no balloons

My husband’s aunt is 85, and she was just diagnosed with ovarian cancer.  It’s late—the cancer, the time, the life.  But the life is precious; they are all precious. 

We visited her on a Wednesday night, just after she’d had a reaction to one of her medications.  It left her stranded beneath herself, somewhere between sleep and panic.  It was temporary.  Did she know?

I sat on the chair beside her, and she reached for me, squeezing my hand. When she fell asleep, I took my hand back, and she awoke again and held both arms out toward me.  I hugged her.  When she fell back to sleep, I got up and surveyed the room.

On the guest’s sofa, far too small for anyone to sleep (though a daughter or granddaughter slept there every night), were magazines and candy bars and assorted toiletries.  In the corner of the ceiling, seven foil balloons, adorned with cheer and imploring Margaret to GET WELL SOON, floated.

1.  Don’t buy me balloons.

I started a list that moment.  No balloons.  These are for children having their tonsils out.  Anyone who brings me a balloon while I am being treated for or recovering from whatever ails me enough that I am in a hospital will be strangulated with their cheerful pastel ribbons. Am I giving too much weight to these helium-filled mood lifters? 

2.  Tell me over and over and over again the truth about my condition.

Make sure you know I understand.  I will squeeze your hand once for yes.   

3.  Ask me lots of yes questions.

“Do you understand?”  Yes.  “Do you want a pizza?”  Yes.   “Should Chuck Prophet come sing at your bedside?”  Yes. Yes. Yes.

4.  If I am never going to get well, get me out.

Don’t let me die in a hospital.  Take me home, and get my daughter to play me out.

I need a longer list: rules about hygiene (mine and yours); lasts—last food, last beer, last song; quality of life stuff. 

Do you think about these things, too?  Does your mind go there when you are beside a loved one’s hospital bed?  Do you look at her gray skin, then at the perky balloons on the ceiling and feel a little bit of rage?

My back hurts. I feel the impending doom of a two-disc fusion.  I worry about the CT scan that checks the progression of my lymphoma.  I fear the fear.  At work, I take a pill and try to put all my black thoughts into a bubble, float that bubble up toward the ceiling. 

But the bubble hits the built-in sprinkler and pops.  Words fall out—on my head, my shoulders, my desk.  I build them into poems. And directives.

collective voices

In the mornings at Baltimore School for the Arts, all the music students (150? 200?) gather in one of the recital rooms and sing. When my daughter shadowed there, this morning exercise was the standout part of the day. Though the word is overused, awesome describes the power of so many voices, whether in unison or in delicious harmony.

The collective voice is why I put it out there.

Not all of it, mind you. But I believe that you don’t get what you want by blowing a dandelion clock toward the heavens. (And you don’t get anything you’d be proud of by blowing someone behind the shed.)

So when I want—or need—something, I just say it. A lot. That covers anything from broken plates to words for a poem to collective prayers. And I believe a collective prayer is as tangible a thing as the broken dishes that compose my mosaics and the words that compose my poems. It’s why when my dad is in the hospital and not getting better, like now, I tell the universe.

My universe comprises, at least, 672 Facebook friends. It’s not a lot of people by any measure (a close friend of mine who is on top of every trend decades before anyone else has 3,406 friends). But I know almost all of them. And I make an effort to engage them in some kind of meaningful discussion or to puff up some small talk and make it personal; you won’t find a mere “happy birthday” from me on your special day.

It’s deliberate, but it’s not calculating. I engage people I like and respect, and my reward is another beautiful voice in the chorus of people pulling for me to get my book published, my dad to get well, my husband to keep playing guitar, my daughter to grow with poise and grace, and my best dogs to go in peace.

I don’t believe in a capital-g god, but I do believe in synchronicity (and most of the Police’s body of work—worth a listen if they’ve been long neglected by you). Sometimes you get messages from the darnedest places: your iPod on shuffle—in a Police song, in an email from a long lost friend, in a dream, in the sound the wind makes when you leave your window down a crack. I listen to these.

Maybe this is an apology to the people who think I over-share. If it’s a sign of strength and independence to ignore what others think, it’s a sign of stubbornness and arrogance, too. We should be respectful of others’ opinions, and our minds should be open enough that we can change them when we have new information. We should be changing every day. You never step in the same stream twice.

But there’s a solution to the annoying over-sharer that doesn’t include unfriending (or defacing, as some call it). Because I have already learned that asking for what I want brings favorable results most of the time. Putting it out there brings sandwiches to my dad in the hospital. It brings my family hot meals after my back surgery. It brings me poetry. And, best of all, it brings a chorus of hope and love and strength, and I can feel it—even without 100 likes and 58 comments.

Last week was the much-anticipated, sleepless high-school acceptance week. I wanted my daughter to be accepted to Baltimore School for the Arts. I know she will thrive there, because I know how driven and how focused she is. I remember being at Goucher and hearing the grad students in my program read. I thought: They are all so good! They can’t have made the one mistake with me! I want her to feel that kind of self-respect. So I share the things about my daughter that amaze me, and I say out loud every day that she is a prize. I tell any of the 672 friends on Facebook who are listening so they can charge the air.

Do I believe that all those voices had a part in my daughter’s acceptance (one of 125 out of 1,200+ applicants)? Her talent and brilliance clinched it. But yes! Those voices found a way to imbue her performance with a little bit of magic.

And when those judges drove home from work, they cracked their windows, and the wind said, “Serena.”

you're the tops

Topping my list of writing devices is The List. Lists are bare-bones instructions, yet they are also the meat. They are written with an affectionate detachment. They mean everything—and nothing. They are shallow, yet they come from deep within your soul.

In my favorite books are lists of kinds of apples and kinds of orchids, and there is poetry in the arrangement. You keep reading because it sounds like music. My favorite list appears in my number two favorite song of all time:

a bag of dead kittens and mufflers and engines
an army of rats and Colt 45
bottles and tires and shipwrecks and trashcans
a porcelain Jesus, your old Christmas trees

—"It's Only Money, Tyrone," by Marah

I recently donated fifty bucks to WTMD. I try to do it every year, even though the radio doesn’t turn me on much. But this year, I tuned in during the station’s fund drive—and its Top 500 Songs of All Time countdown. I gave because I wanted to belong to the club that voted for the Buzzcocks (“Ever Fallen In Love,” #195), even though I’d have to belong to the club that voted for “Free Bird,” too.

But nostalgia is a powerful love maker. There’s a familiarity and warmth that has you singing along with #149, smiling—if you’re of a certain age, of course. The age of our collective consciousness changes the game. It’s why you find songs by Adele and the Black Keys and Mumford and Sons and My Morning Jacket on that list, despite their having zero traction. These songs are someone’s favorites at the moment. How does yesterday’s hit overthrow the song you’ve loved for a whole life? “The Boys are Back in Town,” for instance. “Bennie and the Jets.”

