dreams are like that

We have a rule in our house. Actually, it's more accurate to say I have a rule in our house, a personal rule that I've imposed, making it a defacto house rule: if you absolutely must talk about a dream you had, then you have 15 seconds, no more no less, in which to do so. Fifteen seconds, I'm not kidding.  The clock is ticking. Go.

This forces the speaker to drop all superfluous "it was our house but it wasn't our house," "woah, it was so weird, it was my childhood street but the houses were all different" description that doesn't contribute to the point of the dream.  Fifteen seconds forces the speaker to cut to the chase.  It's simply a waste of words and valuable time to talk about how the dream was different from real life. That's a given.  As Marianne once famously said, "Dreams are like that.  They're not real."

This wonderful rule has imposed a discipline that we adhere to now.  No longer do I cringe when Joe says, "I had the weirdest dream last night," not knowing how long the tale will take, how long I will spend waiting for something to come across in words which allows me to form a picture, any picture, of what he's talking about. Maybe this makes me a horrible person.  I think it just makes me efficient.

Today was one of those rare mornings on which we both had fifteen-second narratives to exchange.

Courtesy of my dream, I woke up angry at Joe at 4:28 am.  I was also cold and uncomfortable.  Even though we'd left Mr Burns sacked out on the couch when we went to bed, he had found his way to us, homing his way in between us and doing his usual expansion-to-three-times-normal-size trick in the dark of the night.  The snuggling is very cute, but also something we are going to have to deal with stat, unless we want another 14 years of interrupted sleep.

Anyway, in the dream Joe had left the front gate open while putting stuff in his truck and, in a moment of inattention, had allowed Mr Burns not only to scamper out but to dart across our busy street.  From where I stood frozen in the dream, I could make out Burns's legs across traffic, the rest of him obscured by the cars whizzing by, across the street where he'd gone to greet another dog.  I felt both scared and angry, since angry is my go-to emotion, the way most of my not-happy emotions come out, whether I've started out angry or not.  That's a whole other story though...

Probably I had this dream because Joe had told me just the day before that Mr Burns had actually darted out of the shop and across the street IN REAL LIFE.  With this puppy, in a way I don't remember experiencing with Jasper, both Joe and I are incredible worriers.  Maybe because the heartbreak of our loss of Jas is still keen, we are both delighted by every Burnsy detail but also nutty with fear about anything being wrong with him, hurting him, killing him.  Seriously, we're like new and nervous parents constantly checking: is he still breathing?

Joe's dream was that he saved me from drowning.  I jumped off a dock into clear water in an uninflated snorkeling vest and sank as he watched.  I was blowing into it, trying to inflate it, as I sank.  Managed to almost break the surface but then sank again, my hands in frustrated fists.  At which point he jumped in to get me and woke up.

Maybe this dream harks back to his memories of my night-dive vertigo experience in which I really did sink like a stone out of sight in the darkness, plummeting toward the bottom of that little bay in the Channel Islands.  Then too Joe went after me, though ultimately it was our dive instructor who grabbed me, understanding what had happened, why I was completely freaked out, feeling like I was spinning when I was absolutely still, sucking air, panicked eyes popping out of my head.  Or maybe the dream was just, as one of my Russian professors used to say in his thickly-accented English, "mental garrrrbage." Or maybe it really has to do with me sinking, being pissed off about my efforts to save myself not working, and sinking again.

Or not.

That's the thing.  Dreams are like that, they're not real.  It takes me a while to shake off their influence some days, when they're particularly weird.  This morning I'm stewing in them a little bit for what they reveal about our inner states.

Or not.

totem du mois

I am going to do everything possible to keep these words right in front of my eyes for the next few weeks, keep the image in my pocket like a rabbit's foot and pet it periodically,  its furry comfort at my fingertips.

Even if you think horoscopes are crap, right now this is so working for me.  Really, really just SO on the money.

http://freewillastrology.com/horoscopes/capricorn.html

gnats, not elephants

It's not the elephants that'll kill you. It's the gnats.

So goes the punchline of a story I carry around inside me, a story told to me by someone to whom it was told. I don't think I read it somewhere, but honestly, after all this time I don't even know any more. A friend returns from safari in Africa and, asked about the dangers of the wild, responds, "it's not the elephants that'll kill you.  It's the gnats."

