nedful things

I gathered it about me,
in long folds. Wrapped
myself in your indifference,
a cold cloak, kept me
aloof and untouchable,
alone and untouched.

Hooded, I wandered
through teeming streets
through the faceless crowds.
Only you can make so desolate
such an inhabited place.
I sought you in the hidden places
and called for you.
My cry echoed in
the distance you created.

Damn this cold
It cuts to the bone

but today made up for all that. I awoke to see a morning that looked suspiciously lighter than usual. As I drew closer to the window, I noted a softer, whiter world out there. At first this seemed so pleasant that I lit the tree just to create an early morning mood. It was doubly pleasant because it was only 5:00AM and the children were still abed.

Even after they awoke, I tried to keep the fact that it was snowing from them as long as possible. If you have children, you already know why. It may be only 7:00AM and it may be cold enough to freeze the snot as it runs from their noses, but they will insist on being out there, in the snow. Snow was made for children. Adults lose the ability to appreciate snow, it is one of the side-effects of aging. We begin to notice when we are cold, we mind when we are soaked to the bone and we don't get a day off to play, we still have to go to work and what is worse, we have to drive in it.

But children see the magical side of snow. You can fall in it, and you won't scrap your knees. You can build a mound of it even when there isn't that much and get a good slide going. You can mold it and shape it, make snow angels in it, create an entire man out of it and you can prepare a missile of it to throw at your sibling's face. Forgotten is the skateboard you got for Christmas, out come the sleds and the saucers and you are transported into a Norman Rockwell world of rosy-cheeked faces and snow-laced eyelashes peeking out from round little bundles of coats and snow pants and mittens.

I eventually relented and we all went outside to play in the snow. I got to "play" with my shovel and free the car from the soft and rounded mound it now occupied. My shoveling benefitted them in that I could throw all the snow from the driveway into their "hill" making it higher and more suitable for sliding down. I shoveled a lot more of the driveway than I had first intended to, originally intending to shovel the end of the driveway where the plows had made a barrier of snow and then just around and alongside the car so that it could be driven in and out with some ease. However, a nice stranger in a pick-up with a plow on the front happened along and in a random act of kindness, plowed out the entire end of the driveway before continuing on his way. This inspired me to do an even better job of it.

I got a bit carried away and was beginning to shovel the neighbor's half of the driveway when I realized all of my fingers had frozen solid and I surmised that if I was this wet and cold and on the verge of frostbite, the children might be too. After bargaining for a few more slides, even the boy was ready to go in. We stomped off the snow, we stripped off the outerwear and we took pink and chilled bodies into the house for something to eat and a nice warm-up while we took in yet another viewing of Mary Poppins. The snow continued to fall without us, but we were satisfied that we had not let a good snowstorm go by without partaking of it.

Oh, and the best part about children playing in the snow? The boy is taking a nap.

It happens every year. I forget to make Christmas Eve magical and special and a time of wonder. I mean to but somehow it never comes off. The day starts out alright, I clean and bake for Christmas dinner. The children play and plan. They ask over and over, " how many hours before Santa comes"? The house is filled with the aroma of cranberry bread and we play some carols. We keep the Christmas tree lit all day. As soon as darkness falls, the children begin asking when they might go to bed (oh, words to treasure!). I even spend the $4.95 to buy four phone calls to Santa's sleigh so we can check on his progress. That guarantees that magical quality, right?

The phone calls consist of a recorded message approximately a minute long and are not interactive. This slightly annoyed the girl, but the boy... well he was immediately suspicious.
On the first phone call Santa has just begun his world wide tour and he promises to wend his way to your house soon and regales you with stories of the hot chocolate Mrs. Claus made him for the trip and how he is looking forward to all those cookies. The boy began calmly enough.

"Santa?" he inquires, as if I were pulling a scam on him and it is really an uncle. "Hi, Santa?Santa, why won't you let me talk? "

The first phone call is over and we are instructed to hang up once Santa says goodbye. It is very convenient that Santa now has a cellphone in his sleigh, we used to have to rely on NORAD to track him but now we just call the sleigh and he tells us how close he is.

