Some parents say that schools give our kids too much homework. I don’t think my daughter’s workload is excessive, but maybe I’m oblivious to the signs? Is this spellng assignment a cry for help?
My daughter’s spelling homework.
Transcript:
Skys are big.
Fly like a bird.
I need a drink.
Here’s a GREAT piece of advice my mom shared with me when I was divorced from Fartbuster and starting to date again. It’s known as “The Five S’s.” That is blatant misuse of an apostrophe to try to make a plural, so let’s spell out the name of the letter “Ess” then make it a plural…Esses. But after that glass of wine (and the one before it) that comes out more like Essesssessess.
With the Five Essesses, it’s all or nothing. Whether I was scouting around for a Friday night date or a life partner, I had to make sure he fit ALL FIVE of these criteria:
SINGLE: Well, duh. Though Fartbuster didn’t let marriage stop him from dating. When we were separated, I got “approached” by a married man. I said, “Good grief. I’ve already got ONE cheating husband in my life–why would I want someone else’s too?”
STRAIGHT: If you’re straight, that is. If you’re gay, they should be gay, too. I’ve spent some time dating members of The Other Team and it’s fun while it lasts–especially when there was dancing involved–but it’s not going to pan out over the long term.
SANE: This one takes a little looking around under the hood. Do they have long term friendships? Can they be alone? Can they be in company? Is their past littered with broken relationships? Is everyone “out to get them?” Any arrest records…and why? How do they treat things that are smaller and sweeter than themselves?
SOBER: I don’t care if you’re a drinker, a tee-totaler, in recovery or allergic to gin–as long as you are in charge of it.
SOLVENT: I’m not saying wealthy. Just solvent. Bills are paid. Living within your means. Not going to ruin my credit score by association.
It took me a while to find Richard (all 5, no question) and then another while to find G (all 5, plus the Secret S: Sexy Accent). Along the way I met some other Esses: Skint, Stalker, Snoopy, Stressy, Skoal, Stupid, Stingy, Swagger, Slob.
So in hindsight….Fartbuster? Single. Straight. Sober. A little weak on solvent and a lot weak on sane. And there was the sixth S: skank.
Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons
Last week, I packed up my office for the first time in 5 years. And honestly, some of that stuff had been with me for the 16 years that I’ve been in my previous job. I started in the summer of 1996, when the torch was coming through Athens.
I moved the necessary stuff to my new office. The furniture is awkard. There are too many drawers. The light is strange. I’m going to park in a different lot. The computer didn’t work.
Then I took a week off to spend time with my daughter as she turned six. In a week, she grew up right in front of my eyes. Now she can read on her own. She can take better care of herself than I remember and it makes my heart tighten up.
My son looked at me last night with his dear baby face. I asked, “Do you want to go swimming?” and out of the blue he replied, “Yes.” It was our first give and take conversation. Now the week is drawing to a close and I’m feeling a huge wave of anxiety because everything is changing at once. Job. Kids. Home. It’s all gotten different and I’m feeling swimmy-headed.
Oh, for flux sake. Flux is that state of flow, always moving, like a river. After Richard died and I faced that crushing grief, my therapist suggested that I view it as a river. If you swim against a river, you tire quickly. But if you bob and float, taking deep breaths, you conserve your energy. The river is going to go where it goes. You are along for the ride.
What the flux is up with you today?
Back in 2008, I signed myself up for boot camp with a single goal: I wanted to be able to do a military style REAL push-up by my 40th birthday. Three weeks later, I did three!
Three months in, after running and working out three days a week in the company of my compatriots at WoW! Boot Camp, I felt better than I had ever felt about my body. Not that it was getting thin–but I was getting STRONG. I decided to jump on the bandwagon and sign myself up for a 5K.
