Category: life

Poem: Seeds

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Here in the middle of the U.S., we just passed the frost date. So it’s time to plant. Here’s a seasonally-inspired poem I wrote:

Seeds

“Here it is,
The start of my first garden,”
she tells him.
Two dozen flat seeds
the color of milk, round with a point,
pour from a paper packet.

He wants to know what else she plans to plant
other than bell peppers.

She hasn’t decided yet,
but thinks it will be wonderful
to raise her own food.
She’ll cook more from scratch,
maybe even learn to can.
Gardening is great exercise;
she knows she’ll lose weight.
She hopes to figure out that sewing machine
she picked up at a garage sale
to make her own dresses.
Who knows?
She may need maternity clothes soon.
Healthier living should improve their chances.
At least she thinks so.
She wants to know what he thinks.

He thinks it seems like a lot to expect
from one little handful of seeds –
to grow a whole new life.

**

This poem originally appeared in “Mid-America Poetry Review.”

How I’ve Kind of Sort of Taught Myself to Play Piano Just a Little

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“Do you play an instrument?”

When this question comes up in conversation, I usually answer it with “No, not really. Well, sort of. I mean, I’m not good, but I can kind of play piano about this much.” I hold my thumb and forefinger an inch apart to demonstrate how small my musical accomplishment really is.

When I was in grade school I became fascinated with the two pianos in our school – one in the auditorium and one in the music classroom. I remember the day the music teacher let each of us in turn practice a middle C scale. And that’s about all I recall from music class in my elementary years. Mostly, I remember daydreaming about playing the piano in the auditorium when we were stuck in a boring assembly. A couple of times in fifth grade, when my class was supposed to be working on sets for a class play, I snuck over to the piano and started pressing keys simply to hear the sounds. I don’t know why, growing up in a house where Hank Williams was considered a deity, I developed a liking for the sound of the black and white keys. Maybe it was a form of rebellion, since a keyboard is seldom used in country music, or at least not the country music my parents favored.

I’m not claiming to be high-brow in my musical tastes. I like me some pop music. But especially when that pop music heavily features keyboard of some kind: Elton John, Carole King, Stevie Wonder, Bruce Hornsby, Coldplay, Lady Gaga (yes, even though I’m thoroughly ensconced in my middle-aged years; I try to concentrate on the music and not the meat dress or whatever.) I’ve always kind of wished I knew more about music, but didn’t know how to go about learning. My dad had a guitar and a fiddle that he’d picked up used somewhere, and he taught himself to play. But he wasn’t one to let kids mess with his stuff. And paid music lessons in my childhood were as realistic a possibility as a trip to the Antarctic.

I signed up for band class when I went to junior high. I played clarinet because I had to use a school instrument and took what was available. I did learn some about reading music and my ear got trained a little, but let’s just say clarinet was not my destiny. For years I stuck with playing the radio, the daydream of piano hovering in the back of my mind, surfacing occasionally. It wasn’t so much that I felt deprived over it not happening in real life, but that I enjoyed having a fun little fantasy sometimes.

Then my kids came along and my husband’s sister had their childhood piano sitting in her house, unused. The soundboard was slightly cracked, but it would do for the kids to start learning. When my daughter was nine and my son six, we acquired the instrument and I signed my kids up for piano lessons. For the first little bit, I sat in the teacher’s living room, petting her dog, and listening to the instructions she gave the kids.  Following along at home, using the lesson books, I’d practice the same things they were learning. I used to spur the children to practice by pretending to compete with them, saying things like “You don’t want me to get better than you, do you?”

My daughter stuck with lessons for six months, then decided to pursue other interests. But my son – let’s just say piano does seem to be his destiny.  After a couple of years’ time, he’d passed me right up. I couldn’t keep pace with him. When he was 10, my mother-in-law and sister-in-law pooled their money to buy us a new piano, and he was in heaven, using an instrument that sounded the way it was supposed to. By the time he was 11, he was choosing Philip Glass pieces to play in recital. He’s 15 now and not only still plays, but also owns a MIDI keyboard he keeps plugged into the computer so he can compose and record his own original music.