My husband wants to know why we make lists of favorites at all. Who cares but the list maker? We all do! Lists are how you find a compatible mate or friend. Lists remind us who we were, who we have become, and who we still are. They bring back the summer of “Sarah Smile,” when Andrea Palefsky and I fell in love with the same boy on the beach. They remind us of the summer we pretended to love “Kashmir” for a boy—and found we really loved the song but not the boy.

My lists don’t change much. Sometimes my top four films rotate positions, but they are, always, Bladerunner, American Beauty, Lost in Translation, and Fight Club (the newest). Sometimes #5 is Garden State. Sometimes it’s Big Fish. It might even be The Runaways.

Of my top five songs, four did not make it.

5. “Bennie and the Jets,” Elton John
4. “Young Americans,” David Bowie
3. “The Boys are Back in Town,” Thin Lizzy
2. “It’s Only Money, Tyrone,” Marah

My number one song of all time rarely changes. I am, apparently, right.

And while two of my top three musicians did not make the list (to hear him is to love him), the third—the one who makes my monkey dance, the one who put the ram in my rama-lama-ding-dong, was the monkey in the middle, caught at #276.

My friend Kim drove us an hour away to watch him play for only an hour on Saturday night. We talked to him after the show, just as we did the last time—a year ago—and found him, once again, good and kind and interesting. He was also interested. He remembered me and The Book, asked about my recent work.

So—you know. Chuck Prophet "put the bomp in the bomp-shooby-dooby-bomp." He did. He's number one.

[uproar]

If it’s not mostly quarters, is change just unnecessary weight and an unsatisfying jangle?

We’re used to doing the things we do the way we always do them. We’re efficient—and complacent—that way. Most of us don’t even rearrange our furniture or get an entirely new hairstyle, despite all the evidence that change does our brains and our bodies good. Something as simple as driving a different way every so often can keep our minds from lapsing into forgetfulness, and the muscle confusion that comes from changing workout routines is encouraged by fitness gurus. We can even suffer from a phenomenon known as taste fatigue when we eat the same things all the time. (I rotate my ales regularly.)

But this uproar over the latest round of Facebook changes?

In all these years, all that Facebook stuff—all the networking and friendship and rekindling of old flames and sharing of videos and photos, all the love and support, all the drunken midnight status updating and the PopCap games—is still free. So if you quit in a mostly unnoticed protest over what you may mistakenly believe is yet another invasion of your privacy, understand that you miss more than LOLCATS and vomiting pumpkins and bad grammar.

Here’s the real problem, the real reason you are aggravated. You’ve been on Facebook for more than a year, and you still don’t know how to use it. You have a useful tool in your hands, but it might as well be a weapon. You post but don’t assume responsibility for the things you say, to whom.¹ You can’t tell the difference between spam and porn, and your desire for the latter by clicking the former leads to an embarrassing tell. We’ve all made the mistake, but so many of you don’t know what to do about it immediately to make it go away.

Like VCRs, Facebook is not intuitive. You need to read the directions or “take the tour.” But most people don’t want to stop for a few minutes to peek at privacy settings, organize contacts, disable applications. You actually do have a right to complain about the president if you don’t vote. But how can you complain that the posts you make available to all your friends suddenly show up on a feed where all your friends can see it? Especially since the first time you complained about Facebook’s changes, it was because you didn’t see enough of your friends’ updates?!

One of the first privacy-related things I did when I joined Facebook was put my friends into categories. From day one, from the first friend I got, I started lists of people—NOGLI for people in my neighborhood; Homies for people who live in town; School of Rock kids and School of Rock parents. I have a category called “Anything Goes” populated by folks I know won’t mind my politics, my bawdy sense of humor, my cussing, my issues. When I post things that aren’t appropriate for kids, I exclude them for only those posts. I turn off my wall for people in the category called “People I Don’t Really Know.”

A few weeks ago, a social media expert was talking about the new “lists” feature developed to compete with Google+'s circles. I said, “New? Facebook has always had lists!” He was incredulous. Even the experts don't know how to use the medium!

Some remarkable things have happened to me through Facebook. I sold scarves when I had back surgery, so I could afford an expensive red leather electric recliner. I got a lot of freelance work. I sold photographs. I got people to come out to Serena’s gigs and my poetry readings. I found old friends and made a hundred new ones. I fraternized with rock stars (one of them even made my photo his profile picture today!) and shared sunsets and songs and knowledge and jokes, good and bad, with everyone I know or almost know.

And yes: I share. You could call me an over-sharer, but don’t. I am a nonfiction writer and a poet, with all the eccentricities those titles bring. Plunk me down in a land called Facebook, and I am at home. Responding to me with a “TMI” or an un-friending is like bitching about drunk people in a bar. Some people have a drink or two. Some are the designated drivers. Some get tipsy. And some just need to kill the pain of the shit of their lives. Most of us have been all those people at some time.

Deal with them—with us—compassionately. Even on Facebook.

And quit yer whining about it.



¹A few months ago during a political scandal, my husband, a teacher of social studies (which includes politics and current events), stuffed his bike shorts with about twenty pairs of socks, poking fun at Anthony Weiner. It was an effort to make me laugh, something I was doing with less frequency after the lymphoma diagnoses (my dad’s and mine). I posted this photo on my Facebook page—invisible to kids, despite it being harmless—because it was the funniest thing I’d seen in weeks

Though I have but a handful of school affiliates as friends on Facebook, someone reported me to the boss. My guess is it’s someone who doesn’t know how to use Facebook, someone who didn’t realize that I’d had the good sense to restrict the photo’s visibility. I sent them all an email explaining why I had to remove them from my page.

While I do take responsibility for the things I post, I ask my Facebook friends to take responsibility for friendship. If you come across a questionable post, an email or a phone call works much better than being a tattletale.

flotsam and jett-some

It's probably normal for people to give their pets nicknames in ways they wouldn't think to name their friends¹—unless they're the guy making the copies. Marty's and my first dog, Beowulf King o' the Geats Miller, became The Wulfman; Wulf McMannus, Attorney at Dog; Woof; and Dogfaceboy. Cleopatra was Queen of Denial, Cleo-yo, Cleedle Dee, and Ledo, after Serena's baby name for her. Their baby, Buddha, was Boo-Boo and Boo Didley. And Chance has a few of his own: Chancey Gardener, Chancery Cursive, and, especially at Christmas, Chancer Dancer Prancer Vixen. (Yes, he answers to each of them, and so did our other dogs.)

Enter Jett. In her month with us, she's become Jetty, Jettster, Jett Ski, Jettison (the Medicine), Jetty Spaghetti, and, sadly, Jettitals. And, sadly, she answers to none of her names and to no one.