An hour passes and we decide now is a good time for the second phone call. We decide that mainly because they are bored with the wait until bedtime and because boredom usually leads to blood sports. I call Santa to distract them from their attempts to inflict serious bodily injury on one another, deciding that Christmas Eve in the emergency room of the hospital is not only less than appealing but will also cut seriously into my gift wrapping time. Nothing has been wrapped and all must be done once they are in bed.

So we dial up the number and the special code, hit the # key and are connected once again direct to the man in red. This time the boy is not so cautious in his interrogation. He starts off in a very straightforward manner.

"Who are you?" he asks. "Why don't you talk with me?" "Where is Santa?"

In fact he talks so much that the girl can't hear Santa at all on the other extension and she screams and cries until finally, Santa hangs up (probably in self defense). She cries for ten or so minutes because she didn't hear Santa say where he was this time.

By the time the next hour passes and we call the sleigh, the boy doesn't even want to listen on the phone, he is dancing on the bed and yelling, "that isn't Santa"! The girl takes the cordless phone and leaves the room in disgust and also because she is slightly afraid Santa will hear the embarrassing little brother and pass right by her house.

So far, $4.95 well spent. Something goes wrong at the next and last attempt and the recording tells me that we already made the last phone call. I look at the lighted dial on the phone and realize I typed the secret code in wrong. I immediately dial again and use the correct code which gives me a recording saying that it is invalid.

Okay, now that last phone call is the important one. It is the one where Santa tells you that he is very near and you had better get to bed and be asleep when he gets there. Needless to say, they are not in bed, and much too wound up to sleep.

The girl actually does go to bed, she wants to be asleep, she wants Santa to come and she wants Christmas morning as soon as possible. The boy on the other hand doesn't really fear Santa enough to worry about it and has no intention of sleeping. I discover once again that boy models just don't work the same way girl models do. I call my sister to tell her to leave all the presents in the trunk of my car and I will schlepp them in later if they are ever asleep. She informs them that the newscast just announced that Santa is hovering very close to our town. Well, that works. I mean, if it was on the news, it must be true and even the boy rushes in a panic to get into bed.

The boy who never sleeps falls asleep fairly quickly. The girl who normally goes into the sleep of the dead if she is even horizontal for more than ten minutes, does not. At 10:00pm, she has not managed sleep, she is still wakeful and anxious. She is trying so hard to sleep the stress is keeping her awake. 11:00pm and she seems to be sleeping but at the passing of stockinged feet she stirs and asks the time. I realize that I will not be sleeping tonight.

Finally, nearly midnight and she is breathing slowly and deeply and rhythmically. Ah! Finally the process begins. It takes two trips to the car to haul in the booty. And another ten minutes to sort and decide which presents will be from Mom and which from Santa. I don't want either of us to look like a cheapskate so the good presents are evenly divided. I decide which gift wrap Santa will use and which Mom will use. This is very important, consistency.

The first four presents are wrapped with care, ends even, creases and folds sharp and well secured. But it is now after 1:00am and my coffee is cold. Soon, I am tearing and cutting the gift wrap with ragged edges and using much more than needed. The excess gets wrapped around a second, or perhaps, third time and the ends are not trimmed but folded over any way they will fold and taped excessively. I am getting tired and lazy and a couple of gifts get hung on the tree with just tags and some thrown into recycled gift bags.

Just as I carry the last gift to the tree, I hear the rustling of sheets and run to the bedroom in time to find the girl climbing out of bed. It is now 2:00am.

"Has Santa been here?" she asks.

"No no, honey, it is far too early, I am just coming to bed myself", I explain.

She settles back and I wearily climb into bed, counting on at least 3 hours of good solid and healthful sleep. Alas, this is not to be. At 3:00am she is awake, asking if Santa was here and wanting to go check. I manage to put her off for 15 minutes. Then, there she is again. I settle her back down and pass out for 15 more minutes. By 3:30am she cannot control her curiosity and sneaks into the livingroom for a peek. She runs back to me full of excitement proclaiming "Santa was here! Santa was here!". I see this is not going to be overcome and I promise that if she goes and makes the coffee for me, I will let her wake the boy at 4:00. She has nearly mastered the brewing of coffee, except for sometimes forgetting minor details like the water, or the coffee.

