Not really sure what happened other than I slept eight hours last night, almost to the exact minute, and felt clean and clear waking up in my bed in the loft in the canyon. In the California mythos of sunshine-wintertime.
I was gone fifteen days but the truth is it was way, way longer than that. On Friday Uncle Tim, who is my godfather by the soul way, called in the morning. It was Ocean Pines gray out which is its own special prison that keeps the winter folk away. The thing is with sock-in like that marsh gasses keep the soil tender-moist and smelling green. So we took a four mile tall tree walk on a path he tends for the Rec department and I cried those hot soul-cleanse tears that are meant only for God-ppl and wise women, which of course are the same thing. Helped me to take serious the karma I have between me and my own god-kids, too. Later I found out about Derynne's brother and couldn't see straight again.
So Konan came through winding us up at Cork Bar downtown which in a million different scenarios if I had to hand-pick that would be down towards 9 hundred ninety thousand on the list. But here's the thing, the Wild proclamation: you just never know you know? We wound up late night in WOC and that there was the only place in the world I needed to be, kicking it w his real home grls and seeing myself in them in a way I haven't seen me in Way. Too. Long a time.
The next day I stayed in pajamas til 7 pm and watched the Red Tent and ate the soup broth I'd made/been making since the first night at home. Witchy bitches make witchy brew. We watched the Ravens rock Pitt like we all knew was coming. WILD card that's Baltimore, that special Baltimore one-eyed medicine some mistake as bad (false-pride).
And that's what's up, tracking home, the special tendencies that run the soul of who you are cuz of the land peopled through of from-where-you-come. If you can read and track this, good for you. If you can't you need help dark-seeing which means between the lines. Linguistics. Can't be studied. Someone should tell Pacifica that.
Point is this all happened or started back the night I went to HB to meet Yasi and Konan started blowing me up--that's the thing about WILD, all cards eventually come a calling and that's the thing about one-eyed medicine. It's your duty to rise up when the reminder comes: you CAN see.
So now Humboldt makes sense, the long 101 journey home again to the earth and the tides that rise. I come living back to the canyon, no food in my hobbit dwelling just coffee and no phone charger to keep me tied to time and ties and all that hell. I write these words and The Light comes on which is Erin Mac back there in Baldamore making her next moves saying wutsup. She comes through as WILD does, like I useta say and always will, Poetry is my only religion.
That is what's up.
I know Who I am. I need little else than that.
Prayers that all ppl get right. Or Wild. Either or is the same. Go listen to some good music if you're dead!
I'm going for a swim.
Showing posts with label Baltimore. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Baltimore. Show all posts
January 7, 2015
November 7, 2014
The tears were gratitude, every one.
In my morning time yesterday I was done with the sitting and done with the journaling so I thought I was done, for good. Ready to start the day. Thursday's have been thesis writing days so my head was a tumble of forward motion towards that. Words on a screen. Losing time down the rabbit hole of books into thought into books into new next thought. Like little lights in a row each of which transmits power to turn the next one onnnn. I love it. I have never before been so plugged in to my real life on every end.
I got down out of the loft and went for my phone. I keep it plugged in downstairs where I can't reach it. Or that's when I don't have clients in the morning or need for the alarm. That way my precious first glance at me in the morning isn't consumed by that dastardly little electric machine! Those high-wires they so easily infiltrate my brain.
When I got down the stairs and peeked the time it was only 8:30, I don't write til 10. Sighhhh, morning time. I made a fresh cup of coffee and climbed back up to the loft.
Hoagy Carmichael on Pandora brings up muscle-ey memories that catch in my chest and stir my whole body to rise. Coloring in bed for the next hour is what I did. It let my body transmit memories. I was alive, at Church Street, which is the house in South Baltimore, Brooklyn Park, where my grandparents raised 7 kids. This little two bedroom and an attic space, the living room ahhh god the kitchen, a space so living in my earliest reverie. I spent a lot of time there. It's a body memory of orange-brown linoleum and yellow walls and my grandmother's round squooshy bosom where her hug got you lost. And my pop, his records. Porgy and Bess.
It was amazing to me. I had this new experience of re-living the love-light of back then, and feeling so happy my eyes brimmed with wet tears at least for half the colored pencil ink pen time. All I could think the whole time was wow, it's never really gone. What a secret to comprehend! That we can revisit love-past at any time.
It wasn't bitter-sweet. The tears were gratitude, every one. Meeting the Self is endless in its inward reigns. It's playful, a living sacrament we each get to make unto our own spirit and soul whenever we choose, each and every day. There's so much joy. There's so much play and life. There's so much and it's so endless and precious and easy to access when we just--do.
In the early morning pain in 1997 when Grammy died I dealt with it in customary McMullen forward motion. Shuffled the girls with their clumsy arms and awkward puberty hair and squeaky voices and braces mouths in to my car. There were five of them, my five girl cousin that all came in a year or so of the others. They were in middle school by then, except for Sarah, the babe. I was 20.
We drove 97 through the county towards where Jackie lived. At some point the car radio played Total Eclipse and that is our song, to this day. Endless. Reverie. Church Street. The bemoans of the aching human heart. An eighties song so legit during the interlude you actually hear blowing wind. Uhhhh yea.
This morning, bc this is the way of the heart when we let her open and sing--cousin Erin's text was waiting when I climbed down the ladder from the loft. A group text to all the girls. It said, Total eclipse on the radio! Love you all-- with a million exclamation points to try to express the inexpressible. We live in Seattle, Buffalo, Vermont, Pennsylvania, Baltimore, California now. It was to me a nod from life that the heart is still home, endless in its ways which lead us both in and outside.
The oldest just had her first girl, last week. Of the six of us, half are parents now. Life goes on. The heart keeps us golden, connected. It eclipses, too, hell yea. And also, overflows of blessings always there, always living and beating, pressing us to look a minute and recognize. To just, see.
I got down out of the loft and went for my phone. I keep it plugged in downstairs where I can't reach it. Or that's when I don't have clients in the morning or need for the alarm. That way my precious first glance at me in the morning isn't consumed by that dastardly little electric machine! Those high-wires they so easily infiltrate my brain.
When I got down the stairs and peeked the time it was only 8:30, I don't write til 10. Sighhhh, morning time. I made a fresh cup of coffee and climbed back up to the loft.
Hoagy Carmichael on Pandora brings up muscle-ey memories that catch in my chest and stir my whole body to rise. Coloring in bed for the next hour is what I did. It let my body transmit memories. I was alive, at Church Street, which is the house in South Baltimore, Brooklyn Park, where my grandparents raised 7 kids. This little two bedroom and an attic space, the living room ahhh god the kitchen, a space so living in my earliest reverie. I spent a lot of time there. It's a body memory of orange-brown linoleum and yellow walls and my grandmother's round squooshy bosom where her hug got you lost. And my pop, his records. Porgy and Bess.
It was amazing to me. I had this new experience of re-living the love-light of back then, and feeling so happy my eyes brimmed with wet tears at least for half the colored pencil ink pen time. All I could think the whole time was wow, it's never really gone. What a secret to comprehend! That we can revisit love-past at any time.
It wasn't bitter-sweet. The tears were gratitude, every one. Meeting the Self is endless in its inward reigns. It's playful, a living sacrament we each get to make unto our own spirit and soul whenever we choose, each and every day. There's so much joy. There's so much play and life. There's so much and it's so endless and precious and easy to access when we just--do.
In the early morning pain in 1997 when Grammy died I dealt with it in customary McMullen forward motion. Shuffled the girls with their clumsy arms and awkward puberty hair and squeaky voices and braces mouths in to my car. There were five of them, my five girl cousin that all came in a year or so of the others. They were in middle school by then, except for Sarah, the babe. I was 20.
We drove 97 through the county towards where Jackie lived. At some point the car radio played Total Eclipse and that is our song, to this day. Endless. Reverie. Church Street. The bemoans of the aching human heart. An eighties song so legit during the interlude you actually hear blowing wind. Uhhhh yea.
This morning, bc this is the way of the heart when we let her open and sing--cousin Erin's text was waiting when I climbed down the ladder from the loft. A group text to all the girls. It said, Total eclipse on the radio! Love you all-- with a million exclamation points to try to express the inexpressible. We live in Seattle, Buffalo, Vermont, Pennsylvania, Baltimore, California now. It was to me a nod from life that the heart is still home, endless in its ways which lead us both in and outside.
The oldest just had her first girl, last week. Of the six of us, half are parents now. Life goes on. The heart keeps us golden, connected. It eclipses, too, hell yea. And also, overflows of blessings always there, always living and beating, pressing us to look a minute and recognize. To just, see.
December 23, 2011
Of course a dance party broke out
It would have been easy to stay in bed with Erin and watch the entire third season of Bored To Death, sleeping half the time and with a lac-of-sleep headache the rest. Grease nap. At Double T the day after the party stories, when everyone's punch-drunk still and easy to make fun of, made breakfast fun. I like Christmas week, always have, when I was a teacher or intake counselor and even last year at the coffee shop I had off and could travel and that's how I used to get my kicks. Being on the road Christmas week. Now, I'm just on the road, all the time.
There's something to the clouds the last two days. On the drive up 83 to Pennsylvania my mom said it's a cold front, all I know is the clouds and the colors up there keep capturing my attention and then next thing I know I'm engulfed, staring out the window or above the trees. The gray and the blue and the white. It's so striking, I forget it's Christmas and just think, Maryland, this is so your sky.
Em and Nicky were home from the farm too and drove down from Connecticut last night. It was raining and balmy on the streets of Baltimore, Em was shaking it at me through the window from out on the street and of course a dance party broke out. Sixty some years ago in a basement on Church Street in Brooklyn Park my grandparents started having Christmas parties for their brothers and sisters and all their friends. My dad and all his brothers and sisters raised us kids on black and white pictures and stories from then, the dusty liquor bottles behind the sheet in the corner, the train that ran the floor on hand connected tracks. Shiny shoes one pair a kid lined in a row. It's a long time away from that little two bedroom house with the 9 people in South Baltimore, my brother and I still do what we can. Our parties have people dancing on the bar and dancing outside, smoking in the streets. According to the aunts and uncles, Grammy's and Pop's had them dancing in the basement under the stairs and sometimes, on the roof. Singing at the stars...
September 3, 2011
TAoCB. Baby Grace.
It was a long trip off the mountain.
There were four people I wanted to surprise the most, of course the number one was my brother the new dad. It was 9:20 am when I flew in to BWI Tuesday morning and almost 10 when I texted my brother could he talk in 15 minutes. When 15 minutes was up I was standing outside the door to the room of the hospital where my sister-in-law was in the bed with her baby on her chest both of them glowing the most tender new momma-baby glow. I texted him Could he talk in person then dad opened the door and I walked in.
