This Hotel Uptown. Where I've been and where I'm going.

My friend Cindy is the bravest person I know.

She is a renaissance woman of the truest type, baker, teacher, traveller, sailor.  Also artisan, which has been amazing to watch emerge.   She took information on intentions and affirmative thinking and put it in to such masterful, unrighteous practice and results that I sparkle just to be around her and consider her one of the most sacred and wise karma-sisters in my life.

Before meeting her I woke up at Sam's after falling asleep the night before pretty quickly.  We wanted to stay up and watch Starwars and drink tea like we said we were going to do but we were both really tired and surprised by all the snow.  There was snow everywhere in the morning, so meeting Cindy at 7am got pushed back.  I had to make room for scraping it all away and for driving really slow.  It wasn't as bad driving as the night before in the storm tho, driving Amy from downtown Chestertown back to her country house in the woods.  It reminded me of being on acid years and years ago in my little blue hatchback feeling like I was driving through outter space.  Except for in the snowstorm space was entirely white and all the stars and aesteroids whirling and wizzing past me were really crazy numbers of little pieces of snow.

Cindy is amazing and I aspire to be like her. I have only ever said that about one other woman who wasn't famous some sort-of way and once about one man. Cindy prooves that independant, open-hearted, passionate and joyful, creative and honest soft and strong are all possible all at once; and that being an authentic to yourself being true woman is possible to do while also being wife and mom. She also has helped me re-define the idea of "settling" down.

We had the kind of breakfast over coffee talk that made spontaneous joy-tears and feeling overflow from my eyes.  Laughing and tender experience of life-talk.  We used to teach ESL together, we hosted a huuge conference once together, she is the one who introduced me to Teena who is the one who owned and invited me to live at Chop.

transgendered ginger cookie!!

She shared a funny quote with me as we recapped the last several months.  "Good luck, as we know, can be fickle.  Good friends are not."

She is a good friend.

When I left her house I went to Proc's for a slice they've still got the best margharita around and I ate in my car because it was lunch time and if there is any place it's easy to be seen it's Chestertown at Proc's or the coffee shop at lunch.  And when I was done  the same song came on that one by Mumford and Sons, once on RNR and immediately following on XPN.  I was moving fast out of town on 291 on the backroads towards the beach speeding along between the wide farm fields and all that white sun.  I had mean tears trying to blink out of my eyes, Chestertown still feels too tight for me and most of all it's frustrating for me sometimes, what seems like such a long waste of time and love.  I know it wasn't at all not at all a waste but to know and to feel are two different things.  Also sometimes I still get so angry at Josh, who showed up this morning in my email and also last Wednesday on the phone, too.  I hope he is happy and peaceful and I pray often lifting him up.  But far as contact goes, those prayerful intentions are moooore than enough.

I am home now it is my second day off, or my Sunday anyhow.  I took a second job at a big uptown hotel in town, one of the oldest ones I even remember my head spinning in excitement when I was a child and we used to walk in--the atrium large and with an ice-skating rink in its full-bellied middle.  I am making money now, lots, which is so good.  I will work this funny demanding schedule two jobs at times 17 or 18 hour days from Thursday through Monday til I have enough by the summer to go on the road and do nothing but be outside sleeping under the stars swimming in rivers and laying on the earth under the sun and moon.  Writing, visiting friends and poems.  By the end of the summer I will settle on the West Coast, somewhere I am guessing between Santa Cruz and Baja only Harmony and Time will show.

I feel so good, peaceful again and happy.  It's nice to have direction, to feel comfortable and in the know around your own home land, to ready your self and get all your duckies lined up in a happy row.

WAITING

I am a waitress.

Do you understand the implications of that sentence?

I laugh at all manners of corny jokes in a way that doesn't seem forced or annoyed. I balance trays the size of small Volkswagen's on my shoulder without spilling any of the glass-encased liquid-bearing weigh-the-same-as-small-boulders drinks that impare your ability to make good decisions when it comes to what is appropriate for a retiree to say to a smiling chipper young lady. I recite with a genuine smile answers about any and all of the food on our menu and  I dont bat an eye when you ask do we have salmon EVEN THOUGH DESPITE YOUR FIVE MINUTES OF STARING AT THE MENU NOWHERE DOES IT SAY WE HAVE SALMON and I already told you the catch of the day.  I SEPARATE YOUR CHECKS. I make you smile even when you are short or rude to me, because I truly believe that serving you is a way to be of service and lift me up out of me, a way to touch hearts that are charged with being in my presence for the hour or so that you are, and I really mean that: making you feel good is my goal. I can remember six things at once. Including cocktail sauce for the guy in the corner two soda refills at the highboy that kid needs extra napkins (oh god somebody sit those kids down before I "accidentally" spill the Volkswagen on them) ask the kitchen to get that salad out before the soup for the man who just decided at the last minute he wants a salad too oh god I wonder if the boys are in the kitchen check and see if the boys are in the kitchen no they gotta be in the kitchen because table 101 is still waiting on that steak up-cook get the steak up-cook out oh that works perfect because you can drop the bill to the table next to them, ok check on the steak up-cook grab the naps and coc say hi to your two new tables on the way let them know you'll be right with them and o yea, that table Jen just picked up says they know dad dont forget to go by and smile, and make an ironic comment about golfing in the cold and let them know how he's been.  I remember all this and still I keep my cool--I smile! when you come to me with an impatient look on your face waving a credit card at me wanting me to stop everything else I am doing now in order to SEPARATE YOUR CHECKS.  I SEPARATE YOUR CHECKS.  Oh wait, did I already mention that?