Meanwhile, I’m still plugging along, inch by inch, through children’s lesson books, supplemented with YouTube tutorials. My practice has fallen by the wayside a couple of times, for periods of a few months, but I keep coming back to it. When I say inch by inch, I mean my progress is soooo slow, and by slow I mean think in terms of those drops of pitch that hung suspended for many years before finally falling in that Australian study. For one thing, I can only squeeze in 20 minutes or so of playing, about three or four days a week. After nine years, off and on, I’m finally at the end of the fourth instruction book.

I no longer have any pretense that my playing has anything to do with encouraging or assisting my children in any way. I know I’ll never be good, really, and I have no desire to try to perform for anyone else. My fingerwork is too staccato, and unlike my father and my son, I don’t possess an innate ear for the notes . But I’ve learned more about music, which means I get more out of the music I listen to. Plus, playing an instrument is supposed to help your brain function. My brain will take all the help it can get. And I enjoy it so much, those little 20-minute sessions of daydream fulfillment.

So yeah, I play piano now. Kind of. A little.

 

 

 

Happy International Peace Day

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Happy International Peace Day!

What are your favorite books about peace?  Here are a few of mine:

“The Story of Ferdinand” by Munro Leaf. This story of the bull who refused to fight remains one of my best-loved children’s books. I love how Ferdinand has nothing to prove and only wants to be himself, sitting peacefully among the flowers.

“The War Prayer” by Mark Twain. Think about what you’re praying for when you pray for victory in war. Really think about it.

“Slaughterhouse Five” by Kurt Vonnegut. For all of it SciFiNess, this gives a very realistic look at how unromantic and ridiculous war is.

“The Secret Garden” by Frances Hodgson Burnett. Yep, I consider this kids’ tale to be a book about peace. There’s nothing about resisting organized battles, but there’s lots about people from different backgrounds coming together and discovering the dual powers of love and responsibility to improve their lives.

Shows With a Strong Female Lead

janeway   LizLemon    RosemaryThyme     VicarDibley

 

 

 

 

Oh hey, Netflix does know what I like. “Shows with a strong female lead” is now one of the categories it offers to me. Interesting I should notice this tonight, after reading an article today documenting the dearth of women in contemporary movies. I suppose I have been tending toward the strong female leads lately, given a wide variety of choices.

My husband and I lived without a television for many years, at his request.  But now we are TV owners and get most of our shows through Netflix instant streaming. (We don’t actually have a cable package and I don’t see one in our near future.) There is a gender divide when it comes to watching habits in my household. My husband and 15-year-old son watch something on rare occasions; my 18-year-old daughter and I are the main viewers.

I’m catching up on stuff I missed over the years. So much Star Trek! I watched Next Generation and Deep Space Nine – all of the episodes. Then, without noticing it, I started a series of series with women at the fore: Thirty Rock, Star Trek Voyager, a British mysteries series called Rosemary and Thyme. Currently my daughter and I have a standing Thursday evening date to watch Vicar of Dibley, starring the very funny Dawn French.

I remember some shows I used to watch when I was a kid. For a while my brother and I sat glued to reruns of The Wild Wild West after school almost every day. Or maybe only I was glued, but I recall him being there. I loved tracking the exploits of two undercover agents in the old west. They employed clever disguises and even cleverer technological gizmos. I used to pretend to have adventures with James West and Artemus Gordon. I’d help them recover the stolen treasure. I’d disguise myself as a sheriff or a poker player or whatever the situation called for. Together we’d outsmart the villain. Often, the two heroes required rescuing by me. I made my mom nervous as many of these games involved climbing around in the trees in our back yard, to the highest branch I could reach.