But to train for a 5K, I needed to increase my cardio training, which meant I would need to do some work on my own. In the daylight. Without my coach. And someone who wasn’t also a member of the group might see me…exercising. So my coach came up to me one morning (at 5:WTH30 in the morning) and asked if I had a training plan. I stuttered, “Um, well, I thought I would start using the elliptical in my basement until I can do about 45 minutes worth because that will equate to about the same amount of effort…” She looked at me sideways and said, “Nobody ever ran a 5K on an elliptical. Why don’t you go outside and run?” The immediate answer in my head was “Because someone might see me and laugh,” but I knew better than to say that to April. I didn’t have an answer for her. She suggested that I map out a 1.5 mile route from my house and go out and back, running as much as I could and walking the rest until I could work up to running the whole thing. Easy Peasy.
I was terrified to run in public because I felt like I needed a permission slip. Wouldn’t “real” runners laugh at me if they saw in my $124 New Balance shoes and my double reinforced titanium running bra, size 40G (the G is for GOTDAMMM!)? I took my dog with me so I could use him as an excuse to be out in public, taking up sidewalk, breathing the fresh air and pretending I was an athlete. I started to run. Just run. I went at night so no one would see me, or on Sunday mornings when the mean people might be busy at church or still in jail.
No test to pass. No license to earn. No membership card. Just run.
I finished my first 5K on a rainy Saturday morning. I had to walk some. Everyone there was nice to me. I was scared to look over my shoulder during the race because I thought the only thing still behind me was the police car bringing up the rear. But I did it and I was so proud of myself that I wore my number straight to a Weight Watchers meeting.
So let this quote from John Bingham be your permission slip. It doesn’t even have to be about running. Replace the word “run” with sing, zip line, act, date, write, blog, swim, whatever you wish you had permission to do.
When’s the last time you had a stomach full of butterflies? I’ve got a big change coming at work so my tummy has been fluttering a lot lately. I have to remind myself that butterflies come from a GOOD place. Unfortunately, anxiety and anticipation live next door to each other in my stomach and I’ve got to check in with the butterflies every now and then to corral them into the right zone.
The first time I noticed their proximity was December 25, 2001….almost midnight. I lay in a narrow wrought iron bed in my parents’ extra room. Couldn’t sleep. In the morning, I would wake and drive myself to the airport where I would meet Richard. We were taking our first big trip together, to Amsterdam and Bruges for New Years. I had joy and adventure ahead, but I couldn’t sleep. I lay there with my stomach tied in knots and I asked myself, “Why am I so anxious?”
I was one year out of a decade-long bad marriage to Fartbuster. We had never managed to adventure much in our years together…not from any lack of wanderlust on my part. I couldn’t talk Fartbuster into going out on a Friday night for pizza and a movie because it was just too much trouble for him. We might SEE PEOPLE. For 10 years, the only butterflies I got were from anxiety, that creeping feeling that something was going to go wrong and it would be my fault.
But there I was, hours away from a grand adventure with someone I loved, who loved me. Someone who had a lot of experience with adventuring and was excited about showing me how to step out into the world. Richard lived by the mantra, “If it doesn’t hurt anyone else, why not?” Lying there in that narrow bed, that’s when it hit me: this isn’t anxiety; this is anticipation! Maybe because it was Christmas. Remember Christmas Eve night when you were a kid and you could try and try and try as hard as you could to fall asleep but you just couldn’t make your body stop being excited? That’s where I was that night–32 years old and feeling the excitement of Christmas for the first time in my adult life! So I lay there and let myself be excited and happy. These butterflies were from the sneaking suspicion that something was going to go RIGHT and it would all be my doing!
Mistaking anticipation for anxiety is simply a habit that I often fall into. I catch myself interpreting all this nervous energy about my new opportunities and labeling it “anxiety” when really it’s anticipation. I’m thrilled to have something new to do. I’m excited to have a new space and new coworkers and new challenges. I feel alive again. But being alive comes with far more risks than living numb. I have to retrain my butterflies to flutter over to the side of my stomach that is ready to grow.