I am a waitress.  I listen to your problems and also to your complaints and I smile anyway even though you are 68 years old and just tried to pick me up.   You think it's okay to sit down all eight of you and run me back and forth because I am young and that is my job--which I make less than $3 an hour doing and you still seperate your check, all eight of you, eight seperate burgers or rockfish sands with water to drink and then you each leave me one dollar and some change.  I smile anyway.

KNOW WHY?

Because I am a writer and even though waiting demands my physical energy it leaves my emotional untouched, which is what I require to give it all to the page.  And it teaches  me about life, again and agian reminds me the basics of human nature.  People just like a little attention, and to feel good.  They like to be warm, and full.  So simple, so very very simple. The people I work with have fun, they dont stress, it's great. I am almost always so happy to be around them that by the end of the night I feel light and renewed, no matter what.  And then I get to come home late and leave work at work when I walk out the door, which is AMAZING. And even though I'm keyed up adrenaline-full it's cuz I got my exercise tonight, and when it was all done I assed-up with the guys in the kitchen until I was chill enough again to remember life's all good.  I am responsible for your happiness but only for the hour or so you are in my charge, and 9.5 times out of 10 we both walk away authentically smiling.  And whether or not that means anything to you at the time, it's hell of a good practice for me.

I have been a teacher,(a good one), an intake counselor, a resource manager, a team leader, a troubleshooter, a secretary, a tech-writer and in all things those roles easily still come out of me.  But the one thing I've done on and off for 17 years now that might well be the most useful and far-reaching role, especially when the mutherfuckingwheels are fallin off this bitch, is WAITRESS.  Because 17 years has taught me how to smile and keep it cool, and to trust.  Tonight, even tonight even this too shall come to an end.

What's Rad: Courier Knew

She was mad on my mind yesterday at work: I was lusting over Vogue and my imagination was getting so epically inspired... She lives in me because of poetry, because of poet-heart, because of the heart we therefor live within...

She keeps her own blog, it is snapshot style and concise, which is how she is. Close-fitting and circled-in which is what you get if you dictionary.com the word succinct for other words that mean the same. She frames things the right way with a quick glance, she is accurate each step that she goes and then she puts things together, later, frame by frame. Not like me who is one long spondown wind of abstraction trying to get to the final "right".

This is her blog, READ IT! or experience her snapshots rather, at Courier Knew.

Today is her birthday it turns out, of course it is...

We met in 2007 at Ben's, I guess. There are vague memories of going to his place for spaghetti one night after teaching ESL, me in my work clothes anyway. She was there, she was a blond no make-up ponytail girl which at the time was a tough road to tow around our allnaturalbeyourself (butonlyaslongasyourcool!) kind-of-friends. You know to not have a practiced paticularity about you or whatever. Sam and I danced tossy-style jitterbug together like we always did and also I looked at alot of Banjo magazines that night, if there is such a thing. I remember reading an article about the Clash.

Later, this probably would've been in the fall, we truly met the day I walked in to apply at the Blue Heron Cafe and go to work for Paul. Kirsten was vaccuming the floor.

I think of her every fall now, the way I think of diPrima and Libby, and what secrets are sitting in the trees. The way I think of trees.

That was the season I waited tables and wrote poems to Josh that were actually sign-markers to my self that I was trying to learn how to position, and hold. Poetry is like that, or can be, if you let it talk from your soul. Kir and I used to get over-caffeinated in the Blue Heron kitchen and talk and talk about art and poems and writing plays together and performing and mythic imagination and lying to your self and how this all happened and why did it happen and it did, anyhow, and it also helped the art and poetry to be internally conflicted and most of all, we talked about men. I was on the verge of myself in a new way that I had always wanted to be. In a way that scared me and instigated from me a flight-response that is classic Aries-Kelly of charging blindly ahead. Ramhearted as I am. She was getting her masters and on the verge of what next in career and all those weird creeks and spaces that that can cause. Her passion back then for fault lines and shifting ground. Most of all, also, there was nothing more in life that season than art and darkness and loving the art we were spiraling out of from that darkness within.