I managed to overlook the typical women’s roles in the show, which were, as I recall, to look pretty, wave a fan while batting eyelashes, fall in love with the agents, get held hostage, and things along those lines. Then one day I could ignore it no more. I came home, settled in with my snack, and turned on the tube, eager to see what my heros were up to that afternoon.  To my short-lived delight, the two leads fell in with a woman who was their match. She dressed in practical clothing that allowed her to move through action scenes. She shot guns. She did everything the guys did – everything I did in the stories I made up. It was thrilling. So thrilling! Right up until the gentleman solved the “problem” of her behavior by getting a proper woman to convince the strong female lead how delightful it would be to put her energy into wearing frills and make-up instead doing all that tiresome actiony stuff. I still get a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach when I think of the final scene, where my two ersatz partners in daydream adventure grinned at each other with self-satisfied smirks over the two women giggling in the background, the tomboy having been shown her place. I watched a few more episodes after that, but any enjoyment on my part was half-hearted. No longer could I gloss over how people of my gender were portrayed and treated. No longer could I fail to acknowledge the lack of any place for a girl in these adventures.

I’d like to be able to look back and say, “What was it with that one show anyway?” But it wasn’t only The Wild Wild West. I had the same experience multiple times. Starsky and Hutch. Let’s talk about them, shall we? I didn’t have quite the attachment to these two buds as I did to the West/Gordon duo, but I liked the show pretty well. They engaged in entertaining banter sometimes and besides, all the kids at school watched it, so I needed to be in the know or be left out of conversations.

I was a little older and a little more skeptical. Already, I had to work to suspend my disbelief over some of the plots. “You’re going undercover as a hair stylist? Really? You can do that without the months of training that hair stylists go through? Gonna just pick up a pair of scissors and start snipping?” I may have rolled my eyes, but I continued to tune in. Until the episode with the reporter.

A female reporter arranged to shadow Starsky and Hutch so she could write a feature on them. Did I forget to mention? An attractive female reporter. The two police officers proceeded to act a lot like some of the sixth-grade boys in my class at school, trying to impress the girl by being jerks. As the story unfolded I found myself thinking the two cops should be glad I wasn’t the reporter, because I’d write something pretty scathing. As it turned out, the reporter wrote a pretty scathing piece about them and their not really cool or constitutional antics. Ha! I laughed, figuring they were going to see what they really looked like to others and mend their ways. Yeah, not so much. They got angry. And then they got even by more or less kidnapping the reporter and acting like even bigger, more unconstitutional jerks, to show her. And she learned her lesson. Properly chastened, she wrote a retraction of her previous article, explaining how the two men were true heroes, something her tiny brain had been unable to grasp at first. I never watched another episode after that. Ever. To this day.

Properly chastened – this was the most galling part to me. It was bad enough that the male leads thought the women needed to be put in their places and treated them accordingly. The worst thing was how meekly the women accepted it. With humility, they came to realize and admit they had no business trying to do the same things men did, nor any right to criticize a man’s actions, especially not a male authority figure. And Starsky and Hutch were supposed to be rebel cops – hmph!

But wait, there’s more! Off the top of my head, I can come up with two more shows in which women’s roles were mansplained in ways that caused female characters to see the light. The Courtship of Eddy’s Father and My Three Sons both broadcast episodes with such edifying storylines. And don’t even get me started on the number of times I saw this scene repeated: Female guest star is being all female and hysterical, because she’s got it in her head that people should listen to her or something. So male lead grabs her and kisses her. She resists, but he doesn’t stop! Until she melts into his arms, because all she needed to be soothed out of her irrationality was to be force-kissed. My dad wasn’t anything resembling a feminist, but I’m pretty sure his view on someone kissing me against my will was that I should punch the guy if I could.

So now I have access to shows with strong female leads and I say “Yes, please!” Give me Captain Janeway, in charge all on her own, nobody having her back. No Starfleet Command available for consultation or reinforcement. Making all of the tough decisions and taking all of the consequences. Give me Voyager, which passed the Bechdel Test as a matter of routine. Give me scenes of three female crew members putting their heads together to fix a problem with the starship’s engine.

Give me Liz Lemon on 30 Rock, supervising a crew of eccentrics and somehow getting them all to do their jobs. Give me a female character who loves to eat as much as I love to eat and who is not apologetic about it. One who is truly flummoxed when forced to choose, at the airport gate, between the man she loves and the sandwich she loves.

Give me Rosemary Boxer and Laura Thyme, two middle-aged women who run their own gardening business and solve murder mysteries on the side, who dress in actual gardening clothes, duck boots and all. Their hair comes all unkempt and they get dirty. Plus they’re smart enough and brave enough to catch the criminals.