My brother and I, emotional as we are and hard as we've worked to learn how to communicate and be adults, were capable of nothing at that moment other than tears. Tears and sobbing and smiling and laughing and hugging, and most of all breathless utter still staring at tiny baby Grace.
Tim and Mary showed up my godparents and they were number two and three to be surprised and there they were, the tears again. Family, my family surrounding me. My brother's closest friends, watching the hearts melt right inside these grown men. I stayed at Erin's that night and spent the next day with Kelly in Catonsville then Brooks in the city and reveled in how very much I love where I am from. Brian and I drove to my sister-in-laws house the day after that and the best part was the cuddle nest of all of us, the lights out and the baby hiding under blankets snuggled sleeping on my chest. That night I drove to the beach with Erin who is my sister, we were dirty Burnie as we get when we're together eating junk food from the Wawa in Easton and making merciless fun of each other til we finally got to Ocean Pines. We cuddled most the night when we did get there, settled in the house with my sleeping mom.
Yesterday I went to the Yacht Club where I lastly surprised Jott. She screamed like in a horror movie and then my trip finally felt done. I came home after that and rested, talked to the boy a while and have been peaceful, smiling a lot, and enjoying my blessings. September is my favorite time ever to be in the sun by the beach.
Welcome to this precious ordinary world, my darling baby niece.
Through the redwoods, alongside the river trained against the sand and stone shores. The sun beams literally were vibrating the air so you could see them. More than once Yalle and I were holding hands, high up towards the ceiling of the car for no reason other than radiant joy. She is a hero to me, in just one night I watched her hustle pool change a tire in heeled boots and skinny jeans and chug whiskey out the bottle. Once the 101 turned to the freeway outside Oakland she took over behind the wheel because she's better at "stepping on it". She got me to the airport Monday night in San Jose with enough time to get searched in security, by a ponytailed woman with an accent and rubber blue gloves. My bra set off the buzzer more than once. I took it in stride, what else did I have to do? When it was over I talked to Gretchen, wrote some on the travel piece I've been keeping and right before I boarded, texted the boy I'd see him when I got back.
There were four people I wanted to surprise the most, of course the number one was my brother the new dad. It was 9:20 am when I flew in to BWI Tuesday morning and almost 10 when I texted my brother could he talk in 15 minutes. When 15 minutes was up I was standing outside the door to the room of the hospital where my sister-in-law was in the bed with her baby on her chest both of them glowing the most tender new momma-baby glow. I texted him Could he talk in person then dad opened the door and I walked in.
My brother and I, emotional as we are and hard as we've worked to learn how to communicate and be adults, were capable of nothing at that moment other than tears. Tears and sobbing and smiling and laughing and hugging, and most of all breathless utter still staring at tiny baby Grace.
Tim and Mary showed up my godparents and they were number two and three to be surprised and there they were, the tears again. Family, my family surrounding me. My brother's closest friends, watching the hearts melt right inside these grown men. I stayed at Erin's that night and spent the next day with Kelly in Catonsville then Brooks in the city and reveled in how very much I love where I am from. Brian and I drove to my sister-in-laws house the day after that and the best part was the cuddle nest of all of us, the lights out and the baby hiding under blankets snuggled sleeping on my chest. That night I drove to the beach with Erin who is my sister, we were dirty Burnie as we get when we're together eating junk food from the Wawa in Easton and making merciless fun of each other til we finally got to Ocean Pines. We cuddled most the night when we did get there, settled in the house with my sleeping mom.
Yesterday I went to the Yacht Club where I lastly surprised Jott. She screamed like in a horror movie and then my trip finally felt done. I came home after that and rested, talked to the boy a while and have been peaceful, smiling a lot, and enjoying my blessings. September is my favorite time ever to be in the sun by the beach.
Welcome to this precious ordinary world, my darling baby niece.
April 26, 2011
Spon Down. Living forever on yoga and sun.
Mom called to say she had a long day at the hospital. It's in Baltimore City where she works once a week as an operating room nurse, her case load long or intense or maybe her coworkers lousy--she called to say she's staying the night in Anne Arundel county at Deb's house instead of driving back to the beach. She's worked there as long I've been alive. I was writing, doing third edits on Part One of my book, so that Part Two comes with more consistency, when she called. We talked a serious bit of talk about something that struck me last night, that I meditated on it struck so deep, and she agreed with the serious bit in the tiny little time that we talked.
Her call made me pause, there was lots of food in the fridge and I couldn't ignore my hunger when we got off the phone. I peeled shrimp and added Old Bay and a little little dash of sour cream to make it shrimp salady. Then I heated corn tortillas and got out arugula and limes and cilantro because everything's better as tacos of course. I am writing again now, not on Part 2 or Part 1 third edits, just writing to write to acknowledge the time the good music on and to say goodbye to the ohsowarmtoday golden yellow sun. I love the gold yellow of the spring, just before it turns summer orange. I love that I am getting browngolden skin and yellowgold hair like twine Rapunzel spun.
Last week right now I was walking through a rich part of DC with a belly full of Thai food and my best friend Katie by my side our sandled feet on the uneven cement sidewalk squares. It was chilly in the air but still we drove with the windows mostly down on our way to the hostel in Tacoma. We met a girl named Shemma from the UK, it is hard not to meet people in hostels when you decide that where you are that night--a boarding house for passerbys--is where you will plant for the moment and stay. Which is to say the next night at the hostel in my favorite neighborhood in Baltimore, Mt. Vernon, we didn't plant, just dropped our bags fitted our sheets and scooted back out the door to all the fun ways to explore the going-ons of my hometown city's streets. Shemma is young, like 22 or 23, and from the UK and instead of on a round-the-world trip tic had one in which you can go right up to eight times. Neat new concept I'd never heard. They were on their last stop, her and her man who she just got engaged to, this happened in the beginning of their trip on a stop somewhere in Asia I think. Now we are facebook friends.
The day after the hostel in Tacoma we went back downtown to meet Walsh and see the Gaughan exhibit. I put all my intensity in to it until I was exhausted from the concentration. Later we laid on a blanket on the green mall under the shade of new fresh green leaves. We talked inappropriately like women always eventually do. Making the day irreverent and lovely. Today I wrote four poems I am sure came from time with my grls.
Last night I was driving home from yoga it was warm out so warm the air was like hot breath breathing off the trees and some song came on Ocean 98 that I can't now remember and I thought all I really need in life is music, yoga and sun. I smiled a while and vibed whole and strong on the bliss of this, then funny ego twist thought: and poetry, too--poetry the ocean music yoga and sun. And friends. And sex...a man. I thought ohmylord like Marla would say...I laughed at myself....this too this too came to mind, what Dani Shapiro would say. Always the ego and all its unsatiated needs. I thought of Erika then, my published-by-Penguin writing partner sister spirit friend. I thought of Walsh and Katie, of Josh and then Mike in California because Sean my brother was home all weekend so it's natural to think also of him. Life is funny, ununderstandable, impossible to figure out and also so fleetingly crystal clear with certain truths. I could live forever on sun, poems, yoga. Music, fresh tacos, swimming and friends. Road trips to museums and hostels in my hometown. Best friends, sisters, grlfriends, men. Like I already do now.
I am writing, I am happy right now. I was going to save this post for tomorrow, some new day with all the new this too's it shall bring, but why bother when it's so luxuriously right now...
Her call made me pause, there was lots of food in the fridge and I couldn't ignore my hunger when we got off the phone. I peeled shrimp and added Old Bay and a little little dash of sour cream to make it shrimp salady. Then I heated corn tortillas and got out arugula and limes and cilantro because everything's better as tacos of course. I am writing again now, not on Part 2 or Part 1 third edits, just writing to write to acknowledge the time the good music on and to say goodbye to the ohsowarmtoday golden yellow sun. I love the gold yellow of the spring, just before it turns summer orange. I love that I am getting browngolden skin and yellowgold hair like twine Rapunzel spun.
Last week right now I was walking through a rich part of DC with a belly full of Thai food and my best friend Katie by my side our sandled feet on the uneven cement sidewalk squares. It was chilly in the air but still we drove with the windows mostly down on our way to the hostel in Tacoma. We met a girl named Shemma from the UK, it is hard not to meet people in hostels when you decide that where you are that night--a boarding house for passerbys--is where you will plant for the moment and stay. Which is to say the next night at the hostel in my favorite neighborhood in Baltimore, Mt. Vernon, we didn't plant, just dropped our bags fitted our sheets and scooted back out the door to all the fun ways to explore the going-ons of my hometown city's streets. Shemma is young, like 22 or 23, and from the UK and instead of on a round-the-world trip tic had one in which you can go right up to eight times. Neat new concept I'd never heard. They were on their last stop, her and her man who she just got engaged to, this happened in the beginning of their trip on a stop somewhere in Asia I think. Now we are facebook friends.
The day after the hostel in Tacoma we went back downtown to meet Walsh and see the Gaughan exhibit. I put all my intensity in to it until I was exhausted from the concentration. Later we laid on a blanket on the green mall under the shade of new fresh green leaves. We talked inappropriately like women always eventually do. Making the day irreverent and lovely. Today I wrote four poems I am sure came from time with my grls.
Last night I was driving home from yoga it was warm out so warm the air was like hot breath breathing off the trees and some song came on Ocean 98 that I can't now remember and I thought all I really need in life is music, yoga and sun. I smiled a while and vibed whole and strong on the bliss of this, then funny ego twist thought: and poetry, too--poetry the ocean music yoga and sun. And friends. And sex...a man. I thought ohmylord like Marla would say...I laughed at myself....this too this too came to mind, what Dani Shapiro would say. Always the ego and all its unsatiated needs. I thought of Erika then, my published-by-Penguin writing partner sister spirit friend. I thought of Walsh and Katie, of Josh and then Mike in California because Sean my brother was home all weekend so it's natural to think also of him. Life is funny, ununderstandable, impossible to figure out and also so fleetingly crystal clear with certain truths. I could live forever on sun, poems, yoga. Music, fresh tacos, swimming and friends. Road trips to museums and hostels in my hometown. Best friends, sisters, grlfriends, men. Like I already do now.
I am writing, I am happy right now. I was going to save this post for tomorrow, some new day with all the new this too's it shall bring, but why bother when it's so luxuriously right now...
October 6, 2010
I first found my some-kind-of-God driving over the Bay Bridge
...now the music just plays and the water goes and goes and sometimes so does the sun,
& my smile smiles like I cant stop...
& my smile smiles like I cant stop...
June 23, 2010
Thunder, The County, Sean. Memphis. Rounded-out inside.
Wanna get breakfast? It's 6:25 am and one of the first things I say.