After she backed out of her collar at the park two weeks ago, I've been cautious on our walks. I've had a recurring dream that Jett runs out the front door and into traffic, that a neighbor refuses to grab her when he can and instead reprimands me for not having trained my dog. "She's new! She's new!" I yell to him, crying. "She's just new!" It stresses me out to know that if she leaves, she might be gone forever.

I've always been a conscientious pet owner, especially when it comes to training. I don't like my dogs to bark outside, so I make them stop after they've gotten me the message that the neighbor is tending her garden. I don't allow jumping on people, so I make them stop a little louder. We're all consistent—and on the same page in the dog-training manual. We don't hit, we sometimes treat, and we use the dog's name for commands but not for reprimands.

Jett's education has been slow. She came to us from three months in a crate and had the kind of energy that said she worried she'd be put back in one at any moment. She was trained to do nothing (except pee and poop outside—an important thing, yes). Within a week of my care, she could sit and give a paw (even give the "other paw" when asked). Last week, she still wouldn't come inside when we opened the door and would often run away when we reached for her. It sometimes took twenty minutes to catch her! But she's learning to trust us, so she comes in half the time.

Lady Jetterly's Lover, as I sometimes call her, has not yet stolen my heart; it took a while to get used to Chance and Cleo, too, as they were not babies with us. I can tell, with every full night of sleep and every Frisbee she catches, that she's going to be one hell of a dog.

This morning, the vet gave Jett two thumbs up and a Lyme disease shot. He was much happier to see her than she was to see him. She started shaking on the drive over and continued to shiver during the visit, like most of my dogs, despite how much fun we try to make it. Yea! A ride! Woo hoo! While we were in the office, she refused to exhibit any kind of wild behavior. So of course the vet was incredulous when I told him of her mad romping in pine tar and mud and dirt, her noisy play growling and mouthiness, the maniacal facial expressions when taunting us with our own shoes and socks, the nipping and yipping and jumping. When they commended me on how well I'd trained her, I was incredulous!

I paid my bill (a whopping forty dollars) and overheard an older woman who had come in. She told the receptionist that she was bringing a dog to be put to sleep and wanted to pay in advance. My heart sank. It was like someone was picking at the fresh scab of grief. I took Jett to the car and opened the hatch. A man my age was in the parking lot waiting, near the grass, for his dog; that's the usual pre-visit pit stop area. We stepped back, and Jett took a running leap into the truck, where I gave her a kiss and closed the door.

I looked back and saw the man's beautiful big dog on a leash. I am the dog yeller, so I called, "Hi, pretty doggy! What a sweetie pie!" and then I saw the woman from inside. They were together. She took the leash from the man and walked the dog slowly toward the door. "She's old," the lady said. "I know," I replied. And then I was full-on sobbing. "I'm sorry," I said to her, choking on tears. She thanked me, and it was ten minutes before I could see clearly enough to drive away.

It never gets easier to lose a loved one. In spite of that, it never gets any harder to love.


- - - - - - - - - -

¹With one exception: I have ten friends named Kim on my Facebook. I see or speak with five of them several times a week and have taken to combining their first name and last syllable. E.G. Kim Carlin is Kimlin; Kim Stanbro is Kimbro; Kim Webster is Kimster; Kim Hosey is Kimsey; and Kim Myslinski is Kimski.

she will rock you—if there's time

My daughter is running for student council president. I'm torn. She's a great kid who will do a great job. But when will she have the time?

I used to tsk at all those moms out there with multiple kids and a mini-van, moms who had a full-time job just in carting their kids around. My best friend has two children in two different schools many miles apart. The son plays a sport that practices an hour away, takes a weekly instrument lesson, has hockey games on the weekend; he's also in a band with Serena. The daughter has high-school stuff. But their mom works more than thirty hours a week and has little help from her soon-to-be ex-husband, who lives an hour away. How she doesn't melt down is beyond my comprehension. I melt down just making this list.

Yesterday was the first full band practice in weeks (the Oxi-morons have six members). Afterward, the parents sat down at the table to schedule rehearsals; they have a paying gig coming up. The nine-year-old drummer lives an hour north but goes to the same school as four of the kids; the ten-year-old bassist lives twenty minutes away but goes to a different school and has a math tutor, an instrument lesson, and Arena Rock rehearsal at School of Rock each week—as well as two working parents who can't get him here. Two kids have music lessons and soccer, and one of them is on the Tom Petty show at SoR. Serena gave up her soccer, reluctantly, realizing that she couldn't fit it in among the two weekly SoR (Tom Petty and Led Zeppelin) rehearsals; the once-weekly TWIGS saxophone clinic, guitar lessons, and bat mitzvah lessons; and the daily practice for each thing, in addition to weekday homework, band practice, and daily care for a bearded dragons. What do we do if she becomes president?

I've seen all those articles about over-achieving kids, parents who push their sons and daughters to be all they can be before their sixteenth birthday; I still tsk at them. But sometimes the parents are pushing the kids to drop something. Heaven knows we don't want to be their chauffeurs. How do you choose a thing to take away? Sports are good for kids' bodies, and music is good for their minds—and both teach teamwork, cooperation, good sportsmanship, and things I find so much more useful to them than homework.

Serena has been sick for three weeks; I've been down for two. We finally had a spare moment Sunday morning, and I took us to Patient First. We returned with two antibiotic prescriptions—hers for strep, mine for a sinus infection. After yesterday's band practice, the girl sat at the kitchen table watching a rerun of a dumb sit-com on Disney—one of the shows about kids with no parents or magic parents or parents so rich they're on a perpetual cruise. My husband hates that she watches it and gave her the usual raft of crap about it.

I had to remind him of all the things she does well, including the fact that she's a straight-A student who can play Pink Floyd's "Us and Them" on saxophone—and that she did much of it for the first three weeks of school while having strep and a cold! So what if she wants to veg out in front of the TV or play a game on the computer? So what if there's a witch riding a bicycle through the smelly-socks air in her room?

This morning, I fed her Throat Soother tea, oatmeal, and a banana. She didn't have time to drink all the tea or eat any of the banana. And right now, she's giving the speech she worked on until 9:00 p.m. yesterday, and then the kids will vote. My fingers are crossed. If she wins, she goes to meet the mayor. If she doesn't, it's one less thing to do. May she get the thing she needs.

it's only rock and roll, tyrone

The river’s muddy guts had backed up, exploded
Spillin’ out the facts, fast and a lot
Spillin’ out the facts of the city’s dirty secrets
Like a city surfacing from out of the brack

"It's Only Money Tyrone," Marah

I saw my favorite still-together (though sometimes just barely) band last weekend at the 8x10. They played to about twenty still-living (though sometimes just barely) people. It was a Sunday night. As if that were an excuse.

