Waiting

You wait and wait, and just when you decide to do something else, the busy-ness you were so bored in preparation for overtakes you.

Headache

"There's just something about dialogue that really breaks up otherwise endless pages of prose, isn't there?"

"Yeah, I got stuck reading a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel once that barely had paragraph breaks, and my head hurt for weeks. I was praying for dialogue by the end."

"How's your head now?"

"Actually, it feels like a pine tree on fire, all straight lines ablaze with pain."

"You sound like Lorrie Moore."

"What?"

"Lorrie Moore. She does that in all her stories, makes everything into these long, complicated similes. 'Love without intimacy is an unsung tune', blah blah blah. It'll give you a headache if you don't have one already. After a while, you have no interest in her characters unless they all go through a course of Proszac. It's perfectly obvious none of them have ever had a good meatball sub."

"What on earth are you talking about? What's a good meatball sub gotta do with it?"

"Geez, you know those people, life is one big dreadful sadness. They've never had something wonderful break through their self-absorbed malaise. A meatball sub ought to be able to have an impact on you - heck, I don't know, you might not care for meatball subs. But you probably feel like about about some kind of food...chocolate chip cookies, maybe."

"Well, I am partial to a good piece of lemon meringue."

"Exactly. Lemon meringue...exactly. It dissolves into something magical."

"Hey, can we stop and get some lunch?"

"You are so suggestible! I bet if I started talking about bowling you'd wanta go."

"Well, no...it's just, like I said, I have a headache, and so maybe if I eat something...."

"Whatever..."

Charleston

I'm headed to South Carolina next week for a family tradition: my brother's birthday weekend in Charleston. Typically, this involves lots of seafood at GREAT dive restaurants (I'm not telling you where they are, I don't want them crowded next time I go) and lots of alcohol. It's been going on for almost twenty years, and my brother's in his thirties.

It all started because my father made us a deal as kids - he would take us out to dinner wherever we wanted to go, with whomever we wished to invite, on our birthdays. I grew up in SC, and originally in a smallish town, so choices started out fairly limited. In fact, as young children, our favorite place to go was Duff's, a truly horrible buffet restaurant that we loved for its plethora of desserts. The food was terrible, but if you're 6, you don't care about canned butter beans when you know you have a bank of sugar and chocolate to wade through once you've gotten the requisite peas and carrots out of the way. So early on, the parental deal became, "I will take you out anywhere you want to go...except Duff's." This remained part of the sentence long after Duff's closed forever, just in case.

When I was about 9 we moved to Charleston and the culinary world exploded. Not that my brother and I were able to take advantage of that or even understand it at our tender ages, but at least the choices widened. I think one year my brother wanted to eat oysters, and asked to be taken up the coast to a place at Murrell's Inlet. My Dad's response was, if you want oysters, let me take you to a REAL oyster place.

We ended up at our now regular dive haunt. It's made of cinder blocks. The cinder blocks are covered with graffiti. The workers roast great shovelfuls of oysters on a grate over an open fire at the far end of the room, and when the oysters are sufficiently roasted, they carry the shovelful over to your table and dump them on the newspaper-covered table. You get a bucket to put shells in. You get plastic containers of melted butter. You get a dull knife to pry the oysters open. You get a packet of saltines. Go ahead, eat up.

Over the years, not all of the guests have been as excited as my brother about roasted oysters. Frankly, I'm a little shocked that my sister-in-law ended up part of the family while not liking oysters that much. A testament to true love, I think. But there's something so up front about the place you have to love it. It's dirty and old and plain and all of the energy is focused into getting you some good-tasting oysters. The oysters are great, and that's why you're there, and there's no wasted time. Decor? Who needs it? Shucking oysters is dirty work.

I am suddenly entirely homesick. There are things I don't love about South Carolina, but there are a lot more that I do, and I miss it. I miss the cadences of speech, and the bobs and twists of phrase, and I miss the decoding that comes second-hand to a native. The Midwest is a friendly place, but it's flat, and what you see it what you get. With Southerners, you get layers.

It's hard to explain to people who have only seen the South in Hollywood movies, all Spanish moss and people in rocking chairs on decaying porches with their hound dogs. That is, of course, not the South any more than a lone hog butcher is Chicago or a wisecracking, rugged policeman with a heart of gold is New York. A lot of the South is just like everywhere else nowadays, big box stores and chain restaurants and highways.

Maybe I shouldn't even try to explain it. In the end, it's home.

I should be more clever

Every so often, the phone rings at this desk and people ask for Carl Robards. Now, this is a business, and there has never been a Carl Robards working here. His WIFE, Frankie Robards, did indeed work in this office, and at this desk, but she hasn't been here for over three years. I know because I never met her, and I've worked here intermittently for about that.