Well, not the first, I've already shared my upon waking deep thought for the morning about the big changes he's upon, and also greeted him a happy US-in-the-World-Cup Day.
Kelly you are a fucking dump truck he says and I say when I answer something like dude you have no idea, like you cant even comprehend the amount of food I ate on my vacation, or for that matter the canyon that must be in my gut it's got to be as big at least as one of those little ones in Colorado, you know like the ones next to a big mesa? I am laughing a little it is early but I am up inside, and the laugh is not the cry-ey laugh kind just a chuckle.
I dont get the irony of mesa meaning table til now.
Last night I think I was driving us both a little crazy. I'd been on his couch all day, and it was a big day, for him at least, and I was priming my self since 9 am to drive to Brooklyn and pick up my bridesmaid dress then make the final truck to the beach. Finally at like 8 at night or something I heard the thunder and went out to sit under the sky on his front step where I feel like I've sat a million times and had to take some time to make my case, which is to say just sit quiet a while with the Nature and me, which is to say the same thing. To sit quiet awhile, find the without, find the within.
The sky was blue but wild pungent yellow behind the clouds. It felt so Maryland and in all, it was good, satisfying to be home. It's funny when you leave a while you come back and see all the subtle quiet things you take for granted. Sitting in the thunder heat with that yellowgreen sky put me in mind of Mandy, who I've seen sit like that a million times. Just watching, feeling the ripe. I had the shift feeling of light air happen then, like some ether layer of me rustling about then settling back in to me again, which actually is recognition, and realized yet again how many little things quantify a place. I went in after a while and looked at my brother with must have been that blank look on my face which is how we do, me and him, without knowing it when we are trying to cover where we've been. What we dont ever get is blank for us means the same thing as transparent and the only one in the world who can read that layer of see-through on me is him. And maybe mom. He laughed it is the laugh that always made me used to feel embarrassed because I always confused it as laughing at me, but I am older now and get that it is just laughter because he knows. Do you want some ice cream I said and he laughed some more and then said Kel, why dont you at least drive to Brooklyn and get your dress? Get out and do something at least take a drive you dont have to drive all the way home. We are afterall suburb kids, taking drives is what he know to do. He doesn't say that part about suburb kids that is mine for right here. Yea yea that's good that's what I'll do I said But you'll have to go right now just get in the car and motor before it's closed he answered and so that's what I did.
I touched down at BWI the night before, texted him I'm here, still on the plane. His car was waiting outside the black and metal mechanics of the baggage claim, under the cement that feels post-apocalypse underground and smells stale and like gas and where you cant even see a single plane. I love it there though and am happy to see him and Jamie waving at me, then I get in, and Jamie apologized immediately for being distant which I didn't notice then went on to say she just got a call from the Vice President of her company in Texas, he needed to talk to her ASAP about an opportunity. I wanted pizza so Seanie immediately drove us to the closet mall, it was near 9pm, and him and me ate pizza from a woodfire oven while she sat in the car on the phone.
Memphis is a long way away, and it all happened so quick, and I can write about it on here becasue in an hour or so from now we'll meet his friends downtown to watch the US soccer game and he will tell them then, and by this afternoon I'm sure most of the family will have found out becasue dad will likely have talked to uncle Tim. They are leaving Thursday, wont even be at the family reunion this weekend. Yesterday I didn't feel a thing today I feel a little like my heart is being taken from me, but all the same I know without any question that for them this is the exact right thing. It all happened so quick, Jamie is in Manayunk CraigsListing their apartment and doing all she can in 48 hours to tie up with her current clients there. He and I sat on his couch most of the day yesterday tightening his resume and other contacts and cover letters and stuff, and watching soccer on tv.
When I got on to route a hundred to head towards Brooklyn Park I couldn't shake that huge rounded feeling of something about to happen, but being in the calm right before it is to come. I knew this feeling wasn't about my brother, that this is more about me and his news was precursor of what's to come. Memphis is his big thing and what they've been waiting for and what we've all been secretely holding our breath in hopes that it wouldn't come, which is selfish but true. None of us knew they'd get transferred that far. I support him a hundred percent though, like I said some things are just right and you know it, you can feel it the way the tide of it fits curved and rounded, and retreats when the energy of it finally comes to fruition, and feels like relief and peace in your soul.
I drove to Brooklyn Park next to the biggest Maryland clouds, full of thunder and white scary lightening smelling ripe as cloves but never dropping any rain. Just passed the beltway where you pick up the harbor tunnel I got of to go south on route 2, and curving round the roundabout I had the most natural sensation of being on my way to visit Gram. It took me a full few seconds to realize, no, no she's dead now, has been a full 13 years and her house in Brooklyn on Church Street sold that summer, 97, first time I went traveling right after in fact I'd gotten home. And there was instead of the sweet ache just a settled feeling of mmm-hmmm, of acknowledgement, of all things passing, and for way more than the first time I had the sense again of much my whole time on the Eastern Shore seemed like a dream. Not the surreal, make-believe way, but in the way of waking so that you cant remember a darn piece of what went on the night before behind your eyes. And how you know it was important, you can feel it, but it's over now so may as well go on and greet the day. And how if anyone or thing could go ahead and show you, hit repeat on the dream button so that you could watch your dreams with the waking thoughts of day, how you wouldn't believe it was in all true, anyway, because the regularly conscious part of you slept all the way through. It's how I felt coming home, like home back to Anne Arundel county, like it's not been a day or more since I've been away--forget those 12 years on the shore. It's how I felt, foreign, when I unlocked my car.
In the beginning of the journey that Liz Gilbert goes on in Eat, Pray, Love she spends a month or more, I guess actually like 4 months, eating her way across Italy. It's healing to her soul. That's how I've felt, where I've been, from the first night in Yachats at the Adobe with Gretchen when she ordered us, literally, 4 entire enormous plates of food. We laughed and ate and ate and laughed the rest of the month away. It's felt so good to just eat. Good, savory, sweet, ethnic, rich, fatty, delicious food. It feels good, too, to be home.
Well, not the first, I've already shared my upon waking deep thought for the morning about the big changes he's upon, and also greeted him a happy US-in-the-World-Cup Day.
Kelly you are a fucking dump truck he says and I say when I answer something like dude you have no idea, like you cant even comprehend the amount of food I ate on my vacation, or for that matter the canyon that must be in my gut it's got to be as big at least as one of those little ones in Colorado, you know like the ones next to a big mesa? I am laughing a little it is early but I am up inside, and the laugh is not the cry-ey laugh kind just a chuckle.
I dont get the irony of mesa meaning table til now.
Last night I think I was driving us both a little crazy. I'd been on his couch all day, and it was a big day, for him at least, and I was priming my self since 9 am to drive to Brooklyn and pick up my bridesmaid dress then make the final truck to the beach. Finally at like 8 at night or something I heard the thunder and went out to sit under the sky on his front step where I feel like I've sat a million times and had to take some time to make my case, which is to say just sit quiet a while with the Nature and me, which is to say the same thing. To sit quiet awhile, find the without, find the within.
The sky was blue but wild pungent yellow behind the clouds. It felt so Maryland and in all, it was good, satisfying to be home. It's funny when you leave a while you come back and see all the subtle quiet things you take for granted. Sitting in the thunder heat with that yellowgreen sky put me in mind of Mandy, who I've seen sit like that a million times. Just watching, feeling the ripe. I had the shift feeling of light air happen then, like some ether layer of me rustling about then settling back in to me again, which actually is recognition, and realized yet again how many little things quantify a place. I went in after a while and looked at my brother with must have been that blank look on my face which is how we do, me and him, without knowing it when we are trying to cover where we've been. What we dont ever get is blank for us means the same thing as transparent and the only one in the world who can read that layer of see-through on me is him. And maybe mom. He laughed it is the laugh that always made me used to feel embarrassed because I always confused it as laughing at me, but I am older now and get that it is just laughter because he knows. Do you want some ice cream I said and he laughed some more and then said Kel, why dont you at least drive to Brooklyn and get your dress? Get out and do something at least take a drive you dont have to drive all the way home. We are afterall suburb kids, taking drives is what he know to do. He doesn't say that part about suburb kids that is mine for right here. Yea yea that's good that's what I'll do I said But you'll have to go right now just get in the car and motor before it's closed he answered and so that's what I did.
I touched down at BWI the night before, texted him I'm here, still on the plane. His car was waiting outside the black and metal mechanics of the baggage claim, under the cement that feels post-apocalypse underground and smells stale and like gas and where you cant even see a single plane. I love it there though and am happy to see him and Jamie waving at me, then I get in, and Jamie apologized immediately for being distant which I didn't notice then went on to say she just got a call from the Vice President of her company in Texas, he needed to talk to her ASAP about an opportunity. I wanted pizza so Seanie immediately drove us to the closet mall, it was near 9pm, and him and me ate pizza from a woodfire oven while she sat in the car on the phone.
Memphis is a long way away, and it all happened so quick, and I can write about it on here becasue in an hour or so from now we'll meet his friends downtown to watch the US soccer game and he will tell them then, and by this afternoon I'm sure most of the family will have found out becasue dad will likely have talked to uncle Tim. They are leaving Thursday, wont even be at the family reunion this weekend. Yesterday I didn't feel a thing today I feel a little like my heart is being taken from me, but all the same I know without any question that for them this is the exact right thing. It all happened so quick, Jamie is in Manayunk CraigsListing their apartment and doing all she can in 48 hours to tie up with her current clients there. He and I sat on his couch most of the day yesterday tightening his resume and other contacts and cover letters and stuff, and watching soccer on tv.
When I got on to route a hundred to head towards Brooklyn Park I couldn't shake that huge rounded feeling of something about to happen, but being in the calm right before it is to come. I knew this feeling wasn't about my brother, that this is more about me and his news was precursor of what's to come. Memphis is his big thing and what they've been waiting for and what we've all been secretely holding our breath in hopes that it wouldn't come, which is selfish but true. None of us knew they'd get transferred that far. I support him a hundred percent though, like I said some things are just right and you know it, you can feel it the way the tide of it fits curved and rounded, and retreats when the energy of it finally comes to fruition, and feels like relief and peace in your soul.