Marah is Nick Hornby’s favorite band, too (About A Boy, High Fidelity); you can trust him. Trust Sarah Vowell and Bruce Springsteen and Steve Earle. But most of all trust me. You missed something serious.¹

Favorite has different manifestations these days. As a kid, I pinned pictures of my favorites to the bedroom wall. If the poster was nice, I caught the corners with the flat part of the tack, rather than poke a hole in the paper, a trick my decorator mother taught me. I clipped and collected articles about the bands from Creem and Circus and Trouser Press and any other magazine that featured them. I knew all the members’ names and what they looked like and all the lyrics to all the songs and owned all the records, including the Japanese bootlegs and the colored vinyls, which I bought at Howie’s Music Machine in Pikesville, where, it seemed, older hipsters spent the entire day in their leather jackets, leaning on the racks, listening to music no one else had ever heard of, where I spent the day when I became an older hipster, leaning, listening. If Ivan Kral had walked down any street, I’d have recognized him. No way could Lenny Kaye or Earl Slick or Julian Cope escape me.

When you got home from the record store, you could run your fingernail down the middle of your album jacket, which was wrapped in thin cellophane, and in seconds you were transported to a place you stayed for hours. If you were lucky, inside would be something more than just a white sleeve with a circular cutout that made the record label visible. Lyrics were especially precious, but posters were adored. And there was another secret about a record: in that end space of smooth, unrecorded vinyl, you could sometimes find a hand-printed message like “ANT MUSIC….”

So who are Marah? They are a gritty, loud rock band, in the tradition of Springsteen—but with the edge of the Replacements and the poetry of Dylan. I would probably recognize the lead singer/guitarist and founding member, Dave Bielanko, on the street, but only the fishnets gave Christine Smith away in the ladies room at 8x10. I don’t know all the words to a single song by heart except the second best song ever recorded, “It’s Only Money Tyrone.”² I think I know the name of only one album (Kids in Philly) besides the new one.

Part of the blame falls on a group that keeps breaking up and replacing its members. I asked the newest, guitarist Bruce Derr, why Marah frequently disbands. Hired three months ago for the tour, Derr’s not even on the latest record, Life is a Problem (which was released on vinyl and cassette). “It’s definitely not Dave,” he said. “Dave’s one of the six nicest people I’ve ever met in my life.”

My friend Kim and I don’t really believe him, partly because Dave's the one constant, and partly since Bielanco basically called us all douches when we didn’t clap at the end of one of the songs. I think we were awestruck. Honestly, even if we could tell the song was finished, the band immediately started the next without a pause, and then Dave mumbled a conversation with himself about our lack of applause.

Dave, we loved it. You are brilliant.

“I really don’t know why [members quit],” Derr said. It's not like they bitch and gripe in the van, which carries the four men and one woman and all their gear from here to there to way over there, with Bielanko and Derr at the wheel; they're the ones who don't drink. Mostly, he told me, they ride in a comfortable quiet.

I'd like to give the talented (keyboards, accordion, harmonica, vocals, coolness) Christine Smith a medal for sticking it out so long—“five and a half years—longer than anybody,” she said. Except Dave, the only original member of the band on this tour.

But that’s a small part of the story. Most of the blame lies with the digital download. It is bad enough wrestling with a CD’s shrink wrap, then trying to pry the too-sticky silver tape from the ends before getting the damned thing open, only to crack the door off the plastic case. Sometimes you get lyrics and photos inside, but, Sonny, I’m too old and tired and busy to get my magnifying glass to read that shit. And when it’s one of those fancy folding things, trying to refold it and squeeze it back into the slot of the front of the case when it’s suddenly expanded and puffed out, like a fucking map, is even more frustrating. And then—FUCK this CD, bitch! YOU listen to it.

Now we have the digital download. We go to iTunes and buy whatever songs we want, sometimes not even a band’s whole album. We stick the songs on our iPods, where they compete with a thousand other songs we’ve not listened to enough, and now what? How do we know the words or the band members’ faces if we are not listening to the records in our bedrooms all day long, staring at the album cover, the images and words etching themselves forever in our minds the way serial numbers and “ANT MUSIC…” “FOR SEX PEOPLE” are etched in the vinyl of Adam and the Ants’ first album?

Who the hell is Marah? No wonder you missed them. But I didn’t. I didn’t miss one moment of their energy and power. I didn’t miss the chance to yell, “ONLY MONEY!” when it looked like Dave was trying to decide which last two songs to do, and I didn’t miss him say, “Yeah, let’s make this one count” to Bruce, who did make it count.

I didn’t miss the chance to hear my new number one favorite song of all time, live, like they meant it, like it's never been played before, ever, from my favorite band, Marah.






¹You miss something serious when you miss Chuck Prophet, too.*

²”Thunder Road.”**

* I would say you’re missing something serious when you miss Bob Schneider, but I’m wishing a lot of you drunk fratboys and party girls would miss that show altogether and leave him to the drunk grownups.

**The Boys are Back in Town” is number 3.

summer lovin', had me a blast

Today, I nearly suffocated in my daughter’s room, buried alive under a mountain of clothing, a lot of it gorgeous, most of it too small. Half still had tags; the other half was barely worn because my daughter prefers to wear the same pair of shorts and the same Beatles t-shirt every day. After she’s worn something else, she drops it on the floor of her closet, where it soon becomes buried under the next thing that’s not her favorite shorts. For two hours this morning, she tried on everything, every single piece of clothing, including costumes appropriated for School of Rock shows. As the hills of shirts, pants, dresses, and school clothes eroded, new mountains formed—these marked for uniform exchange night or a friend's daughter or her cousins. I filled paper shopping bags until they tore. The air in Serena's room was suddenly oppressive, mixed with fabric chemical smell and anxious lizard smell and stress armpit smell—mine and hers. We had to take a break before tackling the drawers.

This is part of our back-to-school ritual. So are wondering whether we skipped this back-to-school ritual last year and lamenting the brisk disappearance of summer vacation. What too-moist beast ate the days? Yet when I look back on the friendships I forged in three short months, the places I visited¹, the pictures I took, the nose I pierced, the concerts² and meals and leisurely drinks I enjoyed, I feel fulfilled and lucky.

While my husband was on his annual retreat in Zion Canyon, Utah, his personal mecca, from where he sent us amazing letters, we were each supposed to write a song to be played upon his return. Serena started some complicated piece about Freddie Kruger. Marty played some chords he didn’t commit to memory. But I did my assignment with gusto, writing what I call “The Country-ass Song.” The lyrics start like this:

You keep moonshine whiskey on the kitchen sink
So when you’re doin’ the dishes you can take a drink
And wash it all away
Like you try to do every day

Spy your girl through the window on the tire swing
You always told your baby she could do anything
But so could you
And this is what you choose to do

So no regrets, no tears
Throw in the towel
Toss back a few more beers.