Diligent in her task, she drags the boy unwillingly into a concious state and they run squealing to the tree. Gasps and shrieks, ripping and tearing, the paper flies in sheets and shreds and it is over. They do not, in fact, have any clue which gifts were from me and which were from Santa, they have not noticed the wrapping paper at all. I expected this, and I only take care to make sure I am consistent because only the tiny inconsistency will cause them to notice or to care.

I suppose in its own way, in their eyes, it is all still quite magical. Santa managed once again to get them exactly what they wanted, and they hadn't even been to see him or written him a letter. They sleep, gifts appear. The girl consoles herself over the absence of the GameBoy by reasoning that if Santa didn't leave it, it must be because he knows that her uncle has already purchased it and she will receive it later in the day. Well, of course, she is correct. Santa knows all and never makes mistakes. He makes it all magical and wondrous and he does it all on no sleep. I don't know how he does it.

I was disappointed today by the weatherman. That is not unusual, of course. I think all meterologists should go into politics. They lie to us nearly every day about the upcoming weather and are so vague that after listening to a five minute discourse on the latest doppler radar readings you are still confused about whether to bring that umbrella, the shovel or the sunscreen. Still, knowing that they lie to us every day and are not the least bit reliable, we would still bring the umbrella if they said rain. But today the weatherman said no white Christmas and I think he was telling the truth for a change.

A few days ago we had snow, just enough to make it all white and not enough to cause shoveling. In New England you don't bother to shovel unless the snow is higher than the bumper of the car. We had just come off a brisk week of below freezing temperatures and then a little snow and finally, it looked a bit like Christmas. But as happens here we went from 3F yesterday morning to over 60F today and after a quick downpour all residual snow is now gone. That's -16C and +15C respectively, for you Celcius users.

And that's another thing. It has been years now since the American public turned its nose up at the very idea of changing to celcius and the metric system and still all the silly bank clocks show the temperature in both Celcius and Fahrenheit and naturally you drive by at the exact moment they are showing the temp in Celcius and have gone far past by the time it shows the real temperature. Now to a New Englander, telling me is it -9F is bad enough, but if you tell me it is -22 I am going to think it is really cold. I might even wear a coat. Conversely, in the summer if is is 104F and you tell me it is only 40 degrees I am going to hit you. (Well, I am hot and cranky).

And we never went for meters and liters or even metres and litres. I can still buy my milk in pints and quarts and gallons, but for some reason the soda bottlers want me to buy 2 liter bottles while still selling 12 oz cans. They are confused but not so sure of themselves that everything is in liters. They print the ounces on the 2 liter bottles. They must have retooled the machines to make that particular size bottle and it is not cost effective to change back even though there is no earthly reason to continue to sell 1 and 2 liter bottles.

And why is it that only Americans still cling to the English system of weights and measures while all Commonwealth nations have conformed to the metric system?

And while we are on the subject of conforming, what is it with these "universal" illustrated road signs? You know the ones that instead of proclaiming simply "No Passing on the Right" have a picture of two cars and one going by the other on the right side with a big red circle around it and a line through it. By the time I have passed the other car on the right to get a good look at it and decipher the sign it is too late. I don't have time to stare at a sign and figure out what the little pictorial means, I will drive off the road staring at something that long. For crying out loud, why did I bother to learn to read?

Where was I? Oh yeah, snow. Well I like snow and all, it is very picturesque. Very Currier and Ives. I think it should snow on Christmas Eve and then not so much after that. Unfortunately Christmas in December is not a snow guarantee. In New England the weather hasn't settled yet into winter. We may have had snow in October but that does not preclude a warm and balmy Christmas day in December. If you want a guarantee of extended and unrelenting cold, snow and ice, you want January. I have been petitioning for moving Christmas to January for ages but so far have not garnered much support. So tomorrow for Christmas it will be mostly sunny and 32 degrees, or 0 Celsius. Unless, we are lucky and the weatherman lied again.