I drove to Brooklyn Park next to the biggest Maryland clouds, full of thunder and white scary lightening smelling ripe as cloves but never dropping any rain. Just passed the beltway where you pick up the harbor tunnel I got of to go south on route 2, and curving round the roundabout I had the most natural sensation of being on my way to visit Gram. It took me a full few seconds to realize, no, no she's dead now, has been a full 13 years and her house in Brooklyn on Church Street sold that summer, 97, first time I went traveling right after in fact I'd gotten home. And there was instead of the sweet ache just a settled feeling of mmm-hmmm, of acknowledgement, of all things passing, and for way more than the first time I had the sense again of much my whole time on the Eastern Shore seemed like a dream. Not the surreal, make-believe way, but in the way of waking so that you cant remember a darn piece of what went on the night before behind your eyes. And how you know it was important, you can feel it, but it's over now so may as well go on and greet the day. And how if anyone or thing could go ahead and show you, hit repeat on the dream button so that you could watch your dreams with the waking thoughts of day, how you wouldn't believe it was in all true, anyway, because the regularly conscious part of you slept all the way through. It's how I felt coming home, like home back to Anne Arundel county, like it's not been a day or more since I've been away--forget those 12 years on the shore. It's how I felt, foreign, when I unlocked my car.
In the beginning of the journey that Liz Gilbert goes on in Eat, Pray, Love she spends a month or more, I guess actually like 4 months, eating her way across Italy. It's healing to her soul. That's how I've felt, where I've been, from the first night in Yachats at the Adobe with Gretchen when she ordered us, literally, 4 entire enormous plates of food. We laughed and ate and ate and laughed the rest of the month away. It's felt so good to just eat. Good, savory, sweet, ethnic, rich, fatty, delicious food. It feels good, too, to be home.
February 2, 2010
Beautiful Friday in Baltimore
For my birthday when I turned 16 my mom dropped off a carfull of me and my friends at some random pad on St. Pauls St in Bmore for a show featuring S.Q.U.I.D. They were formerly Mustard Seed Magic and truly, when I write that I still get a little magic tingle in me that reminds me of sandalwood and vintage stores and Eastern Ave. We got in trouble that night with mom and didn't open our mouths the rest of the drive home because we smelled like beer and weed, even though between the four or five of us there probably was only a six pack and a pinner or two that got finished. But o god that night, the punk rock Xerox's stapled all over the lightpoles, my purple doc martens, all that music that matched the city streets and I remember feeling so cool. But being tough about. It was Baltimore, anarchy dreams, riot grrrl zines, DIY. I mean c'mon, it's way not cool to talk about being cool.
This Friday I have a date with me. I am so stoked about it, Beautiful Friday. I used to do those back in college, my senior year, that first year I was getting clean. I lived upstairs from Amy in CHestertown and sometimes she wouldn't have heat, or electric, and her and her baby would come up and I would feed them on my then-vegetarian-diet of whole grain noodles apples and kale. And blue cheese cuz that's what Amy liked. And since that's what it was, me and Amy trying to stay clean and me and Amy helping each other with that, and also me trying to finish college, and work two jobs all at once, when I read the idea that year about dating me it made real good sense. So that's what I did, and I started calling it Beautiful Fridays and it was the day that was to me, for me, and only me. I guess because back then I didn't have have class on Friday and I remember that I didn't have to work at the coffee shop on Fridays, either. Just Pussers on Friday night, if they needed me/there was money to be made.
So everything superfreakincool that could possibly happen is happening this Friday and I am no longer too cool to talk about it or pretend like I dont care. I am so excited! Me and me, on a date doing way rad free stuff in the city which is my home. Making me not only on my way for a date with me, but with Baltimore, too:
The whole thing started with exhilarated cartwheels over learning about Puss Fust, an all girls exhibition at a gallery called Open Space. But I emailed them to get their hours and found out that they've already started to uninstall. Which would be, or actually still is, a serious bummer except for by the time I'd settled on Beautiful Friday this week I was so glittergoldenbowsin myhairexcited that I couldn't turn back, and so am equally stoked to go instead to the John Waters photo exhibit at C. Grimaldi's. If for some reason you are too un-kitschy or devoid of trashisness and therefor perhaps rather boring, and you dont know who John Waters is, please kindly go here. (Ehem, Sammy.) Then there is the tough choice between this screening at The Patterson, and this reading at Atomic Bookstore. Whaaaaaaa?
I can't even imagine what this beautiful date of mine will choose. What will she wear? I wonder if she'll like me?
I must say, I am looking wildly forward to finding out.
This Friday I have a date with me. I am so stoked about it, Beautiful Friday. I used to do those back in college, my senior year, that first year I was getting clean. I lived upstairs from Amy in CHestertown and sometimes she wouldn't have heat, or electric, and her and her baby would come up and I would feed them on my then-vegetarian-diet of whole grain noodles apples and kale. And blue cheese cuz that's what Amy liked. And since that's what it was, me and Amy trying to stay clean and me and Amy helping each other with that, and also me trying to finish college, and work two jobs all at once, when I read the idea that year about dating me it made real good sense. So that's what I did, and I started calling it Beautiful Fridays and it was the day that was to me, for me, and only me. I guess because back then I didn't have have class on Friday and I remember that I didn't have to work at the coffee shop on Fridays, either. Just Pussers on Friday night, if they needed me/there was money to be made.
So everything superfreakincool that could possibly happen is happening this Friday and I am no longer too cool to talk about it or pretend like I dont care. I am so excited! Me and me, on a date doing way rad free stuff in the city which is my home. Making me not only on my way for a date with me, but with Baltimore, too:
The whole thing started with exhilarated cartwheels over learning about Puss Fust, an all girls exhibition at a gallery called Open Space. But I emailed them to get their hours and found out that they've already started to uninstall. Which would be, or actually still is, a serious bummer except for by the time I'd settled on Beautiful Friday this week I was so glittergoldenbowsin myhairexcited that I couldn't turn back, and so am equally stoked to go instead to the John Waters photo exhibit at C. Grimaldi's. If for some reason you are too un-kitschy or devoid of trashisness and therefor perhaps rather boring, and you dont know who John Waters is, please kindly go here. (Ehem, Sammy.) Then there is the tough choice between this screening at The Patterson, and this reading at Atomic Bookstore. Whaaaaaaa?
I can't even imagine what this beautiful date of mine will choose. What will she wear? I wonder if she'll like me?
I must say, I am looking wildly forward to finding out.
September 29, 2009
Bones & Love
Every night when I come home the first thing I see is the river. Or, what I ought to say: every night when I come home, the first thing I see through my windshield is the expanse of black above my head and the crazy mat of stars through the trees in the driveway. And I get out of the car, and the first thing I feel is the river.
No matter what my day's been like, no matter what is otherwise on my mind or bogging up my head. I pull into my driveway, ease the Versa far back near to the old boat that hasn't been used in more than a couple seasons, park and have the door open before I have time to think. And then, on impulse, as a matter of muscle memory and also, of something deeper programmed in me, some part ancient and respondent to firesmoke and the hush of trees, I breathe. I take a deep breath and let it all out and what happens is from inside me I get a soft smile, and I go still. And then, I can feel the river. I can feel her moving, can feel her in that place in my belly and on the back of my neck--same place where you feel when, say, a storm's coming on.
And for that brief moment, all is well. I know peace.
I moved here, to the town of Choptank with it's 20 or so houses, on the Choptank River, last November. I rent a room in an old house two up from the river. This house has modern painted gray-taupe siding but still looks old because it is. It was originally built in the 1830's. At night you can feel the life in its walls, all that it has breathed and seen. In the morning, where I come to the front porch to write, you can see the river out the window to my left.
At the time of my decision to move here to Chop, I lived in a six-bedroom farmhouse on a 400-acre-farm that grew soybeans and feed corn. That's a lot of land, a lot of space, a lot of air to breathe. I basically lived there on a deal with the owners to tend their property and upkeep the old place, the owners were distant inlaws of the magnificent man I was living with and was in love with and enjoying life with since the fall that I got out of college, in 2002. Brandon was my best friend, he was who and how I processed one of those strange times of transition that makes us humans so sketchy and uncertain: time of what-next or in-between. I loved him with every last blood inside my heart, I loved him so it was how my bones moved. A sweet, adoring love that saw nothing other than him, nothing else outside of us. He was all I knew, and all I ever hoped to know.
That same year my dad came back in to my life in a hands-on way because of a sad and serious depression at mid-life. And my mom sold our house, the one that me and my brother and her had always known, the one in the county between Annapolis and B-more. And she moved back in with my dad, first time in 15 years, to the beach.
Last night I was out late in the county. We met Brian, my brother Sean's best friend since they were five, and his little brother Little Sean, and their folks and our folks for dinner at our old favorite spot for crabcakes, Hellas. Their mom, Ms. Louise, helped raise my brother and me. It was her birthday last night, first time all of us have been together seriously since I dont know when. When we were growing up ma would drop Sean and I off at their place 6 in the morning on her way to work in the city. Ms. Lou would get us ready for school, breakfast, uniforms, carpool. Me and the boys would scream and fight or laugh and play. Nintendo and VCR movies on tv for hours. We were lucky, blessed, charmed-life kids. BMX bikes and kickball in the deadend when we'd come home from school. Anymore when I am home, like last night, I am so, so grateful. I am so aware of how good it was, and wistful in the most tender of grateful ways. And I miss it so much.
I was born in Baltimore City. I remember the market at Cross Street when I was only old enough to stand level with people's knees. I remember what Old Bay smells like on the salty Harbour air. I remember imagining how close the big boats were to the sea. I remember what it feels like, to have a river of living move under you, and that river be no more visible than the concrete at your feet.
It is hard to put this in to words. The bones of me, the true substantial life-time blood. I can say only that when the time comes to know you again, when the time comes to reclaim the flesh of who you are, you know it. You know it in a way that you will fight and pray not to recognize. You know it in a way that feels awful, like fear and hate and pain. In the most secret, darkest places in your brain, in the stomach tight breath that draws you awake at night, in the weight that sits just above your neck, you know it. And when you know something as distinct as Time, there is simply nothing else to know.
Choptank, you healed my soul. I am the river of me again. It was a fucking hard and awful fight and I hated how many times I had to let go. But here I am, on the shore again. How can I ever thank you? How can I ever thank you, Life? How can I ever thank you enuff...?
~~~
The song that helped birth this post: Wharf Rat, The Grateful Dead. O, Jerry. I love you. I love your guitar. You touch the myth inside of me.
No matter what my day's been like, no matter what is otherwise on my mind or bogging up my head. I pull into my driveway, ease the Versa far back near to the old boat that hasn't been used in more than a couple seasons, park and have the door open before I have time to think. And then, on impulse, as a matter of muscle memory and also, of something deeper programmed in me, some part ancient and respondent to firesmoke and the hush of trees, I breathe. I take a deep breath and let it all out and what happens is from inside me I get a soft smile, and I go still. And then, I can feel the river. I can feel her moving, can feel her in that place in my belly and on the back of my neck--same place where you feel when, say, a storm's coming on.
And for that brief moment, all is well. I know peace.