The best case of butterflies I ever had happened in February 2007. I had been antsy all night and at about 11pm, I found myself sitting on the sofa with my hand on my belly…wondering why I was anxious. After all, I had butterflies in my stomach and that equates to anxiety, right? Then it dawned on me that that fluttering feeling inside me was my baby girl, stretching her wings in a way I could finally feel.
So when WAS the last time you felt butterflies? Anxiety or anticipation?
In second grade, my classmate–K–brought the perfect lunch every day. She set her “The Waltons” lunchbox down on the white formica table in the cafeteria then unsnapped the yellow plastic clasp to unveil her masterpiece of a lunch. First, a flowered paper napkin, set to the side. A spoon placed atop the napkin. Then a matching yellow Thermos with a lid that doubled as a cup for the colorful splash of Kool-Aid. A perfectly compact Snack Pack pudding, chocolate or butterscotch or vanilla. A miniature bag of potato chips. And finally a sandwich, on snowy white bread with the crusts cut off and sliced on the diagonal.
Perfection.
I had a Peanuts lunch box that I loved. I had had it since first grade because I remember getting sent to the principal’s office that year after conking Scott Greene over the head with it for breaking in front of me in line. He got sent to the principal’s office too because he HAD broken in line and my job that week was being line leader. Lo, the swift hand of justice wields a Peanuts lunch box.
My Peanuts lunch box carried a perfectly serviceable lunch, with a sandwich and maybe a piece of fruit. A slice of homemade cake if it was near someone’s birthday. The sandwiches were made with that Carl Budding lunch meat that was so thin that you could see through it–now they call it “deli-sliced” and charge extra for it. My sandwich sported Sunbeam bread or–god forbid–Roman Meal. My mom believed in whole grains before anyone else. Sometimes, if Daddy had a client up near Riverdale, he would swing by the day-old bread store and buy an entire toilet paper box filled with Twinkies, SnoBalls, Ding Dongs, fruit pies and jelly rolls. One toilet paper box of treats could fill up the entire upright freezer in the laundry room. Each morning, during lunch packing time, we were allowed to pick out one snack cake and add it to our lunch. The first to disappear were the SnoBalls–a chocolate cake filled with cream, then covered in marshmallow and pink coconut. HEAVEN. If they were hard frozen before I got on the bus, they would be just thawed enough to eat by lunchtime, but the cream-filled center remained an icy sweet core to the whole confection.
Anyway.
What I admired about K’s lunch was the amount of time and attention put into it. Every little scrap of it was thought out and intentional. It took TIME to make. K’s mother didn’t have to worry about getting to work on time AND making a lovely lunch. My mother had three lunches to make and a desk to get to at her office.
I started thinking about K’s Waltons lunch box today while I was in line at Kroger. The kids start summer camp this week and I get to pack lunches. So I found myself filling the conveyor belt with tiny bags of chips, cups of applesauce, boxes of organic strawberry milk, popcorn, popcorn chicken bites, petite carrots, hummus, peanut butter crackers, Snack Pack pudding, sliced ham, string cheese, mandarin oranges, and pouches of Capri Sun water. Holy HELL.
Am I driving myself mad trying to make the PERFECT LUNCH? Yes. Yes, I am.
What was your perfect lunch? What kind of lunch box did you carry?
Black Eyed Susan in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor
One sunny Sunday afternoon in November of 2004, Richard and I took a walk down to Fell’s Point in Baltimore. We sat on a bench by the harbor and watched the gulls dip and dive around the trash cans. A bright white paddlewheel boat–The Black Eyed Susan–rocked against the dock. I told him how the flower, black eyed Susan, always made me think of Van Morisson’s “Brown Eyed Girl.” I sang the chorus.