Now, I'm curious how after three years, I can get a multitude of calls for a man who was, as far as I know, never actually in this office. No, it doesn't happen everyday, but it does happen about once a month.

Has someone finally managed to supply telemarketers or bill collectors with a number that's a true dead end? Why would you give anyone your wife's office number as your own regardless?

Moments ago, I got one of these calls. I take an insufferable pleasure in telling the caller that not only do they have the wrong number, they are so far off as to be incapable of reaching their desired party. I have no forwarding information. The trail goes cold with me.

But I have been exceedingly stupid. My pleasure at telling them how erroneously they dial has been a trap. I need to find out WHY they have this number, I need to ask questions before they know I am a dead end.

A: "Is Carl Robards there?"

B: "Why do you want to know?"

Hmmm....too accusatory. I must ask a question someone would conceivably answer.

B: "May I tell him what this is in regards to?"

No...it will be hard to explain I have no way of reaching him if I lead with that.

B: "May I ask what this is regarding?"

Better. The mystery will be solved....I will lie in wait....the next caller will not slip away with a glib warning from a goody-two-shoes. You have been warned.

Surprise!

So last night the Northern Lights appeared on my horizon, eerie and beautiful. I surprised myself in an audition.

I'm wary of trying to write this down, because such experiences are other-worldly, and often impossible to describe. I read someone else's description of such a moment recently and it just made me roll my eyes. Also, I have noticed recently that sometimes people I think aren't very talented are telling themselves the same things I am about why no one hires them. As you can imagine, this is disconcerting, and calls one's knowledge of one's own talent into doubt.

But any time you are involved in an audition or a play or, I imagine, any kind of creative endeavor, and your thoughts synthesize, leap beyond your conscious mind, and form something you couldn't plan, any time that happens, it feels fantastic. As if you have reached over the garden wall of your consciousness and plucked fruit from the trees that grow in the fertile soil of the unconscious.

Ok, yes, that makes me sound like a wanker. (Begging the question that even using the word wanker as an American makes me sound like a wanker, but let's move on.) Perhaps the sort of lightning flashes that are what we call inspiration are impossible to write about. I don't have them often enough, and after a long spell without them I start to feel drab, because if all I have to approach the world is my conscious mind and what I know, that feels pretty limiting. But we know more than we think we know, and that's very powerful.

It's as if everybody has that magic carpet bag of Mary Poppins, but we don't all have the ability to use its magic all the time, being mere mortals. You reach in at times and all you find is more carpet lint. But sometimes, if you're relaxed and not trying too hard, you reach in and the most astonishing objects come leaping to hand: a lamppost, three figs, a river. The bag is full and endless and entirely fascinating, and you feel so special at being given, however briefly, the chance to explore it. And the figs are especially delicious.

That's what happened to me last night. I often think about things too much, so the experience of creating something without thinking about it is delightful. That I made people laugh is even better.

So, wanker or no, I'm spending the day in small but fervent dances of thanks to the magic of the carpet bag.

The Part I Like

I like going to the gym. Wait, that's a lie. I hate going to the gym, but I like leaving the gym. I like the sensation of having completed my exercise, and the rush of the endorphins. But this is commonplace. What I really like about the gym is looking at other women in the locker room.

Now, I am a woman, and have spent my life as a fairly modest and respectful woman. If I'm around someone else getting dressed, I don't stare. I don't tend to undress in company. But apparently none of the rules of modesty apply in a locker room. I don't remember this from high school locker rooms so it was a surprise. Women walk around stark-naked, stand under hairdryers stark-naked, put their clothing and makeup back on with the greatest nonchalance. And it is all easy viewing.

It's not a sexual thrill - I imagine if I were bisexual or homosexual it would be a thrilling place, however my enjoyment stems from utter fascination. I have never seen so many different women's bodies. The women in my gym come in such a myriad of shapes - tiny, taut women with pure muscle all the way to great, blubbery whales of creatures. Plus, and here's the part I love, everything in between.

It makes me realize how much I've swallowed the magazine myth. Sure, as an educated woman, I "know" women's bodies in magazines are idealized. I know Hollywood films have certain standards of beauty. I know television has a mold from which it rarely strays. But knowing intellectually that media has offered me a template from which all women deviate is different from being able to summon, in my mind's eye, a smorgasboard of different combinations. Tall, slender, with big hips. Large, short, bulbous. There's a woman who looks as if her muscles are steel but somehow she has about a half-inch of gelatinous flesh that covers these steel pistons. Another woman has absolutely no spare tissues between her muscles and skin, a sort of greyhound efficiency in her movement.