I moved here, to the town of Choptank with it's 20 or so houses, on the Choptank River, last November. I rent a room in an old house two up from the river. This house has modern painted gray-taupe siding but still looks old because it is. It was originally built in the 1830's. At night you can feel the life in its walls, all that it has breathed and seen. In the morning, where I come to the front porch to write, you can see the river out the window to my left.
At the time of my decision to move here to Chop, I lived in a six-bedroom farmhouse on a 400-acre-farm that grew soybeans and feed corn. That's a lot of land, a lot of space, a lot of air to breathe. I basically lived there on a deal with the owners to tend their property and upkeep the old place, the owners were distant inlaws of the magnificent man I was living with and was in love with and enjoying life with since the fall that I got out of college, in 2002. Brandon was my best friend, he was who and how I processed one of those strange times of transition that makes us humans so sketchy and uncertain: time of what-next or in-between. I loved him with every last blood inside my heart, I loved him so it was how my bones moved. A sweet, adoring love that saw nothing other than him, nothing else outside of us. He was all I knew, and all I ever hoped to know.
That same year my dad came back in to my life in a hands-on way because of a sad and serious depression at mid-life. And my mom sold our house, the one that me and my brother and her had always known, the one in the county between Annapolis and B-more. And she moved back in with my dad, first time in 15 years, to the beach.
Last night I was out late in the county. We met Brian, my brother Sean's best friend since they were five, and his little brother Little Sean, and their folks and our folks for dinner at our old favorite spot for crabcakes, Hellas. Their mom, Ms. Louise, helped raise my brother and me. It was her birthday last night, first time all of us have been together seriously since I dont know when. When we were growing up ma would drop Sean and I off at their place 6 in the morning on her way to work in the city. Ms. Lou would get us ready for school, breakfast, uniforms, carpool. Me and the boys would scream and fight or laugh and play. Nintendo and VCR movies on tv for hours. We were lucky, blessed, charmed-life kids. BMX bikes and kickball in the deadend when we'd come home from school. Anymore when I am home, like last night, I am so, so grateful. I am so aware of how good it was, and wistful in the most tender of grateful ways. And I miss it so much.
I was born in Baltimore City. I remember the market at Cross Street when I was only old enough to stand level with people's knees. I remember what Old Bay smells like on the salty Harbour air. I remember imagining how close the big boats were to the sea. I remember what it feels like, to have a river of living move under you, and that river be no more visible than the concrete at your feet.
It is hard to put this in to words. The bones of me, the true substantial life-time blood. I can say only that when the time comes to know you again, when the time comes to reclaim the flesh of who you are, you know it. You know it in a way that you will fight and pray not to recognize. You know it in a way that feels awful, like fear and hate and pain. In the most secret, darkest places in your brain, in the stomach tight breath that draws you awake at night, in the weight that sits just above your neck, you know it. And when you know something as distinct as Time, there is simply nothing else to know.
Choptank, you healed my soul. I am the river of me again. It was a fucking hard and awful fight and I hated how many times I had to let go. But here I am, on the shore again. How can I ever thank you? How can I ever thank you, Life? How can I ever thank you enuff...?
~~~
The song that helped birth this post: Wharf Rat, The Grateful Dead. O, Jerry. I love you. I love your guitar. You touch the myth inside of me.
July 31, 2009
like little bells...
i laughed out loud at me and then came my cousin's laughter a sound that since we were kids reminds me of elflight and glistens my heart like little bells. i dont have words to describe that feeling, why i even said what i said, we were walking around Canton Square the light of the night was orange from the clock glow and the neon signed resteraunt glare and all the mist from the crazy summer thunderstorm made for a haze and proved first harvest in-between the worlds magic literally was on the air. we were supposed to go see the O's in the allyoucaneat section we were stoked but then it was so wet and hot and eery out so no. we drove around the city in the rain and laughed and ate then got to walking and talking and laughing some more and it'd been a long, long time since we'd hung cuzin Ry and i and it was gold, and good, and so pure...10 years is what I said followed by some self-deprecating remark and as always it was the self-judging that made us laugh so hard but it's not true i realized later, it's not 10 but 11 years since i've been on the shore. which is the same thing that i catch myself doing, saying i'm 31 when really i'm 32. 32!!! and how that feels not only to miss a year and then to puzzle for a sec and be like o yeah wait, that's not true, but to be an age that inside your head you have an idea about while at once living the fact that that idea isn't really exactly true. and it makes me think of martha, beautiful glamourous melancholy martha with the stories and the wistfulness that would make my heart ache when we would sit together back of the bead store nye beach, oregon, and bead and thread and talk and love. and the mirror she would use to look at the lipstick she wore and how much she still, at 60, loved pink floyd. and it made me also think
of being 19 and going to the community college my baggy shorts and hotgrl shirt and talking to the lady and saying a social worker, that's what i'm going to be. and realizing suddenly, again and again, suddenly each time, that that used to be my dream. and that that is it, that is what i now am....and how good, and hard, that's been....
and thank god for back porch of ocean pines and talking this morning with uncle tim and aunt mary the porch as always still enough, like a dream. and telling them for the first time of all those years ago when i a first year teacher with the beauracrats and how i got so screwed. and how that hurt but it was part of the job and so i learned...and now this year and how much i've learned from kim and also from my dad, but hearing the importance of what uncle tim said managers do it the right way while leaders do what's right. and it's a hard thing to learn, how to be, to really be, and at the end of the day to be at peace with yourself anyhow cuz you are you no matter what and that's what counts and too, where can you grow and where do you just rest, and back off, and accept and learn to love? and this is life yes and wow, how far i've come. and at all i've done and where i've been....and who i am.
and the city she is beckoning. four straight weeks i've run to her to feel the street at one with my flow and she is yearning and swift and i am yearning to go. and godalmighty first harvest is coming first harvest is almost here, it is the greatest, truest, fullest swell of peace i've felt all year... it started when i woke up wednesday sweetness in me a smile on my face cozy and content in bed just me....and the fabulous rustle non-stop in the trees. the whole earth alive with the buzz just like when taurus moon is above i recognized that movement come on deep inside of me: first harvest is here i thought, first harvest or lunar llamas is already here. and sure enough the moon had moved from waning to half-on/half-off and so with that i knew it was true and exalted in what one cant pretend but can only just kow and then could feel the tugging, the great turning of the wheel of the year. of course there was an ear of corn out front in the street when i went outside to take the recycling, go figure. and that night later, a black cat waited, then crossed directly in front of ryan and me. when i told him wasn't it great he got to expereince my little pagan walking dreams with me he said oh yea just great cuz then pannomined a gun to his head then quik with his other hand a splatter of explosion coming out his ear then we laughed again the tinkling bell kind cuz he's a poet and got the inner song like me and moves to the same ol tide....
and that's just it, all that ends begins again and the beginnings are just endings, in disguise.
so it goes, same ol song, silence and crashing, chaos and laughing, all life, sweetness and nothing, all life long....blessed, precious precious song
June 7, 2009
Ocean Pines
In 1975 my grandparents pop and grammy, my folks Karen and Don, and my godparents Uncle Tim and Aunt Mary bought a three bedroom house some five miles outside Ocean City, Maryland. The house was one of three on the street, the street one of several hundred just like it. It was the barely-there community of Ocean Pines: mostly saltwater canals fluxing in and out from Assawoman Bay, tall tall pines quiet and peaceful, second-growth softwoods and saltgrass and every so often the dotting of a new wood-sided home. Ocean City didn't go beyond 60th street then, it was still natural dunes even after 30th. My grandparents were retired, my godparents teachers who were off in the summer, my dad well on his way to the material success implicit of the American Dream. Today there are no empty lots on our shaded street, the bike trails through the woods and the secret bayfront beaches all us kids used to know are gone. The "Dream" quite literally has come home.
My dad is the oldest of seven brothers and sisters, a Catholic working-class family from South Baltimore. He was 28 and just married to my mom when my retired grandad, a Colonel in the army, a fierce liberal and a carpenter by trade, discovered the wooded community that boasted a new golfcourse where he and his two oldest sons could play. Then men in dad's family define themselves in relation to sports. Either played, coached or fans of, this is their common language, a bond that themes them together throughout life and subsequent communion at family gatherings that have occurred since long before my childhood days of listening to the weighted air between the intermittent static of the O's game on the transistor radio on the backporch at Ocean Pines. We didn't have a television here in the summer when I was a kid, and what I remember is the importance, the feeling of anticipation, hoping for the success of the home team.
I was the first grandkid to come along and I came to be at the end of a generation unconsciously dictated to be the change: to bridge a gap between what was and what will be. Fate has a funny way of working out evolution, the consciousness of a people shaped at once by the stakes they claim as well as by the circumstances that initially created the need to claim them. I come from the memory of immigrants, thus in my genes exists the struggle and the ethics of what it means to need to survive: The father of dad's dad an Irish-born immigrant who worked the coal mines in Western Pennsylvania; the mother of dad's mom a WASP from Massachusettes who refused to speak to her daughter when she decided to marry the pigshit Irish-Catholic soldier that she met in France during the war. We hold tight to these stories, my family and I, tight to this history and how it makes us brave.
In 1996 in June I was 19-years-old. I lived in a single-room apartment on 2cnd street and St. Louis in Ocean City with a guy named Kareem. All my boys, the homies from Ocean Pines, lived there, too. We called it the Drifthood. It's since been torn down. My room had a set of bunkbeds, a mirror, dresser and a sink. It was dingy and dark and always freezing: Kareem liked it kept at 55 degrees so there was a bolt of ice that hung perpetually off the AC-unit from the only window in the room. It smelled frozen, of mildew and dust. We had a communal bathroom at the end of the hall that no one ever used because the the tub was filled with piss and the discarded ruins of cigars, or what we called blunts. That's the summer that I first knew I was addicted to drugs, or that something was going on that I didn't have words for, just a gutfull of dread: when I took the first hit of anything I lost control...I didn't know where even the first puff of a joint or pull on a blunt would lead me, good or bad. Just about all our apartments were run through with the guys from Snow Hill who brought with them what in my eyes were mounds of cocaine. They were notoriously bad mutherfuckers, and cool and tough as I tried to be it scared me. Kevin, my boyfriend the year before and a long time late night flirtatious summer love, had one of the good apartments in the Hood: his had two bedrooms and a kitchen and bathroom on the ground level and it opened up to a courtyard with cement and dead grass and a brick grill we filled with bottles ahses and cigarette butts. He was dating a new girl now also named Kelly who later would get popped for running prostitution out of the Hooters restaurant uptown. At night though downtown I worked at a pizzashop on the boards near the skateshop where Kevin and his boys all worked and partied and hung, he would occasionally when drunk before getting dusted or smacked out come lingering around and tell me of his eternal love... We had a number of under the moon beside the sea kisses that summer and they are the last memories of him tender and sweet...The table in Kev's apartment was covered with marker tags and slick with the grease of old and dirty and one day I went in to his pad to pee and there was a syringe and long piece of rubber on top. And this dude Randy a real soulfull Rasta dude who always put me at ease was sitting there and I remember looking at him and thinking I can not keep faking like I am too cool to care.