A pack of Cub Scouts climbed up to the bridge to ring the brass bell. The sun was warm but weak. I was glad for my jacket. The boys rang the bell then chased each other down the ladder to the deck then the dock then across the brick courtyard behind us. The sunlight sparkled off the diamond engagement ring that Richard had given me a few months before. His grandfather Jack had given it to his grandmother Sadie in 1927 and she had worn it for 75 years. Now he had given it to me as a sign of his trust in our commitment to each other. We held hands and I remember thinking, “I’m really happy, right now. Right here.”
Then a phrase entered my mind and it stayed with me for years: “It’s all one life.” It’s all one life.
Here’s the detail that’s missing from the scene I’ve described above. Richard was feeling pretty good that day after his third round of chemo, but it hadn’t put him into remission. He told me a half-truth that week, so as not to break my heart with disappointment and fear. He said his doctors were calling it a “partial remission.” It didn’t take.
We left the safe confines of the guest house on Johns Hopkins campus to walk down the hill to the harbor on a sunny day. It was the first walk we had taken together outside in months. I worried most of the way that his energy wouldn’t hold out or that we might need to find a cab to bring us back up the hill. For years I had chased him all over Europe on our adventures together but now I was shortening my steps and slowing my pace so he didn’t tire too quickly.
Sitting there in the sun that day, I had a sense of wholeness about the whole situation. For once, I wasn’t piecing it apart into the parts I accepted–the love we felt for each other, the joy of rambunctious kids, the autumn sun, the promise of a boat–and the parts I fought against–leukemia, chemo, guest houses, unknowing, weakness, change. I had space in my heart and my mind in that moment for all of it. It’s all one life.
Before that day, the mantra “it is what it is” had been helpful, but I could only use it as an antidote for each piece of information, each separate challenge that came our way. It was a one thing at a time kind of mantra. “It’s all one life” was a rare expression of wholeness and acceptance in that chaotic time, when every day, hour or minute might bring with it some blow to our life together.
After he died, I wondered, “If you could do it all over again, would you?” My answer was yes. Even with the horror of that year and the emptiness after he was gone, I wouldn’t have traded the good times in exchange for missing the bad. To quote Garth Brooks, “I could have missed the pain, but I’d have had to miss the dance.” Or with Fartbuster, after our divorce….I asked myself if I would have been better off never having married him? These are impossible questions because changing one thread of my life would have put me somewhere else and I wouldn’t have heard the Cub Scouts ringing the bell aboard the Black Eyed Susan as Sadie’s diamond sparkled in the sun. Even if my beloved was dying beside me.
“Domino Sugar Love” by Andreas Kollegger via Creative Commons license
It’s all one life. I couldn’t have been the mother who looked into my first born’s blinking eyes and whispered, “Hey! I’ve waited my whole life to meet you!” if I hadn’t been the woman who brushed his eyes closed after they had left this world to look upon some other. It’s all one life. And I’m glad it’s mine.
On Saturday morning, over 800 artists met under the live oaks in Forsyth Park to draw. Each artist was given one square of sidewalk, one box of chalk and three hours–the rest was up to them. The Sidewalk Chalk Festival is hosted by the Savannah College of Art and Design, so the quality is astounding. Undergrads, grad students, high school hopefuls, alumni, faculty all drawing their hearts out as we stroll by or picnic on the grass. In the mid-afternoon, judges judge, prizes are awarded, thousands and thousands of pictures are snapped. Then as the sun sets, it’s all washed away. It’s just chalk, after all.
Jose Luis Silva spent the day drawing a portrait of our friend, Spencer Cox, who died in December. Luis had been working on the portrait for an hour when we showed up. The grinning mug that he had summoned to life there on the sidewalk was already stopping traffic. People paused silently to watch him work with just black chalk, white chalk, his fingers and a watery brush.
