dont know it's all so sad to me sometimes, even though this pigeonholing, I do it, too, believe me!
I believe in deep and vigilant personal responsibility. Insofar as ethics go I believe this, if practiced, extends naturally in to social responsibility. Inner-principal-values walking, or ethos of matreo-centred agroegalitarian deep voodoo, (haha ooops there I go again confusing people.) But anyhow. Here is this guy, this buddy at work Jason, who openly admits he's not a democrat but who works vigilantly and committed and for stoopid piddly compensation as a student advocate. He is without question the number one resource in the county at least that I know of for social service referrals, and is this gentle easy-going teddy bear of a guy who is absolutely adored by his students and committed to what he does. But my favorite thing about him, now, would be his walking ability to totally bust my own extreme lines of political stereotyping and illusion just by being the change he wants to see. Card officially, though gentely, pulled. I am grateful. His walking fires in others the ability, the courage to do the same, as this email above states. And he's mellow as hell, too! Thank god for this, for people like him and our pal Kim, who keep it going and going. I can't say I'll do this forever, but so long as there's black cherry floats involved, and students who can quote their president, I'll get in the ring at least one more day.
And that my friends is as political as it gets.
February 18, 2009
Pine trees and riot grrrrls (it's the little things sometimes)
Uuuuuuummmm, yea
So who I'm listening to: Forever
& how it came to be that I'm listening to them: Was perusing various blogs/sites I frequent, happened to be doing so on my work computer--yes, at work!! bc it was 9:30 pm and I still had students testing at the site furthest from my home!! (that's my second 10 hour day of all student intake all day long for whoever's counting i kno i kno cry me a river JT) And most of all I was perusing bc I couldn't dream of doing anymore paper work as the entire side of my face is/was numb with what is, I am only guessing, an ear infection. However said cauliflower of the inner ear did not a'tall disrupt the extra gushgushing of my bloodstream when, on the fine DIY site indiepages.com the most recent music review posted sent me directly to Forever, bc as the reviewer himself posted, he is "a huge fan of the '90s riot grrrl scene" and this band fits, if not the politics of that phenom than at least the sound. Which is super extra fine by me
Pine trees behind the Dunkin Donuts in Denton, where I took my break yesterday. 
And, where my grammy used to stop inthe middle of our regular icy-kneed drives in her air-conditioned Pontiac from Baltimore to Ocean Pines when I was a wee toehead. Cold knees and the dusty sounds of static and church music and the dusty smell of stale the whole ride. But it used to be the Tastee Freeze back then and all the blue coolant in the world couldn't keep me from ice cream under the pine trees with Gram when I was a girl.
And, where my grammy used to stop inthe middle of our regular icy-kneed drives in her air-conditioned Pontiac from Baltimore to Ocean Pines when I was a wee toehead. Cold knees and the dusty sounds of static and church music and the dusty smell of stale the whole ride. But it used to be the Tastee Freeze back then and all the blue coolant in the world couldn't keep me from ice cream under the pine trees with Gram when I was a girl.Funny how everything comes back around...
thinkin of ya Gram
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