I finally got kicked out of there for not paying the rent. I ran back to Ocean Pines, to Tim and Mary and my very sick Gram and my cousins and cuddles on the couch in front of whatever movie was playing in the VCR. I remember afternoons stepping in to the Pines house terrified, sure the life I'd left behind in town had followed me, only to find the house quiet: Gram on the back porch in the middle of a nap that must've smelled to her like honeysuckle and old wood; Uncle Tim smiling quiet over his glasses in his hands a good book. The cool calm, the consistency. What would I have done if it weren't for Ocean Pines?
About 20 or so years ago they put an addition on the house here: two new rooms; one for my brother Sean and I and one for Tim and Mary's kids yet to come. And they lengthened the backporch. Every summer, right around the Solstice, my family, all 7 of my aunts and uncles and all those cousins, come to the Pines for a reunion. We kick it off with a crab feast on the back porch. The back porch that is decorated with sports memorabilia and long enough to sit all 35 of us comfortably. On Sunday we go to the park, where dad's cousins, the sons and daughters of the brothers and sisters of that Pigshit Irish Catholic boy from the coalmines of PA, all bring their sons and daughters and their sons and daughters, too.
I think about this driving up Philadelphia Street yesterday, the Junebug beachweekers everywhere music and energy and little bikinis, tattoos and muscle shirts and drunk kids screaming. All this delicious energy, I was so happy to be home. People hate it here, dirty downtown OC. It's so loud and upfront: life unhidden, humanity in your face. I reclaimed my room here this past spring: the stuff from my move off the farm that didn't fit in to Chop wound up in the attic or on the walls here at the Pines. My mom lives here now, my grandparents have been gone over ten years now, my dad funnily enough lives with Tim and Mary in their house in the county outta Bmore and they all make it down on the weekends. This, Ocean Pines, is what is left of a place I can still go to and call home. My cousins Erin and Tim, Tim and Mary's kids, live here with my mom and bartend at the big local restaurant. My dad's youngest sister Sue, also a teacher, lives a street over from us and her son Collin is a lifeguard at the local pool.
All those years of loudcalling wild fun in OC. All those years of mess and destruction. So much peace, so much longing. Hours and hours of sea. It's funny, home. Tom Waits says if you kill your demons your angels go, too. Is it supersappy then to say that getting to know your demons might be the best way to invite your angels to just stay, stay stay....?
My dad is the oldest of seven brothers and sisters, a Catholic working-class family from South Baltimore. He was 28 and just married to my mom when my retired grandad, a Colonel in the army, a fierce liberal and a carpenter by trade, discovered the wooded community that boasted a new golfcourse where he and his two oldest sons could play. Then men in dad's family define themselves in relation to sports. Either played, coached or fans of, this is their common language, a bond that themes them together throughout life and subsequent communion at family gatherings that have occurred since long before my childhood days of listening to the weighted air between the intermittent static of the O's game on the transistor radio on the backporch at Ocean Pines. We didn't have a television here in the summer when I was a kid, and what I remember is the importance, the feeling of anticipation, hoping for the success of the home team.
I was the first grandkid to come along and I came to be at the end of a generation unconsciously dictated to be the change: to bridge a gap between what was and what will be. Fate has a funny way of working out evolution, the consciousness of a people shaped at once by the stakes they claim as well as by the circumstances that initially created the need to claim them. I come from the memory of immigrants, thus in my genes exists the struggle and the ethics of what it means to need to survive: The father of dad's dad an Irish-born immigrant who worked the coal mines in Western Pennsylvania; the mother of dad's mom a WASP from Massachusettes who refused to speak to her daughter when she decided to marry the pigshit Irish-Catholic soldier that she met in France during the war. We hold tight to these stories, my family and I, tight to this history and how it makes us brave.
In 1996 in June I was 19-years-old. I lived in a single-room apartment on 2cnd street and St. Louis in Ocean City with a guy named Kareem. All my boys, the homies from Ocean Pines, lived there, too. We called it the Drifthood. It's since been torn down. My room had a set of bunkbeds, a mirror, dresser and a sink. It was dingy and dark and always freezing: Kareem liked it kept at 55 degrees so there was a bolt of ice that hung perpetually off the AC-unit from the only window in the room. It smelled frozen, of mildew and dust. We had a communal bathroom at the end of the hall that no one ever used because the the tub was filled with piss and the discarded ruins of cigars, or what we called blunts. That's the summer that I first knew I was addicted to drugs, or that something was going on that I didn't have words for, just a gutfull of dread: when I took the first hit of anything I lost control...I didn't know where even the first puff of a joint or pull on a blunt would lead me, good or bad. Just about all our apartments were run through with the guys from Snow Hill who brought with them what in my eyes were mounds of cocaine. They were notoriously bad mutherfuckers, and cool and tough as I tried to be it scared me. Kevin, my boyfriend the year before and a long time late night flirtatious summer love, had one of the good apartments in the Hood: his had two bedrooms and a kitchen and bathroom on the ground level and it opened up to a courtyard with cement and dead grass and a brick grill we filled with bottles ahses and cigarette butts. He was dating a new girl now also named Kelly who later would get popped for running prostitution out of the Hooters restaurant uptown. At night though downtown I worked at a pizzashop on the boards near the skateshop where Kevin and his boys all worked and partied and hung, he would occasionally when drunk before getting dusted or smacked out come lingering around and tell me of his eternal love... We had a number of under the moon beside the sea kisses that summer and they are the last memories of him tender and sweet...The table in Kev's apartment was covered with marker tags and slick with the grease of old and dirty and one day I went in to his pad to pee and there was a syringe and long piece of rubber on top. And this dude Randy a real soulfull Rasta dude who always put me at ease was sitting there and I remember looking at him and thinking I can not keep faking like I am too cool to care.
I finally got kicked out of there for not paying the rent. I ran back to Ocean Pines, to Tim and Mary and my very sick Gram and my cousins and cuddles on the couch in front of whatever movie was playing in the VCR. I remember afternoons stepping in to the Pines house terrified, sure the life I'd left behind in town had followed me, only to find the house quiet: Gram on the back porch in the middle of a nap that must've smelled to her like honeysuckle and old wood; Uncle Tim smiling quiet over his glasses in his hands a good book. The cool calm, the consistency. What would I have done if it weren't for Ocean Pines?
About 20 or so years ago they put an addition on the house here: two new rooms; one for my brother Sean and I and one for Tim and Mary's kids yet to come. And they lengthened the backporch. Every summer, right around the Solstice, my family, all 7 of my aunts and uncles and all those cousins, come to the Pines for a reunion. We kick it off with a crab feast on the back porch. The back porch that is decorated with sports memorabilia and long enough to sit all 35 of us comfortably. On Sunday we go to the park, where dad's cousins, the sons and daughters of the brothers and sisters of that Pigshit Irish Catholic boy from the coalmines of PA, all bring their sons and daughters and their sons and daughters, too.
I think about this driving up Philadelphia Street yesterday, the Junebug beachweekers everywhere music and energy and little bikinis, tattoos and muscle shirts and drunk kids screaming. All this delicious energy, I was so happy to be home. People hate it here, dirty downtown OC. It's so loud and upfront: life unhidden, humanity in your face. I reclaimed my room here this past spring: the stuff from my move off the farm that didn't fit in to Chop wound up in the attic or on the walls here at the Pines. My mom lives here now, my grandparents have been gone over ten years now, my dad funnily enough lives with Tim and Mary in their house in the county outta Bmore and they all make it down on the weekends. This, Ocean Pines, is what is left of a place I can still go to and call home. My cousins Erin and Tim, Tim and Mary's kids, live here with my mom and bartend at the big local restaurant. My dad's youngest sister Sue, also a teacher, lives a street over from us and her son Collin is a lifeguard at the local pool.
All those years of loudcalling wild fun in OC. All those years of mess and destruction. So much peace, so much longing. Hours and hours of sea. It's funny, home. Tom Waits says if you kill your demons your angels go, too. Is it supersappy then to say that getting to know your demons might be the best way to invite your angels to just stay, stay stay....?
October 24, 2008
Legends
I'm so lucky cuz for some reason Chestertown has this totally epic cult-like epicenter for crazy talented-ass musicians. I dont know why, or what it is that draws us all in our antic-questing to encounter and run in to each other out here in the middle of colonial drudgery under-your-thumb-imprinted-capitalistic-ruin perfect pinpoint micro image of the macro which is Chestertown out amid the middle of the farmfields, maybe it is as Tai-Chi way-out Wayne says there must be an aquafir or something...
But anyhow all the musicians at right are ones who wnadered past here, Kent County, good ol Eastern Shore. Some have stayed on if not for good at least for now and Marc Dykeman from Plans Plans is one of those cats. Turns out we used to not know each other but know those or know of those who knew each other back in my purple booted punk-rock riot grrrl days of dark firehalls garage bands and flannel shirts, outside Balitmore, USA.
He's kept that loud thing up. I sweat him for it. A hella lot. Also, his wife is a fairy princess and I think she's so rad and they throw the best parties, too.
Go check out his rock band Plans Plans tonite, in Baldamore, 1700 N Charles the Metro Gallery. It'll be worth it I know.
ps i just figured out how to copy soemthing off YouTube I stole that video above off of PlansPlans, I'm so proud of me!
August 29, 2008
10,000 Ways
Smile...
There must be 10,000 ways to kneel and kiss the earth...
by Mowlana Jalaluddin Rumi, 13th century mystic and poet who inspired the All Faiths Beautiful exhibit, in its final week at the American Visionary Art Museum, Bmore.
Go there! (but dont get caught snapping photos cuz the guard'll yell at you...)
August 5, 2008
My tribe, my art, my madness, my home
They say write your madness. Or specifically, your obsessions. Cuz that's what makes you a liver of this life, a qualified human being with your own unique something to say. It's true. Natalie Goldberg, in Writing Down the Bones (read this book) tells us it's okay about our obsessions. Actually she goes as far as to say make a list of them, because when you get down to writing and having to be there, alone with yourself on the page, one of two things is going to happen. You'll either tunnel in and extol on and on all about those couple of things that whirl away most of your brain activity from day to day and at the very least be self-informed when you're done, or else your going to try to avoid them, and in doing so, either not write at all or else end up ONLY, with sort of neurotic blinders on, writing about the one thing that in every other waking moment of your life you spend so much time trying not to look at.