As said, I've always always had great love for her. This time last year I sent her an email at random after months of no contact to say hey why dont you come see Brandi Carlile play with me. We both needed Brandi, it turned out, I for coming to terms with moving on and she for the same: yes, always about the men. Brandi played at Rams Head Live and threw a pick in to the crowd and it bounced off Kir's broken heart and landed on the ground. All the lesbians battled for it but Kir just bent down put her hand in to the mass of feet and legs and retrieved the momento easily and handed it to me. A totem now, I keep it in my writing bag with all my USB's.

She is happy, in Canton now, with birds in her hair and our funny man hearts, wink wink Kir my dear friend. I check in on her energy when I quiet and pray or trance or meditate just like I do all my k-nnected friends. But she will always be above most the rest bc of the poetry in her, and memories of starting over in the fall. Starting over, how it comes from reflecting on the bounty of who and how and where and what you been as you root down to take hold and turn over fresh again.

She is friend, who makes me better at me. I am thinking of her today, today birthday today fall today collecting here collecting me collecting her today today today...Today, celebrating You! Gratitude gratefullness grace and space and place for this, poetry and hearts of the matter, Dear Friend...

Brandon

In the fall of 2002 this was what my life looked like. I was 25 and about to be two years sober. It was mid-October. I was four months a college grad, my mom was in the process of selling the house I grew up in from 12 on and my dad had just quit his corporate-American lifestyle, sold his condo in Ruston "Sillicon Valley of the East" Virginia and moved back to the beach, prompted all at once by the slow, then final loss of one of two of his best friends to cancer. Dad stood by, and took care of his friend Richard who he'd known from Brooklyn, Bmore, since they were in their twenties, every day those last months until August when they said goodbye. Richard died right about the time that it became clear that Chuck, Dad and Rich's other best friend from that same early-twenties hellion-time, was also going to die. Cancer took to him with a vengeance, too. A week after Richard died my dad completely left his own life. He went to the beach so he could, for a while, hide. And heal.

It was the most courageous thing I'd ever seen him do.

I mention this because I was there, at the beach, for part of that time. I was confused, caught in that horrible juxtaposition of blindness: complete inexperience at adulthood coupled with vague awareness of my glorious, terrifying Independence. It was far too real, and raw and wide-open, to really see! It took me 7 years to get through college and during that time I think my total monthly bills were, maybe, $400. Maybe. Suddenly I was a college grad, with a writing fricken degree?? Paying rent to a lovely girl in Chestertown for a room in her sweet Victorian house, and my student loans no longer covered my monthly needs. In fact, in addition to rent I now had to start to pay back my student loans! So I was barista-ing at the local coffee shop, waitering in a tux-button down at the local white linen, and the other three days a week I pulled double-shifts at a high-volume seafood joint on the Northern-most edge of Ocean City. And I watched my dad, during that time, emotionally fall down.

It sucked. For all of us, my mom selling our home, my lost and desolate dad who up til then had physically been absent for most of my "adult" life, and my brother Sean, who also had just graduated and who also was living at the beach waitering at the same seafood joint(which, during a lot of those day-shifts during that slow and sunny September meant keeping his eye on the fishing rod propped off the back deck of the restaurant and in to the Bay), it sucked. I think we were all in that place that us humans hate to be in: the in-between place. Or better, how I like to call it: Through. As in the only way out....

So yeah, I was working weekend days at the coffee shop, weekend nights at the Hotel in my button-down, and then driving to the beach to stay with dad, immobile on the couch, and go pull doubles in town. I had very little sense of what I wanted my future to be like. I knew one thing for sure, had decided it, just as sure as if I decided to drive to the post office or to make my bed, I was going to be a writer. I was on my bed in the lovely girl in Chestertown's Victorian home, the bed had high cold metal posts that were meant to look brass but the paint was thin and instead they were chipped white so they just looked old and even black in some places too, and I had scarves tied around them and blankets over the ornate curled cold metal at the foot and the head. And I was on the bed and I was writing in a journal and it was this very week six years ago because I was writing about my baby Amy who was just about to turn, back then, one-sober-year-old. (Happy 7 years Amy!) And the writing about/to her became very poetic and the candles and the incense that had prompted the boyfriend of the lovely girl in Chestertown in whose home I was living to think I was a witch were burning with the warm orange light and the warm orange smells and I all of a sudden, just like that, understood deep and real: I am going to be a writer. And I understood: this means nothing, nothing at all other than the commitment, unabashed and unafraid, to follow the inner impulse. To follow it, whenever, and to wherever, it meant to take me.