If I've been quiet for a while, it's because I have been engulfed in a maelstrom of gnats, unable to see, do or think anything beyond the very immediate task of meeting sequential utterly insane deadlines at work.  The November holidays -- Veterans Day, Thanksgiving and the day following -- are theoretically lovely; unfortunately, the deadlines I labor under have no care for holidays.  They piss on holidays, in fact.  So I've wound up in my office the last two Sundays, in my desperate quest for gnat-free air.

The job is gnats right now.  Pesky. In my face. Inescapable but for moments.  Its real value to me right now -- other than supporting us in the reduced style to which we have become accustomed -- is that it is such a constant reminder of how much this is not the end-all for me. It keeps my determination, when I'm not exhausted, clearly focused on something else.

The gnats have been eating my brain lately, it's true, sucking every ounce of my energy.  Which makes me pretty boring.

So I've been reading, trying to fill my head with some sound other than the buzzing, pretty words on the 925 pages of 1Q84 and now The Phantom Tollbooth.

I feel a wind coming, a wind that will blast the bugs away.  In the meantime, I'm sitting here, resisting the temptation to swat wildly at them, conserving forces, making plans.

XX

"it's my job to write everything down, to take obsessive notes..."

As anyone with kids can attest, they are somehow magically their very neediest in the morning if you have a hang-over. Or morning sickness. It's like some kind of irritating prescience they have. At the point at which you are your weakest, your very own neediest, there they go with their pain-in-the-ass demands for attention and breakfast.

So it was this morning with Puppy. Normally he gets up, he eats, he does the business, he plays a smidge, we walk, then he curls up fast asleep and I write and stare and do my own morning stuff. This morning, because I was tired from being out on a school night to see David Sedaris in a packed house at the Marin Veterans Auditorium, Puppy didn't sleep even one wink. We went for a walk, we played, he bit the shit out of everything in sight. Finally, I had to bribe him into his crate with a peanut-butter smeared toy so I could have a moment's respite and peace, head in hands.

Admittedly, going to see someone read their stories on a school night does for most people a wild late-night make. But I remind me that we also had to go to Safeway afterward to pick up our respective breakfasts for today (since, typically, we were out of food). Adding that errand for cereal, milk, half and half and bread means I got to bed two hours past my bedtime. And completely amped and wound up at that, mind racing, replaying the sounds.

Because seeing Sedaris read was really and truly great. So inspiring. I didn't know what to expect, never having seen him read before, having only heard him on the radio or read his words at my leisure on the page. So when he strode out, papers in hand, blue keds on feet and opened his mouth, for a moment I was a little stunned by the sound of his voice. And then I started laughing.

And laughing.

I was happily aware of three things for the next two hours:1) that I was probably laughing too loud (and long and lingeringly and anticipatorily), 2) that, man, that Sedaris can put a story together, and 3) that damn, wouldn't he be just the kind of person I could hang out with forever?

He started with a story called, "I'm not running for President," written last summer. He also read, "Atta Boy," which I think I also read in The New Yorker. He read, "You're Trash. You're Trash. You're Family's Trash." He read entries from his diary, jokes he'd heard at book-signings, adventures in airports. There was more, but I can't remember it all right now, all blurred up as it is by the tears running down my face, their droplets all over the inside of my glasses. There were times I wished for Pause, Replay, because a sentence was so delightful. I wished for the lights to be on so I could scribble. But instead I just listened and laughed and laughed, swept up in the communal laughter of 300 or so people packing the house.

And only a little distracted by the woman sitting to our right who felt it necessary to explain exactly who Monica Lewinsky was to her 12-year-old daughter, right in the middle of the joke. Really, that can wait. Given the enormous cock also featured in that joke, and Lorena Bobbitt, and the knife, Monica’s the least of your issues.

Sedaris took a few questions at the end of his reading. My favorite thing he said was in response to a question about whether he ever exaggerated in his stories. He responded that the things he wrote were true even if people don't believe that they happened the way he said they did or that so-and-so said what's in the story. It's his job, he said, to be observant, to write everything down, to take obsessive notes on what happens every day. When you write every single day and you write down the crazy things that happen to you, that you overhear, that people say to you, well, there it is: who needs exaggeration? I’m paraphrasing, but that's what I took away. I mean, that’s what I wrote down, since that’s the precise point at which I started scribbling. I basically scribbled all night in my head, his reading just setting me off. It’s self-serving, really, to remember that part of what he said, but I selfishly need and want that reinforcement of my own tendency to scribble. For whatever it's worth.

Interesting that he chose to recommend a book about China as he was closing his remarks, interesting only because of the flack he got recently about what he’d written about China. People were unhappy with his descriptions, with what seemed to be a basic derision. Interesting.