Luis paused long enough to share hugs with me, with Brantley, with Jill. We three had loved Spencer when he was a bold boy at Governor’s Honors and again as a wizened man. In the interim years, most of us were unaware of Spencer’s work to get AIDS drugs approved by the FDA. He had disappeared on us during those New York years. At his memorial in January, many of Spencer’s dearest friends had commented on his chimeric habit of disappearing, of slipping away then reappearing years later. We started saying goodbye to Spencer when he was diagnosed with AIDS in the early 1990s. Hell, Spencer was supposed to have been dying for twenty years but he never did. Then he did. It was hard to believe he was gone gone.
Thanks to the work that Spencer did to get protease inhibitors approved by the FDA, eight million people around the world are living with AIDS today. Living. Today. Yet he’s gone. I can’t find words for the….irony? Pathos? Tragedy? I can’t, so I’ll quote from Peter Staley’s eulogy, “Grief Is a Sword”:
Eight million people on standardized regimens. Eight million lives saved. It’s a stunning legacy, and so bittersweet. How could that young gay man, confronted with his own demise, respond with a level of genius that impacted millions of lives but failed to save his own? This death hit us hard. We have grappled to make sense of it. Why did he stop his meds? What role did his struggle with crystal meth play? Was this a failure of community? Are there lessons we can learn?The first lesson for me has been about impermanence–Spencer is gone. Yes, it was complicated. Yes, he did great things with his genius. Yes, he did horrible things to his health. Yes, we can learn things from his life. Yes, there are things we will never know. No. He is gone.
But there he was again, emerging from the sidewalk beneath Luis’ fingertips. Luis drew the figure first. Then he added texture to the shirt and the hands. He added highlights. A couple of strokes from a stick of chalk and the distinctive patch of white in Spencer’s beard came back to us. A little bit of chalk dust and there was my friend.
When he was diagnosed with AIDS in his early 20s, it seemed foolish to dream of living to 30. Miraculously, he made it to 44. It was still miraculous for a man with AIDS who had survived the plague years to die at the advanced age of 44; it was still tragic for a man in this day to die of AIDS at 44 when drugs are able to offer many more years.
Luis surrounded his black and white portrait with a vibrant pink and purple background. Colors are never as simple as “pink” and “purple.” It took yellow and brown and gray to make the pink and purple work.
He added Spencer’s name and the years of his birth and death in the top left corner. That’s when the passersby started asking each other, “Who is that?” In the top right corner, Luis added a red ribbon for compostional balance. Once they saw the red ribbon, fewer people asked who Spencer was. Oh, AIDS. Another one bites the dust.
The dust. Saturday’s weather couldn’t have been more pleasant–warm spring sun, dappled shade, light breeze. Even in that idyllic climate, every motion–from the breeze to the sighs of careful crowds–took its toll on Luis’ creation. Near the end of his three hours of allotted drawing time, he turned to me and said, “That’s the thing about chalk. I use the water to make it stick better, but the face is already changed from when I drew it. Just in a few hours.” His hand fluttered between the photocopied picture of Spencer that ran with the New York Times obituary and the chalk portrait there on the ground before us. Chalk art changes as you make it. It can’t be anything but impermanent.
When Luis declared that he was done, we sat under the oaks and we didn’t talk about Spencer. We played with the tired baby. We drank beer and iced coffees. We sent the big kids on errands. We packed up and headed home at a sensible hour, like grown ups do.
I wonder what it would have felt like to stay there until the park emptied out and the cleaning crew came through with their hoses. I wonder what it would have meant to me to watch that patch of white in Spencer’s beard wash away into nothing as it joined with everything around it.
An artist creates a portrait that changes as he draws. A musician plays a note that fades at the same instant it is born. Eight million people breathe in; eight million people breathe out and the dust shifts around them. Before we can know a thing, it has moved on.
Saturday, April 20, 2013
about 4pm on a really good day
Hi, this is me.
I was trying to edit my “About” page for this blog and I realized that I’ve been hiding. I can tell all kinds of stories about heartache and empowerment and rebuilding, but I have been afraid to just show ME. So today I am coming out of the photo booth.