It’s not autobiographical. Well, the beers part, maybe. But I do like my days. Even today. Especially today. This kind of purge and reorganization is spiritually cleansing and enlightening (note to relatives and friends: don’t buy the girl anything pink or with any kind of heart or flower or bow). Sure, summer’s a tough act to follow—this weekend alone is jam packed with concerts and dinners and lunches and company. But autumn always kicks ass!

Now, post-ritualistic closet upheaval, I feel more ready to let go of the summer of 2010, one of the hottest summers on record; the summer of Resurrection in a can; the summer of a bouffant ‘do and Hairspray at the pool; of running five miles again; of dinner and drinks with my homegirl, Sheri Booker, and our agent, Betsy Lerner; sushi with Bahhhhhhhb’s drummer; crabcakes with Monica Mansfield. So long, summer of poetry and music and friends and one delightful, glittery gem twinkling beside my nostril.




Shameless Plugs

¹I spent the perfect amount of time at the beach—with my sister’s family and my daughter, as well as with a new friend, Betsy Merrill. I overcame my fear of flying to attend the Madison, Wisconsin wedding celebration of a dear friend, Gabi Helfert, overcoming severe stage fright to play her and her new partner (and my new dear friend), Joey Johannsen, a song. I stayed with a beautiful woman, Lee Davenport, whom I met online, and visited with the talented printmaker, Tracy Ducasse, my funniest friend , Teena, and the beautiful writer, Carrie Kilman. People visited me, too—like Janer and Joy, two pals from back when the Internet was only just invented! My house has been full of love this summer. One good pal, Monica Mansfield, examined my old dog, Cleo, and brought her medicine; instant love right there. And Gail Dragon was my buddy for an overnighter, seeing Jason Ager at a tea house before driving home to North Carolina. I relished my time with BFFs, too—Kim Webster, Kim Stanbro.


²Peter Frampton, Yes, Bahhhhhhhb (Bob Schneider, for the uninitiated), Taylor and Evan, Justin Trawick (this Friday, 8x10, CD release!), Jason Ager, The Dead [Fucking] Weather(!). And the best: I watched my daughter nail sax, guitar, and vocals on The Beatles and Pink Floyd, and I watched her band, the Oxi-Morons, play a block party. Oh, and she plays again Saturday and Sunday at Angel's Rock bar, the hits of 1970, followed Sunday by Marah!

pierced

When she discovered that the glittery gem on my nose went all the way through it, my mother cried. “You’re forty- [inaudible mumbling],” she stuttered through the tears, as if there were a deadline on body mutilation.

The good news is that since it’s not a pre-existing condition (like tattoos and, now, tongue piercing), I’m not out of the will. And after the initial shock, it was business as usual—telling jokes at brunch, planning my daughter’s bat mitzvah. I sat to the right of my mother, the glittery booger visible only to my husband and daughter.

No one who has seen me has asked why I did it. Maybe it’s because it doesn’t seem out of character. Maybe it looks as though it’s always been there. When I tell people on the phone or online, about half of them ask why.

I did it because I could. Because it would only hurt for a minute. I did it because I met a woman twenty-five years ago, a waitress at Bertha’s, who had a stud in her nose, and she was exquisite—certainly not in spite of it and maybe not even because of it, but it gave her a pinch of exotica. Since that day I longed for one of my own. I did it because it had just enough risk—a little bit of pain but not too much, a little bit of permanence but not too dramatic should I decide to just rock the empty large pore for the rest of my life. And it’s pretty. I like it. I can’t think of a better reason than the last one.

For awhile, I got the stick-on kind, just to see how it would look. When I’d remember, which was rarely, I’d carefully remove one diamond chip from the adhesive and drop it down the bathroom sink drain. Then, with the drain stopper in place, I’d remove a second one and affix it with Liquid Bandage, which would sting and smell bad for a few seconds. I’d go out somewhere, and, within an hour or two, I would scratch my eye, accidentally brushing against the chip, which would disappear into the ether.

Those who’d caught its glint would ask me if I finally went and did it. When I’d say it was a stick-on, I could see both their relief and their disappointment. Perhaps the relief was more because they didn’t have to imagine the pain of the needle. But the disappointment was, to me, more palpable.

I am not a faker. I have never pretended to be something I’m not, never lied about my skills, not even on a job application or my résumé. I had fake nails for my wedding only; I bit them off on my honeymoon. I color my hair, but it’s real color on real hair. I don’t pretend to like bands just because they’re cool.¹ And I don’t lie.²

I’d given up the idea a month ago when a friend told me I’d have to take it out for surgery or x-rays, that the hole would never close. And then I thought: who lives that way? Who makes a decision based on what would happen should she ever need surgery? So when my sister told me on the boardwalk that she’d asked about the nose piercing at Dimensions and that she’d pay for half, I started to consider it seriously. Serena came in with us and whined the whole time, having just been turned upside-down (by choice) and around and around (also by choice) and become so sick that only a snowball would make her feel better. So we left, and I vowed to give it serious thought. That night, I talked to my husband for a half hour. He’d already hated the idea, even though he didn’t think it looked bad at all. And when he finally said what I wished all people would say—“It’s your body; I have no right to tell you what to do with it”—fate was sealed.³

I prepared my daughter, who also hated the idea, and sent her to the pool with her cousins and uncle. I chased a beer with a big shot of vodka from the freezer (thanks, Tom), and gave Beth the keys to my car. She drove me to Dimensions, where I handed over my ID, signed the Health Department’s forms, and picked my nose ring. I waited upstairs. When it was my turn, I sat in a big scary chair and watched the tattooed dude open the big scary autoclaved tools. My sister squeezed my hand. At some point, while the big scary needle was dangling from my nose, she stopped looking.

“That wasn’t so bad,” I said.

“That was the easy part,” the dude said. And then he put the jewel in.

“Ow,” I said. But I was completely still, unlike my sister, whose face was buried in my back. When it was over, it stung a little, but it wasn’t awful. We went back to the condo, and I took a swim, after which it bled a bit. And, with the exception of the occasionally pawing in the night, it’s only given me a moment of trouble.

With my mom. And only for a moment.




* * * * *


¹I’m sorry, Vampire Weekend and Decemberists. [yawn]

²In fact, there’s only one lie I’ve told with regularity, and it had to do with whether I was smoking. I have not smoked since I was pregnant—not even once—but I used to keep my smoking habits secret from my family.*

*Then again, it’s totally within my power to shave a few inches off my thighs in a self-portrait, to lighten the dark circles under my eyes, to smooth out the kinks and dings in my skin. But that’s art. And, with the exception of nonfiction, art can’t lie.