I also loved something he read, a line in one of his diaries, about how what if the people we are at the airport is really who we are? That cracks me up so much.

I want to read and re-read everything he's ever written. His stories are so well-crafted, their arc so elegant. So much to learn there. And so much funny.

Wow, it was good to laugh last night, to listen to someone's brilliance in his own voice. Completely worth the pain-in-the-ass neediness this morning. Completely.

XX

Panchito preciosito

me and my brother

Not so long ago I got this idea to have my chart read. I'm of mixed emotions about this -- on the one hand, it's funny to live here and not have had it done, since it's the sort of thing one hears mentioned in normal, everyday conversation fairly regularly (I know, a function of my particular environment); on the other, while I am sure there is something to be gained from it even if it’s just blog-fodder, I still maintain a dose of skepticism. To know what was happening in the universe at the precise moment of my entry will certainly be interesting, and not at all like the time I went to the Dickens Fair and had my palm read. It will tell me things about myself that could be very helpful.  Regardless, I’m just a little reticent. But still curious.

To have your chart done, you need to know your exact time of birth. Which meant that I had to send my parents digging, since all those years later they couldn't remember what time of day I was born. Which meant my father had to carry to ladder up to the second floor, climb up into the storage space above the closet in the tv room, bring down box after box of family photos and memorabilia, searching for the one baby photo, taken minutes after birth, that includes the details that the birth certificate omits.

So now we know that I was born at 2:18pm, 6 lbs 6 oz, 17 1/2 inches.

While you're digging around in the photos, I asked my mother, could you see if you have any photos of Pancho? Since losing Jasper in March, I'd often thought about Panchito, my first dog, the brother my parents got me when pregnant with me. For four years it was just the two of us, no little sisters, just me and gentle and sweet Pancho who knew all of his commands in Spanish. I loved him so much, speaking long rolling endearments for him, Panchito preciosito, amorcito, that still roll through my memory when I see a certain kind of dog or even when murmuring to Mr Burns. Panchito disappointed me only once and not for long, when he refused to perform even one trick years later when we put on a circus on the Kanights' deck on Liberty Street. I left the stage, head down, in time for the Three Ms to start their act, surprised and disappointed. But for the rest, for long childhood years, he was the very model of a good dog, a perfect brother: gentle, sweet, loving.

It's amazing that when I finally found pictures of him, after hours of digging through those same boxes at my parents, he is so much smaller than I remember. And brindle! I remembered the warmth of his brown coat, but brindle? I didn’t know it. But those eyes, those I knew so well: always so warm, looking at me with so much tenderness. It's such a pleasure to see him again, to add the image, refreshed, to the load of sensory memory I carry around inside.

wow, Sari, my mother: gorgeous! but i only have eyes for panchito

later, older: so cute!

I still haven’t had my chart done, even though the exact time of birth went off, by email, to the astrologer in question. I may still do it, but really looking at Panchito, holding the treasure of these photos in my hands, I feel like I already know everything I need to about how the circumstances of my birth made me who I am and how the path will unfold.

Ay, perrito preciosito: so much love to you, even now.

XX

Elevenses

photo credit: The Baltimore Chop

I was going to write a whole thing about 11/11/11 11:11 since it's apparently de rigueur, but then, as things go when I'm awake in the middle of the night and reading and eating toast, stumbled on something that I think is more interesting. Related and more interesting.

So today is supposed to be a super-auspicious and romantic day. Tons of people apparently are marrying today to take advantage of the good luck (or so I'm told) connected with this date. In Chinese apparently, "The numbers rhyme with one husband, one wife and one soul ... and signifies a marriage that would last a lifetime." If nothing else, marrying on 11/11/11 guarantees an anniversary date that's easy to remember.

Personally I will be marking the date by initiating a new habit of taking Elevenses -- taking on some refreshment late-morning, between breakfast and lunch. If I were a hobbit, naturally Elevenses would come between second breakfast and luncheon.  I'll skip second breakfast.

While thinking about all this -- that is, during first breakfast -- I'm reading the NY Times on-line, after a quick scan of the SF Chronicle.  That's always the sequence: check email and Facebook, check SF Gate for local "news" and celebrity gossip, check NY Times for what's really going on and for inspiration.  Insomnia and getting up really early are what make it possible for me to do this -- buy me the time to let my mind run, to just drift and click from one idea to the next, see what turns up.

