How Things are Around Here

We are all holding up pretty well, although Mary has a rough couple of weeks coming up and is ready to be done for the summer now. She will do just fine though. My youngest son cruises as always as though downhill in neutral, or wind driven. My Number One Son, I don’t see so much, but when I do he seems excited and confident. I know he is full of nervous doubt, but he also knows he can handle most anything. I am never sure about how my daughter is, but she seems to be getting through her classes with her usual crisis of the week. So all is well. I get 2 weeks off to sort a few things out before going into a summer of preschool with no paper work attached. Nice. Someday I will have a real vacation and then I will know what I am missing. I hope things are going well out there. The weather has been all big blue sky here, and we rush from building to building getting things done. What are we thinking?

A Poem Carved Out of a Self Experiment

Moments in a Long August Day

I

I stand in the office.

sunlight comes in through two windows

one behind me and one to my right.

My hand is moving away from the book I just put down.

A woman talks fast and loud.

She swivels around in her large office chair to face me.

I see the slight curved wrinkles at the corners of her eyes.

The hum of computers is there underneath her voice.

The words come fast, so fast they can’t mean anything.

One metal prong, curved as it comes up from the file,

reflects itself in the straight tilted end.

My finger and thumb closed together nearby.

II

I sit tilted forward, leaning over a yellow file folder,

black lines hard on the yellow.

Someone talks behind me in loud, dry, tones

rough rocks moving together.

The whispery hum of computers still underneath it all.

III

Both of my hands lightly grip the black steering wheel.

Through the windshield I see a narrow two lane road rising in front. Trees form a solid wall of shifting green in many shades, leaves glittering as the breeze moves them.

Dark green leaves against the bright yellow of a house.

In the distance a hillside,

a patchwork forest against the cloud washed sky.

IV

I am counting pieces of plum colored printer paper.

The sound of a drill comes from under my desk.

A man is on his back head and shoulders hidden by the desk.

legs lay apart flat on the floor.

Someone reads an Email about impending change.

V

I sit on a couch

paperwork on a coffee table.

A man looks from me over to his 3 year old son.

He says something in Punjabi.

The boy nods his head and replies in clear singing tones,

also in Punjabi.

“He says that he wants to go to school now,”

the man says.

“He is ready.”

The boy smiles at me.

I smile back.

VI

The light is green.

I steer the car through the intersection

up the hill.

“What was that beep?” asks my son.

“It was just my watch.”

VII

I am walking toward a parking lot with only a few cars here and there. My wife, who walks next to me, tells me some ideas she has about college and her career.

Across the parking lot

enormous trees,

spreading, chaotic oak, symmetrical pines, narrow cottonwoods are scattered about an undulating field of short cut brown tinged grass.

VIII

I sit at a glass table on a second story deck in the cool stretched shadows of an ancient furrow barked hemlock.

A bowl of minestrone steams

It is too hot to eat.

I take a bite of jicama, sweet, crisp, and wet.

My wife talks about her work and change.

IX

The headlights shine on the bushes and telephone pole as I steer the car around the corner

Up the street and down into the driveway.

My daughter sings with the radio.

I turn off the car.

X

All is still.

Relocating the Mess or Have You Seen the Toaster, Dear?

I’ve been moving for the last 3 weeks, which everyone knows is about as good for any sort of daily activity as explosives are for renovation, unless you want to just chuck it all and start over. Well that thought did occur to me several times during the process.

“Let’s just have a bonfire and leave the molten debris,” my wife suggests.  “We don’t need the  stinking cleaning deposit.”

But after careful deliberation with my wife and children we decided to shove every piece of garbage we have so carefully selected and moved about with for the last 20 years, haul it 2 miles, and deposit it in a location about 1/2 the size. Now we are in the process of sorting out and shoving smaller items into the larger cracks in the basement. This process should take until we have to move again. In which case we might just leave that heap of molten mess and flee for our sanity.

For now we are settling and sorting, cramming, arranging and swearing. My wife says she wants to go live at the old house. Now that it is finally clean, it looks like a place she wants to live. But, I remind her all this crap comes with the package, and she sighs and thinks wistfully of the bonfire. I remind her that the fire department would be on us so fast we could only burn half of the stuff, and there we’d be homeless with melted debris. So we continue sorting, settling and searching for places that will take donations of useless items that have found their way into our possession. Anyone want a fondue pot?

A Tuesday Poem

No Transient Pulse

A dark cloud of pain,

she swept in

disturbing the rhythm of the current

leaving eddies 

swirling ghosts with open mouths yawning

Her body shrinking

in knots of fury

The child, I released into that storm

was immediately lost in the tide.

she followed, carelessly

“It is the only life I know how to live,”

she shrugged with her last look back.

  I sat alone

swallowed by a trailing ghost.

This happened last week, and it is haunting me. It is the dark side of being a teacher to see future suffering, and do all you can to mitigate it, but in the end know you can’t solve all the problems. You can only shine a light and hope it begins to shine a little in the family you are working with.

I am not sure what the title means. It just came to me that way.

.

This Year Has Got to be Better. Right?

I keep trying to write a post about last year and last week, but I am in a weirdly negative place right now. I was feeling pretty good about the last year until I really took a good look at it, and it was all way too hard. I somehow got through it without feeling completely exhausted and alienated. In fact I feel OK.

A visit with my parents didn’t helped my attitude any. They live in their own universe, and I am at a loss to explain it to anyone but my siblings who just smile and shake their heads and say, “yeah, I know.” My wife and children want nothing to do with my parents at all. It all leaves me feeling inept, sad, and frustrated. It’s not a good way to end a difficult year.

Mary is feeling optimistic about going into nursing, and my job is not sucking nearly so much this year though I am tired of the whole overworked underpaid thing. My children are showing definite signs of maturing through their ups and downs and challenges. They are growing out into the world and finding their paths, and I look forward to supporting them on their journeys. I am moving forward with my own plans though they are much more vague at this point. The new year is like an undiscovered landscape moving around me as I go. When I started last year I could not have thought of all the challenges and interesting things that happened, and this year will be the same. I will start with ideas about what is going to happen only to be surprised over and over again by what actually happens. So why do I even bother trying to figure it out? I’ll just be here on the path looking at all the scenery and doing what I do to be me and support those around me to find their ways into whatever year we have in store for us.