³I ask because we are a team. And though he can’t prevent me from poking a hole in my nose or writing on my skin, I respect his opinion, and his unhappiness with my decision would make this a mistake.

my baby, he wrote me a letter!

When I was fourteen or so, I put a free pen pal ad in the back of Rock Scene Magazine—something about Cheap Trick girl seeks fans of same. Perhaps I made mention of some other band, like Foreigner.¹ Perhaps I signed my name Rainbow Leigh or Crystal Leigh.²

Those were the days when a teenage girl could publish her real address with a fake stripper name in a national magazine without alerting any pedophiles³ (unless you count the rock stars, who had groupies my age). I got lots of replies, including a string of post cards from Rick Nielsen, who was flattered at first but then annoyed by all my questions. I wrote to (we called it “writing to” back then and would often say, “Do you write to so-and-so?”) Becky Olenchak, June Feinstein, Cathy Pearce, Dan Bonham, and a handful of other really cool teenagers and twenty-somethings, who helped me get through the hell of high school. We met in real life, too, at various locales like New York's Bleecker Street and St. Marks Place and the Rock and Roll Convention in Philly (the Ramones played!). Within weeks of getting my first car—a two-tone Mustang hatchback—at 16 or 17, with no such thing as a cell phone, I drove to Cathy’s house in Lynchburg.

Music was my passion. I did little else then but write death poetry and play Patti Smith’s Radio Ethiopia over and over again and check the mailbox. The mailman brought me stuffed-full letters every day and would often leave big packages for me by the door of my apartment—bootlegs and imports of the Ramones or the Runaways in Japan, groovy singles like the neon yellow "Nasty, Nice" by Jane Eyre and the Belvederes. The best days were when I got home from school and found a letter from Becky, who’d tell me about her exploits with some famous-to-us rock star of extraordinary hotness, with photographic evidence tucked in the stationery; I looked at it first, foreplay.

Although the thrill of getting the mail dies with your first credit card statement, every once in awhile, I’ll get something cool from my Internet friends—beautiful photos and paintings and post cards, care packages from all over the world. But I don’t get any Slam books anymore. I rarely get a letter in longhand.

Last week’s letter from my husband might have been the first one in years. Marty’s been away for nearly two weeks. He doesn’t have a cell phone, and I can’t blame him; my own preoccupation with connectivity needs to be checked. But when he’s out there in the wilderness of Utah, I worry for him—the flash floods, the heights, the heat. And it’s sometimes annoying that I can’t catch him up on life back home. But I know he deserves the solitude and isolation. This is how he recharges his own cells: hiking the Watchman trail, wading through the Narrows, swimming in the frigid Kolab Reservoir of Zion Canyon. He wakes up before dawn and makes coffee, takes his book and his guitar out to a spectacular overlook, and reads, strums, thinks. He writes poetry in his head and music in his heart. He's there for every sunset, too. And I envy the person who could do this alone.

It had been several days since we’d put him on the plane, and the only contact we had was a ten-second call from a stranger’s cellphone. He said, “Serena, I’m on top of Angel’s Landing,” and the signal was lost.

The next day, though, a two-page (fronts and backs) letter came.⁴ Marty wrote it after he checked into the hotel in Mesquite before heading out to Zion in the morning. He began:

Yo Ho Chick-E-LA-Las… No phone? No E-Mail? No Internet? No…No…Ahhh!!

But wait! What about the MAIL? Remember—“my baby, she wrote me a letter”? Yeah…I’ll talk to you the ol’ fashioned way.

The rest of it was details of the flight, the weather forecast (it’s always 115 when he lands in Vegas), his hopes for the trip, a request for us to “play music!” and a peace sign. A day or two later, a three-page letter arrived. It was on the same lined paper, ripped out of a bound journal, and it ended with the usual peace sign and a reminder to play music. On Monday, we got another letter, ripped more sloppily so that we had to fill in the words on the edge, Serena and I sharing the pages and reading like it were an adventure, like we were some sort of pioneers who received the note by pony. This one was written at the site of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, Marty recounting the story of slaughtered women and children. It started on a bummer but ended with his having held an impromptu concert at the top of [secret camping location] for a troop of teenage bicyclists and their chaperones on their summer adventure program. “Make music!” he said again at the end, the peace sign torn at the edge.

Since the first letter, I’ve been singing the song Alex Chilton wrote and performed with the Box Tops when he was just sixteen. And yesterday, one of the School of Rock show directors asked my daughter to play the sax solo in Joe Cocker’s version of “The Letter.”

And now, ten days after he flew off, I’m sitting here in the kitchen, waiting for the mailman. I have checked the box three times today, even though I’ve heard no squeak of metal on metal, no rusty door opening, no sound of papers becoming suffocated, no rusty door closing.

Our mailbox is sixteen years old, a wedding gift from a friend. It used to have a wooden frog head and four wooden frog feet, but they rotted long ago—perhaps when the mail itself rotted. It used to be so much more than bills, credit card offers, and circulars for places with mediocre pizza and Chinese food. I’ve wanted to replace the box, maybe build some mosaic masterpiece, but the junk that comes never seems worthy.

And now I regret not having something more beautiful and protective for these rare treasures, words from someone I love, though I know a fancy box is more likely to attract thieves and vandals and less likely to summon something so precious. We should remedy the latter.

A few days ago, Marty borrowed another stranger's phone. They'd just finished having dinner together, and he talked to us for what seemed like an hour, apologizing to the man at regular intervals for the length of his call. He said he'd written a letter just for me—a separate letter not signed Marty/Dad. And I couldn't wait to get it.

I nearly held my breath at the mailbox this afternoon, but the only things inside were the latest Musician's Friend and Guitar Center catalogs and a circular for some lame pizza joint.

Maybe tomorrow.

	BOX TOPS - Box Tops - The Letter .mp3
	Found at bee mp3 search engine

* * * * *


¹Shut up.

²Shut up.

³There were some pervs, though, including a guy named Phil, who used to request worn underwear in exchange for records and, sometimes, cash. My mom corresponded with him for a time, pretending to be a teenage girl. He was mad when he found out she was my mom, but he didn't come to our apartment with an axe.

⁴Also in the mail was a $40 speeding ticket, only my third in my life; my first came when I was sixteen and on my way to Cathy Pearce's house.<sup>5

5</sup>My second was on Stevenson Lane, driving really fast when I'd decided to close my health food store. I was listening to "Gravedigger" and crying. And that's what I told the cop, who gave me the ticket anyway.

turn and face the strange changes

My daughter hates my new hair color, whatever color it is—the newness an issue more than the color. Heaven forbid I move a chair or swap furniture between rooms; my husband has a fit. Some people will suffer for years with that devil-they-know of a job or spouse they despise, rather than deal with looking for a potentially less-painful—but possibly more fabulous and probably way better—career or lover.