Most of y’all have known me since I wiped my nose on my sleeve, but some of you are strangers. Hello to all. My name is Ashley and I am the Baddest Mother Ever!
This picture was emailed to me yesterday from a photo booth that I sat in last weekend. It was Alumnae Weekend at my alma mater (Kathy Bradley, author of “Breathing and Walking Around” taught me that the phrase means “nourishing mother”). I had a fantastic weekend, filled with stomach-lurching challenges (like leading a formal meeting with 1000 people, fire, and an organist) and breathtaking successes (that meeting, even with a couple of glitches). I made new friends who graduated before I was born. I hugged necks of friends I hadn’t seen in 20 years. I met our oldest graduate, 106 and there for her 85th reunion. My spirit was nourished. I challenged myself, rewarded myself, believed in myself.
And look at how it shows on my face! Normally, pictures of me make me see wrinkles and gray and extra chins, but this picture…I can’t help but smile at myself. I LOOK LIKE MYSELF.
How long has it been since you posted a picture of yourself on Facebook? Yesterday, I saw Nicki making a muscle she’s worked hard to earn. Today, Alice was having breakfast with her son. Lucy had some cute hair going on. Kimberly’s son is taller than she is. Felicia is at the paddock. What are the rest of you doing?
Your babies are adorable. Your cats couldn’t be cuter. And that lunch you had yesterday…yum! But let’s see more pictures of you! It’s my challenge to you today. Post that pic of YOU.
Tintern Abbey, East End Columns
via Wikimedia Commons
This is the poem that Fartbuster selected for our wedding ceremony. I remember when he read it to me the first time, as we sat on a purple velvet settee in The Bookmonger, in Montgomery, Alabama (one of those treasure trove used books stores that has gone the way of the dinosaur). He read it to me, sotto voce, from a book of John Ciardi poems and I felt honored to be marrying a man who was so wise and sensitive.
BY JOHN CIARDI
Oh, twenty-six year old me…honey, honey, honey. Bless your heart. Or to quote Jake’s last line to Brett from The Sun Also Rises: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”
It was pretty to think so, to think that ours would be the kind of marriage like an arch, leaning in to the point of falling, but catching each other in the all-bearing point. Raised by our own weight. Isn’t it pretty to think so?
Wellllll…What words did this young poet have for me when we were finally alone together after the wedding? Granted, we had been living together for a couple of years, so it’s not as if I was expecting a pulse-quickening night of romantic discovery. And we were staying in a local chain hotel before driving to Charleston the next day for the real honeymoon. But this is what I got from my new husband, the erstwhile poet.
He flopped out on the bed with the basket of snacks sent by the caterer and started grazing. I shimmied out of my wedding dress then went to the bathroom to pry off my foundation undergarments. I wasn’t feeling shy–it’s just that my cousin, Shannon, had poured about 2 pounds of birdseed down my back as we left the reception and most of it was valiantly contained by my foundation undergarment. I figured it would be a kindness to the maid if I unleashed all that birdseed on the tile floor instead of the carpet. So off I went to the bathroom. When I came back out, shed of the birdseed and my single girl inhibitions (as IF), Fartbuster was still snacking and had turned on the television. To Beavis and Butthead. 
BEAVIS AND BUTTHEAD.
I looked at him. I looked at the TV. I looked back at him and he finally noticed me standing there. I said, “REALLY? Beavis and Butthead?” And this was his reply, gentle reader:
“C’mon! It’s a NEW ONE.”
Poems are pretty. John Ciardi’s vision of marriage is a lovely one. Marriage does require bending towards each other, trusting that the other half of the arch will meet you in the middle. The trust that grounds marriage is a falling towards, leaning over, reaching out. If your partner isn’t there when you do that…you fall flat on your face.
But to tell the god’s honest truth? Falling on your face isn’t the worst thing that can happen. As the old Japanese saying goes: “Fall down seven times, stand up eight.”