Give me a small English village’s first female vicar, one who can hold her own with the moneyed town councilor who is used to getting his way. One who is wise and caring and fallible and funny. One who is a strong female lead. Thanks for the category, Netflix.

Notes on Scraps of Paper

Often inspiration for a story or poem strikes when I’m in the middle of something else. My paying job, for instance. I have a habit of scribbling quick notes on scraps of paper, hoping I’ll remember the entire thought later. Sometimes I make notes on a book I’m reading. Sometimes I forget these notes until I rediscover the scrap of paper many weeks or months later. Maybe in the pocket of a pair of pants I haven’t worn in a while, to give a real example.

Here are some notes I just found in my own handwriting. It’s a list (?) on one sheet:

character identification

takes place night

extreme close up on eye

music

clothing – a.p. – true

horror lies in sympathy

What does it all mean? Your guess is as good as mine.

 

Earth Day Resolutions

I didn’t get to attend our city’s Earth Day celebration today because I was working. However, I have managed not to use a car all day. I walked to work. It’s not far, so I don’t save a lot of driving miles in one round-trip. On the other hand, I walk almost every time I go to work and I’ve had the same employer for nine years. It does add up. I figure at least 1,600 car miles displaced in that amount of time.

I’m continuing my effort to live a more environmentally friendly life by making one change at a time. Here are the steps I’ve taken since last Earth Day:

Reusable coffee filter. One of those things that pays for itself eventually. No more paper filters.

Reusable coffee filter in action.
Reusable coffee filter in action.

LED light bulbs. They’re much more energy-efficient than compact fluorescents, and contain no heavy metals. Also, they’re supposed to last longer – the package advertises 18 years. We’ll see. They’re still pretty expensive, so we’re replacing bulbs gradually, as they burn out.

Our new lighting.
Our new lighting.

Mesh produce bags.

I’ve been using canvas grocery bags for quite a while. But I was still tearing off the plastic bags from the rolls in the produce aisles at the grocery store when I wanted to buy a bunch of spinach or  several apples. Now I have these. They weigh next to nothing, so they’re not running up the price on fruit and vegetables by the pound.

Mesh produce bag
Mesh produce bag

No single one of these things is a huge change. But I hope, as with the walking, over the years it will add up enough to make a significant positive difference.

Next goal – a rain barrel or two.

 

A History of Snow

One thing I adore about my husband is that he loves to play in the snow. The first Christmas we were dating, he gave me a sled. Living in Missouri, we get two or three decent snows each winter, which is about right for me. I like snow, but not enough to live someplace like Buffalo, NY.

We’ve tried to pass on the “snow is for fun” attitude to our kids. Following is a collection of photos I’ve taken over the past few years of snow creations and activities involving my household.

Poem: Teen Dies in Shooting

I was sorting through some of my poems the other day, and came across this one I wrote several months ago. I know it could use some more polish, but it seems always sadly timely. It was based on a newspaper headline.

 

Teen Dies in Shooting

Teen Dies in Shooting
and mothers who read the headline
die inside a little more
from the combined effects of this
and child soldier documentaries
along with
Young Lives End in Car Wreck

Oh my children, let me go with you
everywhere to hold your hand,
throw myself in front of the gun,
hide you from the recruiters,
grab the steering wheel

Let me never lay myself down to sleep
lest something evil should happen
while I’m not keeping watch

Facing 2013: the Daily Checklist Project

I tend to shy away from major resolutions at the beginning of a new year. But I do like the opportunity for reflection, and the idea of a fresh start, the prompt to decide how I want to live the next few months of my life.

This time around, I’ve started my New Year’s plan early. I decided to make a daily checklist of things that are important to me, with the goal of accomplishing most of the items on most days. Here it is:

1. Exercise
2. Studies/classwork
3. Creative writing
4. Something to improve the house/keep the household running
5. An act of love for someone else
6. An expression of gratitude

Some of these can overlap. Buying groceries can fall under headings 4 and 5, for instance, especially if I make an effort to find one special item for each member of the family. I have a few more specific thoughts about each goal I listed.