Oh, I was sad. I was sad, for my dad, my mom and her empty-nest, for my life that had no semblance or order to it, for my old life of partying that no more offered solace or an answer. The friends I had lost to all that. I was confused, disoriented, working like a dog, and, like I said, I was pretty damn sad. But mostly, cuz it was the best I could do, I was numb to all that sadness. And so I began to write. To write my way through....

And then not a week later, in he came. This young guy with these big, I mean big brown eyes. With these lashes that reminded me of honey. And this river, this river that he did to my heart.

Brandon worked at the coffee shop with me and I always used to flirt with him. Tell him if only he were old enough, how I'd rock his world. He was 20. A baby to me then! And so, so cute.

The lovely girl with the Victorian house also worked with me, she set us up after getting tired of seeing us swoon. She invited him over, made us dinner, her boyfriend built a fire, rented us a movie, and then together they quietly and with sneaky smiles and smarmy charm left us alone for the rest of the night...After that first night it felt like a linebacker socked in to my heart: I never knew it could open, and take flight, like that before. It's like I never even knew that love existed. And then, after just one moment, I suddenly did.

It is six years since, this week. We are, so to speak, going "through" some things right now. I know how now, I've learned better how to do it, the making your way through thing. But it's hard, it's not easy, it plain sucks. Especially cuz I still so love those precious honey eyes.

Detours, windows, doors & light: this week around kent county

Well, so i got a job. it all happened very fast and i am not feeling, say, fluent in the language of my new life just yet. and yet, it seems so right, so somehow as if i am finally, after a long long detour, stepping in to the facts of my life as if my soul just snapped open like an old 1980's blind and windowed me in on things: this is how it is meant to be--these are your moments, 'writ in eternity'....

i was of course waiting tables--slinging grease is what always goes in the back of my head when i say that, which is true regardless the level of white linen affair in which one is involved. it's all grease, it's all over you at night's end, it's all always in your hair and lingering not so much as a coating on your skin as a smell, or a sense, or a flavor of the over-processing of your life that ends up going with you, that you end up carrying around with you and wearing like a form of yourself not so true but also that you quietly can't seem to rid.....
it is the function of this life, no? to carry these skins of us on our back and at once deep within, and to try not to struggle when they are slow to come off, and try too not to force the transmutation...?

oohhhh, so i am an intake counselor, a liason for students of Adult Ed once again. but now sooo far to drive to my new job each day, so far to drive from my home. yet this feels so good to me, exhilerating and also stunning at the very same time.

ohhhh! and my eight pairs of ohsogorg trouser pants some wide-legged some high-wasted all so demurely chic and debonair hanging there on the new love affair i have which are my legs... literally make me quiver. that's right, i got hired by 11 and was shopping shopping shopping and remembering my body by 2....

in other not as fashionable news, but good to remember--authentic and just as true: coming out of my detour this week coincidently corresponded w touching down on so many lovely parts of our home land here in kent and queen anne's county...

sammy g

sammy g, bran and i were out on the chester monday eve. ran in to timmy p and greg down at ben's dock taking a swim before pearl creek's band practice. this is where we all go for relaxing dips, down the very end of blue heron farm lane--i wonder does ben know how often the all of us, at varied times, are there swimming even if he's not around?

our swimming hole at ben's dock

tuesday nite was ladies nite out--laura leah and i surprised brooke, who's getting ready to move, on her own, back in to her historic 13 bedroom unfinished hotel-house outside tolchester w the brand new wrap-around porch. we went out and about in naptown, our way of saying go on grrrrrl and also each quietly getting to remember that we are none of us ever alone...

brooke, laura, leah

then, thursday nite we all potlucked at mark and andrea's place out to rock hall. (you love the vernacular i know go ahead and sweat it) mark is this funny easy too come across as shy guy but so quik w the dead-on sharpheaded wit once you've been around him enough that you literally get moved to cry w your laughter...i know, it's happened to me way more than once. and andrea is his baltimore-living girlfriend who weekends it at their work-in-progress farm house here on the shore. he's a wash coll alum, so is she, like many of us. he's working now for the college on oyster restoration and other local sustainability grant and projects, taking whatever is handed to him and going along with it in his steady kind of mark walk-run. he, too, worked at the resteraunt w me. we quit the same week.....















mark's front porch & stairs, under construction

mark and andrea

their way cool bathroom door, handcrafted by mark!!

(probably i should have taken more pictures of the finished rooms--their lovely warm kitchen or the study upstairs. but guess that's for another potluck....)

and lastly, this morning, in our bedroom. how very good, still and clear the light can feel sometimes...