It seems that most people hate the idea of change even more than the actual change. (Contrary to my beliefs, a candidate did run and win on the promise of change, but perhaps everyone knew nothing would really change but the president’s skin color.) Granted, divorce sucks. But what if your husband or wife sucks, too? What if he or she makes only a nasty, negative contribution to your life? Imagine someone more loving waiting in the wings. Someone surely is.

But I’m not talking about the changes brought on by tragedy; rather, it’s the tiny ones, cosmetic or functional ones, so-called improvements, that seem to get everyone’s knickers in a bunch—your wife ran out of cheese and had to pack you a different sandwich, your usual bank teller is sick, a website is redesigned (with many of your previous complaints fixed).

I thrive on change. I like the freshness of it. I like new seasons, new responsibilities and opportunities, a different routine. I can’t eat leftovers for three days, antsy for a new dish. My iPod is on perpetual shuffle, and my favorite artist of all time, David Bowie, is a musical chameleon. My photography is random: flowers, dogs, rock bands, food—sometimes in the same day. I try new beers all the time. My hair is curly one day, ironed flat the next. And my thoughts, as you can probably tell, are all over the place.

I love waking up to a completely different paint color now and again, even if I enjoyed the last color for a decade—especially if I enjoyed the last color for a decade! It’s only paint.

I used to let my hair grow for two years, then get it chopped off short. A hairdresser I know refused to cut it because he was worried it would be too drastic and I’d blame him. My best friend for twenty years never once altered the way she wore hers. It’s only hair!

Some people hate change so much they won’t even change their minds, despite their being presented with new evidence, as if stubbornness equaled righteousness, correctness, or, sometimes, cuteness.

If we take death and devastation off the table and talk about rearranging some furniture or trying a new hairstyle or replacing a bad habit with a good one or getting out of that rut you’ve been spinning your wheels in for years, what’s the worry? Even fitness experts tell you to change your exercise routine after three weeks.

What little, or great big, thing have you been dying to change, stopped only by fear? And what is it you fear? And what will you change-fearers change today?

C’mon. Change is gonna do you good.*


- - - - - -

*For a beer on me next time I see you, if you're old enough, and without searching for the answer, what 1970s song has "change is gonna do you good" as a lyric?

the spot on the wall

part one

I told a friend I was having a bit of an identity crisis. I’m not sure what I am—an author, a photographer, a mosaic artist, just another creative Libra with undiag- nosed adult ADD. She asked how I wanted to be known. I don’t even have to think about the answer. I am a writer. It’s like skin on a body; you can’t detach yourself from it without stinging, burning, bleeding out. I stopped writing in 1997, and I didn’t sleep for five years.

It seems I could feel that way about photography, too. I’m never without my camera—sometimes because I want to capture the essence of a thing with words later, but more because I don’t feel like I see as fully without it. Photographs verify and fortify and rectify my vision—even enhance it. (Amazing how much of a bird you can see by zooming in with a 300mm lens.) But take my camera away, and, although I’ll flounder a bit, I’ll still be me to my core. I’ll still sleep.

I rarely go somewhere just for the pictures of an event, but almost every interesting thing I've done in my life is for the writing of it. If you are a writer, you do things—interesting things—things other than playing endless rounds of Bejewelled Blitz and posting status updates. In November, I drove members of Bob Schneider’s band to their hotel and back to the venue, an unglamorous thing for a fan to do, just so I could write about the experience. I went to Rock & Roll Fantasy Camp for a day two summers ago as part of a writing project. I enrolled my daughter in the School of Rock and went to Ladies Rock Camp for three days last summer for the same writing project. It’s why I meet people for coffee. It's why I ask questions. I land a photo shoot for an interesting person, and before we book the session, I’m interviewing my subject, trying to parlay our meeting into a story. I am a dog, and everything outside of myself is, potentially, a bone.

I guess the crisis is less with my own identity than it is with experiences. Photography subjects are endless—flowers in drizzle are always beautiful, my dog Chance is always handsome. But I have nothing to do right now, nowhere to go; I have nothing to say. I’ve been sitting around for the past few dreary, chilly, rainy days wallowing in the miserable sitting. I am a shapeless blob at my kitchen table wondering who I am, staring at a spot on the wall.

From the time I was six years old, I would ask my mother to give me a subject, and she’d say something like, “Write a poem about the dog." And I would. She'd point and say, "Write a poem about that spot on the wall.” And I would.

I’m all grown up, but I still feel like I need someone to tell me what to write. Agents and editors are often unwilling, and my mom isn't much help in that area anymore. Lately, I can't even write a poem on my own; my last five were composed around a bunch of random words donated by my friends on Facebook.

So here I sit, with an open call to the universe, waiting, prepared, ready with all the perfect words, all my soldiers, my children. Here I sit, staring at this spot on the wall. The spot where I’ve recorded my daughter’s height for the last eight years of her life.

oldies are goodies

My mother worked outside the home before any other mother I knew. She was a school teacher when I was little. Later, she took a job with some architects, as a secretary, sure, but she always did more. She made the firm smarter, more grammatical, prettier. When a few of the architects left to start their own businesses, my mother went with one of them. She’s been the other half of her firm for three decades.

My mom taught me the maxim: old is good, new is bad. It fits in so many areas of life. Old houses are better built than new ones. Old appliances were made to last. Old furniture has style and character. Even the methods we use now to make jobs easy tend to complicate life. Mom’s partner, Dick, doesn’t use any kind of CAD system to design houses he’s built for people like Brooks Robinson; he drafts by hand. He prints in draftsman’s block, doesn’t need no stinkin’ font. My mom still has an IBM Selectric typewriter at her office. Nothing beats it for typing an envelope.

I’ve been thinking a lot about old things, and not just because of the new lines on my face, the new grey wires poking from my head. I think we’ve traded a lot of our soul for modern, for fast, for instant gratification. We can get the answers to anything so quickly that we’ve lost our ability to hold a thought, nurture a question. It’s good for the sentence, but it’s not so good for standing in line or for saving up for something special. It does nothing for discipline. We are spoiled.

Yesterday was Mother’s Day, and I complained, again, that it was a day of cooking and cleaning, rather than a day of pampering. I made two quiches and a cake for brunch at my sister’s; she, in turn, shopped, cleaned, set the table, entertained. Is this the way it’s supposed to be? Where’s my special bouquet, my sterling silver bird skull pendant, my gift certificate for a fabulous tin belt buckle at Studio C? (As Woody Allen declared in an essay on phrase origins, “Where are my bellows and fruit, eh? All I rate is fiddlesticks!”)