I am mad about my family--my tribe and friends and the people I seem to have come here with. Their karmic patterning and how they are reflected in me and we are all rooted up in each other. Knowing this, really getting in to the stink and the light of it, helps me better decode who we each are trying to be. I'm mad about my art, the self-expression of my madness, and of anything that prompts that or helps me digest it or want to pump it out of me. I am mad about my madness: my spiritual growth or anyhow the experiences of this here soul. Sometimes I am mad about people, certain people, but I chunk them in with the tribe thing. I am mad, I get mad, about this idea of one single word, about the digressions and assertions and the alertness and sensitivity and the conflicts of mine and everyone else's ideas about this one word God. I am mad about Home, and place. And Youth. Music. Soul. Nature. But these all come back to the same couple things, in no particular order--my tribe, my art, my madness, my home.
I want to go back and write about a couple of momentous experiences from this summer but I am also not sure where this will take me, and so it may take a couple days/a couple posts. Firstly, Artscape. The nation's biggest free public art festival--on the streets of Baldamore every year in July. Mom claims we went there to the festival alot as kids, up to the top of MLK in the heart of the city a block away from the hospital where she worked and sometimes got to go sit in the nurse's lounge and play. I do have a mass of memories from childhood labeled city. The physical fragments I recall are of half-way up stuff and commotion: from the knees-up of people in Lexington Market or the other one on Cross Street, the door-up of tall tall buildings in the commerce section where dad worked, the tires-up of fast moving cars on the grey corners and the light coming down the eyelevel alleys from the way-up sky. And the way the bay at the Harbour made you aware of all that sky. The towering sense of life all about you in little splotches of movie-slide detail: how the city brings all that life in a magnified way right on top of you as a kid and you can feel it pulsing there, wizzing on top of you and moving all around you and passing you ever so quickly by and how all that power, all those dizzy half-up visual moments are compounded in to the couple of memories the soft grey flesh of your brain was willing to stop and say hey, I'll take this one down. Mostly my memories are visceral: the cool feeling of the water that spritzed me and my three-year-old boyfriend Kurt when we walked under the misters at the Harbour after the Science Center or the Constellation or the Aquarium and my socks and my shoes got wet. The heat on my ankles that rose up off the street tar. The sweet smell at the Greek festivals that I will forever associate with sticky fingers and bahklava. Being a kid, being so close to real life there on the ground. And the music, the music brushing my ears and the magical feeling of grass in the middle of all that concrete, the music literally moving by my head on the air, through my hair and me with the grass and the late twilight heat of July and mom's artist friend Ellie: being a kid and the touching throb of life that is art and how as kids all that art which is life is still so natural a rhythm to us. Tired after a long day in the sun with all the half-up views at the festival that made mom's eyes twinkle in wonder and her breath go breezy: Artscape.
Sean my brother said it ain't Artscape if it ain't a hundred plus fucking degrees. Yep, that's to be an adult at Artscape. We drove up from Chestertown and got there on Sunday, the last day of the festival, around 11 in the morning. We were laughing and rolling our eyes with tender family humor and had made decisions to go with the day because my mom and her family, her sister and brother-in-law and three of their kids were all coming up from the beach, too, and my mom's family likes to claim to plan things but really it's an excuse for them all to complain a little and at once laugh at each other I mean really laugh until tears come and then in private each one say something mildly injured but also always very funny. And the plans never ever go according to schedule and mostly just get lost or forgot and that is mom's family, and why I love them, how human they are, how imperfectly annoying but able to laugh so frolickingly hard at each other cuz at least they sort of partly see the imperfections and the laughter reminds us we all have that in common. But before I remembered that I just got alot of phone calls from mom and Sean, who was going to the festival to meet us with his new girl from his home in Columbia, about trying to plan and to meet and if there is one thing I cant stand it's going to a wide open place of Life and trying to manage or create the experience. So Bran and I did what we do best. We agreed to quiet. We started the day in the front lawn of our farm, corn rows all growing high above the street and us in the sun Thanking the Day for the Harmony it was meant to bring. With our arms up wide above our heads our hearts open pointed at the sky. Then we got in the car, drove an hour and fifteen minutes cuz I only know how to drive fast, to Lombard Street found free parking and had the best day we could have never planned...
The Wailers were scheduled to headline as the final wrap-up act and that was at 6. First we walked Mt. Royal on the right side and I relished in every single vendor stand that I came across. Right away I saw something that I wanted to buy. This guy doing little sculptures made from rail ties. The were small like the size of a fat grey Barbie doll and on a little steel stand. And they were so alive--enchanted! I loved them. They had little placards that said things like "The Morning After" with a railroad tie-made man perched over a railroad tie-made toilet. Or "Chiropractor" with a railroad tie patient getting his leg yanked above his head by a railroad tie doctor. They were so gloriously irreverent it was like they were smiling wryly at you and winking their non-existent railroad tie eyes. I wanted the waitress one. Immediately, art came alive and life spoke to me: the sacred mundane, ahhhhhhhh.
By the time we got to the top of Mt. Royal where the local music stage was we were hungry and wanted a snack. Best part of Artscape besides the free music and the street performers and MICA being open and the Symphony Opera House being open and Lyric being open for free shows all day and the many many vendors and the children's theater's and the hands-on displays is all of the all of the all of the very good food. This year they had a green/organic food court too but we never even made it there. Instead we split a big serving of chicken curry sitting on the curb listening to a funk/punk fusion local band. And when we were done we got up to walk down the other side of Mt. Royal and see those vendors when what do you know there was mom, Aunt Lori and cousin Mason and he was jamming with this short wiry dreadlocked black guy like they knew each other forever calling each other things like chief and smiling and sweating. We chilled with the fam awhile. Then here comes Sean and his girl, and of course we all found each other by happenstance there in the middle of the festival come together under the hot sun.
This is a card from a pack that the non-profit Art with a Heart gave to me after buying a craft from them. The image was done by a woman who lives in a shelter for homeless women and their children. Art with a Heart basically does programming throughout the city, empowering folks by giving them tools and permission for self-expression through all kinds of different art forms. Half the profits of what they sold at Artscape that day went to the artist, the other half back to the organization to keep it going. HOW EXACTLY IT IS THAT? A real live art co-op functioning in the midst of some of the most hopeless accounts that life can deal. I bought a decoupaged mirror from a fat-faced boy who shyly showed me his work and beamed when my heart jumped because the colors he used for his mirror are the vital colors of me in my joy essence. I bought it spot on out of sheer joy essence though whether it came from his beam or my love of the colors I am not sure. Support these people and this group.
The other thing I bought was a print by James Mayfield, out of New York, called Woman Grounded In Thought. His site is under construction right now, but when it is up if there is a link to this piece check it out. I love how this gals whole body has been shaped by the forces trying to move her, and how stalwart and solid she is in her conviction to stay right there. How you can tell that whatever reason she is standing there, veiled, being pushed by the wind but staying so still against it all the while, is deep enough a part of her that her very being will be shaped by it ever after, like water wearing on stone. That is me. Has been. Busy, stuck and grounded going nowhere. It made me melt a little inside and get a teenybit wet-eyed. Even though the very polite James' buddy grabbed my brother aside and pointed out that the reason he liked the print was cuz of the woman's "poppin booty".
Other than that my big moment of the day was seeing the Full Circle Dance Collective at the Lyric. They performed a shortened version of a piece called the Sacred Body. Exploring the various experiences of religious sublimity and such themes. I love to dance, to let my body go, and this was the first time that watching dance actually made me feel the same exact ecstasy as when it's me doing the moving. I was sitting there in the dark, during the first act called "Supplication", a very Christian theme which I at once struggle with and am enraptured by, and suddenly I was crying. Like sob stifled in my throat so no one could hear me crying. The Sacred Body was intensely religious for me, of the oneness in-bliss, truest kind.
All in all it was an amazingly flowing day. And ohtheirony, it brought me home to me, grounded in thought as I'd been, insistent this year on going my own way. Remembering the bit of good there is in every single side of how one looks at a thing.....
**
First Harvest just past. The birds outside our windows are crazy busy, making nests and gathering food and the noises they make sound like someone digging frantically through a box trying to find some lost piece of something in order to take with him back home before anybody sees it's gone. They flit around a lot. The sun is going further away in the sky. Things are turning. The birds know.
I am going to the beach today. Got a ocean of floating to do.
I am mad about my family--my tribe and friends and the people I seem to have come here with. Their karmic patterning and how they are reflected in me and we are all rooted up in each other. Knowing this, really getting in to the stink and the light of it, helps me better decode who we each are trying to be. I'm mad about my art, the self-expression of my madness, and of anything that prompts that or helps me digest it or want to pump it out of me. I am mad about my madness: my spiritual growth or anyhow the experiences of this here soul. Sometimes I am mad about people, certain people, but I chunk them in with the tribe thing. I am mad, I get mad, about this idea of one single word, about the digressions and assertions and the alertness and sensitivity and the conflicts of mine and everyone else's ideas about this one word God. I am mad about Home, and place. And Youth. Music. Soul. Nature. But these all come back to the same couple things, in no particular order--my tribe, my art, my madness, my home.
I want to go back and write about a couple of momentous experiences from this summer but I am also not sure where this will take me, and so it may take a couple days/a couple posts. Firstly, Artscape. The nation's biggest free public art festival--on the streets of Baldamore every year in July. Mom claims we went there to the festival alot as kids, up to the top of MLK in the heart of the city a block away from the hospital where she worked and sometimes got to go sit in the nurse's lounge and play. I do have a mass of memories from childhood labeled city. The physical fragments I recall are of half-way up stuff and commotion: from the knees-up of people in Lexington Market or the other one on Cross Street, the door-up of tall tall buildings in the commerce section where dad worked, the tires-up of fast moving cars on the grey corners and the light coming down the eyelevel alleys from the way-up sky. And the way the bay at the Harbour made you aware of all that sky. The towering sense of life all about you in little splotches of movie-slide detail: how the city brings all that life in a magnified way right on top of you as a kid and you can feel it pulsing there, wizzing on top of you and moving all around you and passing you ever so quickly by and how all that power, all those dizzy half-up visual moments are compounded in to the couple of memories the soft grey flesh of your brain was willing to stop and say hey, I'll take this one down. Mostly my memories are visceral: the cool feeling of the water that spritzed me and my three-year-old boyfriend Kurt when we walked under the misters at the Harbour after the Science Center or the Constellation or the Aquarium and my socks and my shoes got wet. The heat on my ankles that rose up off the street tar. The sweet smell at the Greek festivals that I will forever associate with sticky fingers and bahklava. Being a kid, being so close to real life there on the ground. And the music, the music brushing my ears and the magical feeling of grass in the middle of all that concrete, the music literally moving by my head on the air, through my hair and me with the grass and the late twilight heat of July and mom's artist friend Ellie: being a kid and the touching throb of life that is art and how as kids all that art which is life is still so natural a rhythm to us. Tired after a long day in the sun with all the half-up views at the festival that made mom's eyes twinkle in wonder and her breath go breezy: Artscape.