I have yet to see anyone in my gym who actually has a perfect body.

Interesting - that's what I mean. I say "perfect body" as if there is indeed one setup that I can refer to, as if anyone reading this would know immediately what I mean. In the dressing room I can hear the myths exploding, over and over, like a fireworks display.

I've never had such access to women's bodies, I find it electrifying. I especially like the large women who stand around naked, in no hurry to clothe themselves. I like the idea that, here it is, here's my body, and I don't have anywhere to be but in it, so don't expect me to cover it up like I'm supposed to be ashamed of it.

It is an education for an educated woman.

The Circus

My dreams last night were especially vivid and thought-provoking. I was on a tour package trip with my parents. The first day would be spent with a circus. I knew someone I once thought I could love, someone I haven't seen in a long while, would be on this trip . I felt a mix of dread and excitement and curiosity and indifference. That sounds an impossible combination but sometimes you care so much about something that you also just don't care anymore.

My agitation sent me out to the circus. It wasn't even a proper circus, more like a performance with singers and animals and a dirt floor. The headliner was an overblown, once-famous black woman singer, a woman who had sung the blues with great power and now lived inside them. She took me around backstage and talked to me in sentences that started with phrases like, "Now, I'm gonna be straight with you..." She was philosophical about her deterioration.

I wandered around, fascinated and distracted, until the afternoon performance was about to start, and combed through the crowd to sit with my folks on the lawn in front of the stage.

And there he was, sitting next to them...with what I suddenly knew in the eureka clarity of dreams was his fiance and her parents. And I sat down next to him and asked him how he was, as if we were acquaintances, since this other woman should not be made suspicious. He looked at me with misery in his eyes and said something I can't remember now, something like, I'm so unhappy. Then he leaned his head towards my chest, without actually moving close enough to touch me, as if he wanted to crawl into who I was an escape the people who surrounded us. I kissed him, carefully, on his head, as if to tell him I would let him.

I read over this and I have caught none of the intensity of it, the strange, dirty, road-weary performers, the presence of large bears and perhaps horses, or buffaloes, the self-mocking laughter of the blues singer who so clearly knew things I did not and amused herself with my naivete. I haven't captured how adrift I felt knowing I would see someone whose presence had once sparked such amazement, and whose absence left such a loud silence, like the absence of laughter for a joke you tell that should be riotously funny. And I haven't explained how his leaning and my kiss anchored something in me and in him, as if we both had returned home. Clearly he would marry the other woman, but she would never visit the part of him that rested there, in that moment, with me.

I woke up stunned. I think dreams are the subconscious' way of throwing out the trash, of forcing us to consciously confront the ideas that have been lurking in the shadows. Once exposed, they are destroyed.

I'm happy to dream of those I have lost, as it usually signals that my subconscious feels thoughts of them are taking up space and should be permanently removed.

But it may be a while before I shake that feeling of homecoming with someone I am not likely to see again.

I'm Sailing Away

And then delight flutters in like your own ticker tape parade. After a particularly glum series of weeks, I have regained my fabulousness. More accurately: I have regained my feeling of fabulousness. I may or may not be fabulous, according to the time of day and the odd preferences of the beholder, but I can deflect a lot of external woe with my relish in my own fabulousness. I have to work at it, or I lapse into muttering slumps of bitterness and envy. The fabulousness isn't me feeling "good" about myself - "Who-Hoo! Look at me! I'm so great and wonderful!" Fabulous catches the light when the ability to be yourself packs down so dense and concentrated that you are lofted for a time beyond the judgments of others, and, more rarely, beyond your judgments of yourself.

It's a nice place. There are large windows there.

I love to sing. Sometimes I do it well, sometimes badly. Unfortunately, too often the times I do it badly are in front of people who may or may not hire me based on how well I perform.

But last night I sang for a clutch of people, first to ask for some work, and then just because I love to sing. To warble, to soar. To dance around foolishly. To do a ride-out. I ask you, what more ridiculous movement is there than a ride-out? But as a finish to a song, it is a ride, unmistakably. It only makes sense when the song is a ride.

I have a distinct memory of being a small child in my nightgown in front of the woodstove my my house. The lights were all off, I was meant to be in bed, and I was just sitting by the fire, humming to myself.
"Michael row the boat ashore,
Alleluuuuuuuuuu-ia
Michael row the boat ashore,
Alleluuuuuuu-ia."
I was sitting on the carpet, with my knees tucked up under my chin, pleased with myself for staying up late. I was content.

That kind of content still lives inside the songs. Last night I squeezed some of it out.