I had been led to believe, by the new Mother’s Day Machine, that the second Sunday in May was supposed to bring me a card, a pedicure, some flowers, and a restaurant meal. But that’s not what Appalachian mom Anna Jarvis had in mind when she lobbied presidents for the national holiday. It’s not what her daughter wanted, either; before her death, she admitted regretting that Mother’s Day had become a holiday at all, if it was just going to be a way for florists and greeting card companies and restaurateurs to profit.

I know. Bah humbug. Mother's Day detractors are just like those decrying the commercialization of Christmas. But every time I heard from or delivered to someone a "Happy Mother's Day" greeting, I couldn't help but recall the movie Brazil, in which it's always Christmas, and everyone has some fancy-wrapped gift at the ready.

But is there anything I don’t have that I truly need or want or have room to store? And what could be a better gift than my daughter having learned “I Love Playing With Fire,” by the Runaways, just because I was a fan? Every day, my house is full of the music I love played by the people I love. Did I really need a new belt? I have a dozen that fit around my old, smaller waist.

After typing my husband’s school work and begging my daughter to wear something nice and take the ponytail out of her hair, after baking my grandmother’s sour cream cake, after wolfing down food I shouldn’t ought to have et (but which was delicious), and listening to the kids in my life play old Beatles and Doors songs together, my not-yet-three-year-old nephew, Marcus, on air drums with two plastic forks, I did what any old mother might appreciate. I went to Target for some hair dye, sunless tanner, and Slim Fast. I came home to my old house, drank a beer, dyed my hair, and slathered my dry skin with moisturizing sunless tanner, mentally preparing myself for a couple weeks of dietary discipline so that I may take advantage of a fabulous and too-long-neglected wardrobe.

I do believe, at least in the philosophic sense, that old *is better than new,** but it can use a facelift or a tuneup or a fresh coat of paint every now and again.



*not too old
**not necessarily where technology is concerned

of machines and men

I squint at the six open DIY check stands at Home Despot (I call it that in honor of my Peepop, who once said “depot” when he meant “despot” during the annual reading of the Hagaddah). I had cash. I didn’t know whether the machines could handle cash, and I didn’t want to find out. I spied a guy and asked if he would do me the pleasure of ringing me up, and he was delighted.

“I hate those machines,” I tell him. “I feel like they take jobs from people.” I do.

“I can’t comment on that, so I will just say thank you very much.” He smiles.

He’s a decorated employee. By that, I mean his many tattoos, a sign of his loyalties, are visible. A still-scabbing tat shows Woody Guthrie with his guitar and the famous slogan from it: “This machine kills fascists.”

“Did you see this one?” he asks, proudly showing off the asterisk on his left arm, with “and so it goes” beneath it. Of course. My friend Dave and I both know it—Kurt Vonnegut, from Breakfast of Champions (and everything else).

I get permission to take his photo and am wrestling with my camera as a line forms. Here are like-minded people—regular folks who probably have mastered a Google search—lined up to be checked out by a real person.

I don’t want a drum machine or a phone router or an ATM. I want someone to pump my gas. And even if I had to choose between a robot or the nasty witch at the post office who can never manage a smile and will actually rear up and ask, “What did you just say?” if she thinks you might have called her on her bitchness, or the crazy old bat at Burlington Coat Factory who grumbles and complains about everything and slams your shit down if it doesn’t have a price and asks you why you couldn’t get the one with the tag on it—I’d probably still choose the real people.

Or maybe companies can hire more people like the Home Depot guy or the two ladies at Family Dollar on Harford Road. Yesterday, while hanging our 3 Hipstateers* show with Dave Pugh and Steve Parke, Steve and I stopped in to get some long nails; we didn’t have the right ones to hang our photographs. A woman asked, “Can I help you find something?” I told her I was looking for nails. She said, “Oh, they’re in the front of the store, just past those two young ladies.”

I looked at the two people up the aisle—a middle-aged woman and her mother—and I turned to tell the woman how sweet she was. She smiled. But I was lost when I got to the front of the store and didn’t find any hardware. Why, this is all—fingernails! I shared a good, emotional belly laugh with the woman who sent me to the nails that most of the women in our area would have meant.

At the cash register, our checker gave us the once over. “You two are rockin’ the superhero shirts.” Steve and I didn't really understand her at first, but we looked down. Not only were we both wearing t-shirts with superheroes on them, but we had the same four superheros on our shirts. “Ya’all didn’t know that?” she asked, surprised that we hadn't consulted on our outfits that morning.

You don’t get any good stories from an ATM. Your computer does nothing delightful. No DIY checker will ever tell you that you're rockin' a superhero shirt. And no robot is going to love you like I do.



- - - - -

*Please join the 3 Hipstateers—me, Steve Parke, and Dave Pugh—for a show of photos taken exclusively with our iPhones (a machine that can't do anything without a person at the controls), Thursday, 6-8, at Clementine Fine Foods, 5402 Harford Road.

Less Miserables

The change machine at Safeway spit out a Tennessee quarter, guitar-side up, and I considered it a sign: I should play my guitar! I consider everything a sign these days: the sale of a photo, the rejection of a proposal, an un-stolen iPhone left in an unlocked car with all the windows down.

But I’ve changed how I deal with the signs. Last year, the rejection of a proposal meant giving up writing altogether. The sale of a photo meant something else would go wrong. An item of value left in my car overnight would not have signified my incredible luck but my overwhelming carelessness. Eh, I say now. Mistakes happen. But maybe I should buy a lottery ticket!

Is this really the result of a simple attitude adjustment?

A year ago at this time, I might have told you it was impossible. I might have argued with you the way I argued with my mother, who has, for years, told me to smile and pretend, because there’s a chance it could rub off. But she was right.

I’m not saying you can become happy—or even that you should. Who said happiness was a normal state? Some of us are not cut from cheerful cloth. But we don’t have to be miserable. At least we can be less miserable.

When I didn’t believe in it, I thought those smilers looked like morons. In truth, I was a little resentful: what did they have that I didn’t? Probably a song in their heads or the memory of that grove of iridescent grackles or a picture of their kids playing saxophone along with Pink Floyd’s “Us and Them.”

The famous and handsome author/filmmaker Michael Kimball (Dear Everybody, I Will Smash You) and I discussed happiness at lunch one afternoon. He told me that smiling has been proven to release endorphins that cause you to actually feel happier.

So I’m sitting here now, smiling, on a gray day. Did you catch that? I spelled gray without an e; the latter seems so much more moody and dismal that I rarely feel compelled to use it anymore, even to describe those annoying squiggly wires coming out of my head en masse. I’m sitting here composing, writing, typing, with a smile on my face. Do I look like a moron? Maybe, but I’m a moron whose daughter rocks, who is writing in the face of rejection, who is listening to “Us and Them” on her un-stolen iPhone. I am a @#%&*! smiler who has a shiny Tennessee quarter in her pocket, a smiler who is about to play her guitar and sing.

What will you smile about right now?