Sean my brother said it ain't Artscape if it ain't a hundred plus fucking degrees. Yep, that's to be an adult at Artscape. We drove up from Chestertown and got there on Sunday, the last day of the festival, around 11 in the morning. We were laughing and rolling our eyes with tender family humor and had made decisions to go with the day because my mom and her family, her sister and brother-in-law and three of their kids were all coming up from the beach, too, and my mom's family likes to claim to plan things but really it's an excuse for them all to complain a little and at once laugh at each other I mean really laugh until tears come and then in private each one say something mildly injured but also always very funny. And the plans never ever go according to schedule and mostly just get lost or forgot and that is mom's family, and why I love them, how human they are, how imperfectly annoying but able to laugh so frolickingly hard at each other cuz at least they sort of partly see the imperfections and the laughter reminds us we all have that in common. But before I remembered that I just got alot of phone calls from mom and Sean, who was going to the festival to meet us with his new girl from his home in Columbia, about trying to plan and to meet and if there is one thing I cant stand it's going to a wide open place of Life and trying to manage or create the experience. So Bran and I did what we do best. We agreed to quiet. We started the day in the front lawn of our farm, corn rows all growing high above the street and us in the sun Thanking the Day for the Harmony it was meant to bring. With our arms up wide above our heads our hearts open pointed at the sky. Then we got in the car, drove an hour and fifteen minutes cuz I only know how to drive fast, to Lombard Street found free parking and had the best day we could have never planned...
The Wailers were scheduled to headline as the final wrap-up act and that was at 6. First we walked Mt. Royal on the right side and I relished in every single vendor stand that I came across. Right away I saw something that I wanted to buy. This guy doing little sculptures made from rail ties. The were small like the size of a fat grey Barbie doll and on a little steel stand. And they were so alive--enchanted! I loved them. They had little placards that said things like "The Morning After" with a railroad tie-made man perched over a railroad tie-made toilet. Or "Chiropractor" with a railroad tie patient getting his leg yanked above his head by a railroad tie doctor. They were so gloriously irreverent it was like they were smiling wryly at you and winking their non-existent railroad tie eyes. I wanted the waitress one. Immediately, art came alive and life spoke to me: the sacred mundane, ahhhhhhhh.
By the time we got to the top of Mt. Royal where the local music stage was we were hungry and wanted a snack. Best part of Artscape besides the free music and the street performers and MICA being open and the Symphony Opera House being open and Lyric being open for free shows all day and the many many vendors and the children's theater's and the hands-on displays is all of the all of the all of the very good food. This year they had a green/organic food court too but we never even made it there. Instead we split a big serving of chicken curry sitting on the curb listening to a funk/punk fusion local band. And when we were done we got up to walk down the other side of Mt. Royal and see those vendors when what do you know there was mom, Aunt Lori and cousin Mason and he was jamming with this short wiry dreadlocked black guy like they knew each other forever calling each other things like chief and smiling and sweating. We chilled with the fam awhile. Then here comes Sean and his girl, and of course we all found each other by happenstance there in the middle of the festival come together under the hot sun.
This is a card from a pack that the non-profit Art with a Heart gave to me after buying a craft from them. The image was done by a woman who lives in a shelter for homeless women and their children. Art with a Heart basically does programming throughout the city, empowering folks by giving them tools and permission for self-expression through all kinds of different art forms. Half the profits of what they sold at Artscape that day went to the artist, the other half back to the organization to keep it going. HOW EXACTLY IT IS THAT? A real live art co-op functioning in the midst of some of the most hopeless accounts that life can deal. I bought a decoupaged mirror from a fat-faced boy who shyly showed me his work and beamed when my heart jumped because the colors he used for his mirror are the vital colors of me in my joy essence. I bought it spot on out of sheer joy essence though whether it came from his beam or my love of the colors I am not sure. Support these people and this group.
The other thing I bought was a print by James Mayfield, out of New York, called Woman Grounded In Thought. His site is under construction right now, but when it is up if there is a link to this piece check it out. I love how this gals whole body has been shaped by the forces trying to move her, and how stalwart and solid she is in her conviction to stay right there. How you can tell that whatever reason she is standing there, veiled, being pushed by the wind but staying so still against it all the while, is deep enough a part of her that her very being will be shaped by it ever after, like water wearing on stone. That is me. Has been. Busy, stuck and grounded going nowhere. It made me melt a little inside and get a teenybit wet-eyed. Even though the very polite James' buddy grabbed my brother aside and pointed out that the reason he liked the print was cuz of the woman's "poppin booty".
Other than that my big moment of the day was seeing the Full Circle Dance Collective at the Lyric. They performed a shortened version of a piece called the Sacred Body. Exploring the various experiences of religious sublimity and such themes. I love to dance, to let my body go, and this was the first time that watching dance actually made me feel the same exact ecstasy as when it's me doing the moving. I was sitting there in the dark, during the first act called "Supplication", a very Christian theme which I at once struggle with and am enraptured by, and suddenly I was crying. Like sob stifled in my throat so no one could hear me crying. The Sacred Body was intensely religious for me, of the oneness in-bliss, truest kind.
All in all it was an amazingly flowing day. And ohtheirony, it brought me home to me, grounded in thought as I'd been, insistent this year on going my own way. Remembering the bit of good there is in every single side of how one looks at a thing.....
**
First Harvest just past. The birds outside our windows are crazy busy, making nests and gathering food and the noises they make sound like someone digging frantically through a box trying to find some lost piece of something in order to take with him back home before anybody sees it's gone. They flit around a lot. The sun is going further away in the sky. Things are turning. The birds know.
I am going to the beach today. Got a ocean of floating to do.
June 12, 2008
I wish that was me...
Wow, these kids, or young adults, in Baltimore staged a hunger-strike recently in order to get mayor Sheila Dixon's attention and funding for a peer support group that the young people believe in and feel is necessary in order to turn around the futile, perpetuating state of violence and hopelessness in the inner city.
These kids are heroes, and I want to be like them. I want to have a heart big enough, strong enough and courageous enough to lay down. I wish I knew them, I wish I could be there with them, I wish I could call them my friends.
Read about it http://hiphopcongress.com/protesters-promise-hunger-strike-baltimore-press/
Mayor Dixon, to date, is typical in her bureaucratic rhetoric. Here are groups of local, dedicated citizens--and the youth at that!!--getting together and motivating and taking action! And the mayor's office says, It's a decision up to the school board. Right--aren't they supposed to be representative of the people? And are these kids likely to get their voice heard through those dog and pony show proceedings? If they were our city's school wouldn't be in the condition they are. Yet again this affirms my bitch that politics, on even the local level, supports only agenda and is not now, nor likely ever has been, ABOUT REPRESENTING US--I am incredulous over this, it is a simple common sense issue. Give these kids the time to have their voices heard and ideas grown... don't make it about waiting til election time so you all can shine your pretty gold belts.... What an insult. Amen to these young people with hope enough in them selves, with hope enough in Change, Amen to these young people and their tenacity to dream...
Poem for the Hunger Strikers, by Marge Piercy
The low road
What can they do
to you? Whatever they want. They can set you up, they can
bust you, they can break
your fingers, they can
burn your brain with electricity,
blur you with drugs till you
can’t walk, can’t remember, they can
take your child, wall up
your lover. They can do anything
you can’t stop them
from doing. How can you stop
them? Alone, you can’t fight,
you can refuse, you can
take what revenge you can
but they roll over you.
But two people fighting
back to back can cut through
a mob, a snake-dancing file
can break a cordon, an army
can meet an army.
Two people can keep each other
sane, can give support, conviction,
love, massage, hope, sex.
Three people are a delegation,
a committee, a wedge. With four
you can play bridge and start
an organization. With six
you can rent a whole house,
eat pie for dinner with no
seconds, and hold a fundraising party.
A dozen make a demonstration.
A hundred fill a hall.
A thousand have solidarity and your own newsletter;
ten thousand, power and your own paper;
a hundred thousand, your own media;
ten million, your own country.
It goes on one at a time,
it starts when you care
to act, it starts when you do
it again after they said no,
it starts when you say We
and know who you mean, and each
day you mean one more.
These kids are heroes, and I want to be like them. I want to have a heart big enough, strong enough and courageous enough to lay down. I wish I knew them, I wish I could be there with them, I wish I could call them my friends.
Read about it http://hiphopcongress.com/protesters-promise-hunger-strike-baltimore-press/
Mayor Dixon, to date, is typical in her bureaucratic rhetoric. Here are groups of local, dedicated citizens--and the youth at that!!--getting together and motivating and taking action! And the mayor's office says, It's a decision up to the school board. Right--aren't they supposed to be representative of the people? And are these kids likely to get their voice heard through those dog and pony show proceedings? If they were our city's school wouldn't be in the condition they are. Yet again this affirms my bitch that politics, on even the local level, supports only agenda and is not now, nor likely ever has been, ABOUT REPRESENTING US--I am incredulous over this, it is a simple common sense issue. Give these kids the time to have their voices heard and ideas grown... don't make it about waiting til election time so you all can shine your pretty gold belts.... What an insult. Amen to these young people with hope enough in them selves, with hope enough in Change, Amen to these young people and their tenacity to dream...
Poem for the Hunger Strikers, by Marge Piercy
The low road
What can they do
to you? Whatever they want. They can set you up, they can
bust you, they can break
your fingers, they can
burn your brain with electricity,
blur you with drugs till you
can’t walk, can’t remember, they can
take your child, wall up
your lover. They can do anything
you can’t stop them
from doing. How can you stop
them? Alone, you can’t fight,
you can refuse, you can
take what revenge you can
but they roll over you.
But two people fighting
back to back can cut through
a mob, a snake-dancing file
can break a cordon, an army
can meet an army.
Two people can keep each other
sane, can give support, conviction,
love, massage, hope, sex.
Three people are a delegation,
a committee, a wedge. With four
you can play bridge and start
an organization. With six
you can rent a whole house,
eat pie for dinner with no
seconds, and hold a fundraising party.
A dozen make a demonstration.
A hundred fill a hall.
A thousand have solidarity and your own newsletter;
ten thousand, power and your own paper;
a hundred thousand, your own media;
ten million, your own country.
It goes on one at a time,
it starts when you care
to act, it starts when you do
it again after they said no,
it starts when you say We
and know who you mean, and each
day you mean one more.
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