1. Exercise. This is pretty obvious. I need to take care of myself. I walk to work, which helps me meet this goal. However, it’s only on five-minute walk, if I take no detours. Then again, some days I work split shifts, so I make the round trip twice. On those days, that’s 20 minutes of walking. If I can manage to leave the house a few minutes early on workdays, I can add a loop around the park and end up with a fair number of steps. Days I don’t work pose more of a challenge, as unintuitive as that seems. But I find I’m trying to run all of my errands and catch up on other things, so the opportunity for exercise isn’t automatically scheduled in. I’ll have to remind myself to make the effort on those days.

2. Studies/classwork. I’ll write about this in more detail in a future post, but I’m pursuing a course of study that has me taking one on-line class right now. I might bump it up to two at a time after I finish this one, depending on how my schedule is feeling. Nevertheless, it requires the discipline to make myself show up and do the work.

3. Creative writing. I have a theme in mind for poetry for the coming year. I’m thinking in terms of a chapbook, so I don’t want to divulge too much detail at this time. I’m also about 30,000 words into writing a novel.

4. Something to improve the house/keep the household running. There is no end to the number of home improvement projects that need done around here. A couple I plan to tackle that will probably require the use of vacation time. We have a new accessibility ramp, and we can’t put any finish on it yet. Around March or April, though, it’s happening. We also had a new back door put in, and I need to paint the door frame. Same project more or less. My husband and I tentatively plan to repair and repaint the walls in our entry room as well. Beyond that, I need to get a better handle on housework. If I can even just clean a sink on days I’m super busy, that will be better than nothing.

5. An act of love for someone else. The older I get the more I think love is defined by how you act, rather than how you feel. I hope I don’t disappoint myself on this one. It doesn’t have to take a lot of time. Listening with genuine interest to one of my kids talk about something that excites them, or taking some supplies to my mom, or getting a cup of coffee for my husband. I just want to make sure I’m remembering to be part of the world around me.

6. An expression of gratitude. Another one that can be accomplished in mere seconds, yet I can forget it some days. It can be as brief as noticing that – yay! – our water heater still works. Or  a sincere thanks to a store clerk.

That’s it. Nothing huge. But daily attention to the basics feels about right.

Come Healing – the Power of Music and Poetry

Like everyone else, I’m processing the school shooting that happened in Newtown, CT last Friday. Like everyone else, I can’t fathom the pain experienced by the parents of the slain children. I felt devastated more than 1,100 miles away, with no connection to the families, other than being a parent who knows what it is to love a child.

At work today, I felt my phone vibrate in my pocket. I surreptitiously checked it, only to see a text alert from the local public school district, the one where my son is enrolled. All schools were on modified lock-down. Students safe. Wha-? ALL schools? Were they being threatened? What was going on? I had a hard time maintaining my composure as I waited on library patrons, because all I wanted to do was check the web for local news to try to find out what was going on. Thank goodness for the “students safe” part of the text. Turns out there was a wide-ranging car chase going on, and the driver had been identified as having an ex-wife who was employed by the district. Before too long, a second text arrived stating the lockdown was ended.

And that was when I had to excuse myself to go wipe my eyes in the bathroom. Because I’d had the tiniest of tiny tastes of what the Newtown parents had experienced. And it brought the tragedy to the forefront of my mind again.

Many people, myself no exception, have taken to social networking with opinions and activism of one sort or another in the wake of the tragedy. One thing I’ve noticed in between impassioned debates about gun control and mental health care, is that folks have been posting many links to music and poetry.

Only last week, I discovered the Leonard Cohen song, “Come Healing.” Somehow it seems perfect for the time. I can’t stop listening to it. I can’t even explain why it helps, but it helps. That’s the magic of music. It doesn’t make the grief go away, but it gets us through.

Many of my facebook friends have posted the link to the children’s choir singing “Silent Night” on Saturday Night Live. For the couple of minutes the song lasts, you’re given the feeling that somehow the world might be worth living in again some day. A few more friends have posted this Kahlil Gibran poem.

Now I see. Music and poetry are more than arts. They’re human instincts.

What songs and poems get you through?