Because I was already thinking about all the 11/11 marriages, of course I could not resist the attraction of "Bound by Love and Disability, and Keeping a Vow Until the End,"  the sweet love story of a couple with cerebral palsy who met at 7, eloped at 37, and were together until the wife Noemi's death this week at 53.  Edwin, her husband, took care of her until the end, to the best of his abilities, with a lot of help naturally, as we all do.  Everybody wants this -- to love and be loved, to be with the beloved and care for him or her.  It's fundamental to who we are, I think.  No matter what day of the man-made calendar we tie the knot, there it is: we're knot-tiers.

Edwin and Noemi reminded me that in the mid-80s I worked for a couple with cerebral palsy, when I was a graduate student in Russian Language and Literature at SF State.  Stephen and Ethel Dunn were brilliant scholars who'd set up their own research non-profit and operated out of their gorgeous house in Kensington.  I'd ride the BART, then the bus, to their place from my flat in the grimy pre-gentrified Mission, disembarking finally in the Berkeley hills, in trees and green and quiet, and walk the remaining mile to their house.  I did mostly word processing for the for-profit side of their business, and transcription of Stephen's translations from audio tapes for the non-profit side.  Both Stephen and Ethel had this huge range of expertise and creativity, their minds completely unbound by the wheelchairs their bodies lived in.  They were smart and funny and sweet - I was always inspired by the steel-trap of their two minds and their love for each other.

And, I digress, they also had one of those libraries with the rolling shelves, just stocked with reference books in Russian and English.  Poetry, too.  I'd turn the little steering wheel to open the shelves and fetch whatever was needed.  So covet(ed) that shelving!

Naturally, because it's Let Your Mind Roam Free time, I Googled Stephen and Ethel.  Stephen passed away in 1999 I was sorry to read in Ethel's lovely memorial piece.  I emailed Ethel immediately after reading this news -- it's disconcerting that my message bounced back a minute later, the victim of a "permanent fatal error."

Those two, Stephen and Ethel, loved each other madly.  Edwin and Noemi, too, loved each other madly.  Who could ask for anything more?  Surely to find each other and love each other: that's the best luck there is, right?

On 11/11/11, may we take a little tea and a savory snack between breakfast and luncheon and use the time to think about love, to appreciate the love we have, to scheme ways to make more.  At 11:11 as I lift a cup to my lips, I will be doing just that, grateful and inspired to consider how my own love story will live on after me.  


XX

Twenty Four

Twenty four years ago, when I myself was 24, I was in my last days of being extremely pregnant. I was absolutely side-show enormous, pushing past the very outer limits of maternity wear. By then, I think I lived in one of my Uncle Ben's large plaid shirts, an XL long-sleeve thermal top and black leggings with a forgiving waistband. I also lived in my Uncle Ben's former house near San Francisco State University, thanks to my parents, so it was always gray and cool, perfect weather for me when insulated by an extra 25 pounds, 9 of which, though I didn't know it at the time, were all baby.

It pleases me to count the days, to know that in just a couple, I will cross a big boundary: I will have been someone's mother for half my life. And then, every day after that, for MORE than half my life.

Other than breathing perhaps, I can't think of many other things I've done for 24 years straight, for half my life or more. OK, drinking coffee: sure, that's true. And reading books and being friends with people I've known since 8th grade (Scott, that's you) and high school (Old Joe, Frances, Lisa and more): OK, those are true, too. But still, half a life is a long, long time to be one thing, to be someone's mom, to know that that creature over there is half me, half someone-else, connected and also free, of the same cloth and yet completely individual.

There's a lot of delight in that.

Twenty four years ago I thought I was prepared for what is, essentially, something for which nothing can prepare you. I thought I knew; I didn't know shit. And yet, everything turned out great. Knowing is not essential. Preparation is helpful, but also not essential. I'm still learning to be unprepared, to leave room to be stunned, left wordless and breathless, by all that I don't know, that I can't know.

On Monday night I'll go through my annual ritual of reliving the whole experience: the slow start to the contractions, their insistence throughout the night, the early morning ride in my parents' VW camper to the hospital, The Kid's sunny birth at 2:16pm. I'll re-feel echoes of that long-ago pain, and celebrate the moment I first saw my boy with my own eyes, all 22" of him, all 9 pounds, purple feet and hands in fists, drawing that first long breath and wailing his arrival.

Happy 24th to my sweet child. Happy 24 years of motherhood to me.

It's good to be here, half a life later. So good.