bailarín agraciado

you pour into the room
like coffee liqueur
dark, sweet and smooth
inciting my thirst

tu sonrisa es mi sol

manifest smile
breaks open and
a song of laughter
flirts with my ears

ojos como los guijarros en una corriente

in those dark depths
shared secrets and
unspoken mysteries
lie sunken

tu cabeza en mis brazos

thick lambswool
black and unrestrained
a coil plays about your neck
entwines about my finger

mis manos tiemblan

hunger reaches out
one timid hand
a brushing, glancing touch
conceals its desire

mi marrón, mi amor

My father never went by his given name of Andrew. Everyone called him Jack. As I stopped to think about it today, I must confess that I still don't know why. His middle name was Jacob, perhaps that had something to do with it. He bristled at people who called him Andy, those friendly type people who like to show their friendliness by familiarity and the use of nicknames. My father wasn't into friendliness much.

My father built the house we grew up in. After they first married my parents moved to Florida for a short while, and returned north having found it unsuitable for them. They rented an apartment for a time and my father was working for a construction company. There were going to build in a new area of the next town over. My father decided to buy one of the plots and in between working and building the other houses on the new street, he built his own house on his own land.

He built it, I say, but he never finished it. There is an old saying about the cobbler's children never having shoes. The carpenter's family has a house that is not completely built yet. He scaled down the blueprint he used so the entire house was slightly smaller than it was supposed to be. My mother never stopped chastising him for that. She had seen the house it was supposed to be modeled after and she was not happy with the miniature house that Jack built.

The second floor was to have two small bedrooms and one large one as well as a bathroom. It only ever had two small bedrooms. The bath and master bedroom were an unfinished area that we children always called "the attic" and it was filled with the usual junk one collects in such an area. Downstairs was the kitchen, bathroom, livingroom, diningroom and a small den. I remember long ago there was a time we actually used the dining room as a dining room but I can't for the life of me figure out where everyone slept then. We had a family of seven in a house with only two bedrooms. The den usually housed two children or my parents, my mother kept switching rooms. The dining room eventually became my mother's bedroom for good after he built her a large closet with sliding doors. I can remember being in almost every room at some time in my life until finally, after a few of the older siblings moved out I got my own room, the teeny tiny one that had the slanted ceilings and barely room for a bed.

When I was growing up, there was no electricity allowed on the second floor. This had to do with my sister, a lamp, a blanket and a magazine that was being surrreptitiously read late at night. Once the offending parties had moved out, and I was an inhabitant of the second floor, that had to change. I did get electricity, oh boy did I get electricity. I think if he had ever seen the number of things I had connected to the only two outlets in the room he would have pulled the plug permanently. The only inconvenience I suffered was when he would change the fuse from a 15w to a 30w to run his machines in the cellar as he worked and when he changed them back again. The record player would slowly wind down to an inhuman garble and then wind back up again to be recognizable as The Beatles. I never understood why the cellar and the second floor were on the same fuse, but that was the way things worked in the house that Jack built.

The one bathroom was not sufficient for seven people and was so tiny that it could not be exited by one person if another also occupied it. Originally there was a sink on spindly legs in there and the door opened wide enough for escape or entry. Later he built a lovely vanity around the sink that absolutely just fit. The door cleared it by 1/16 of an inch. A few careless people nearly lost fingers by having a hand on the wrong part of the door as it went by the corner of the vanity. Danger of dismemberment was just part of life in the house that Jack built.

We had a huge back yard. The kind you could play baseball in. Anything over the opposite neighbor's pine trees on the property line was a home run. Even all these years later, I can still see the depressions of home base and the pitcher's mound. This was one place where having a carpenter for a father came in handy. We never had a swing set, but we had sawhorses to set up with long planks for see-saws. We could build anything we needed.

My father reserved a portion of the yard for a garden. Planted potatoes (of course) but also corn, tomatoes (though he hated tomatoes) and assorted beans. I learned how to hoe and weed and cultivate. I also learned how to pick the potato bugs off the vines. It's a nasty business and you have to put them in a can of kerosene to kill them, or at least that is what he had me do. Potato bugs are really quite colorful little creatures but you can't have them returning, can you?

There are great advantages to having a carpenter live in your house and work from your basement. We always had wood and tools and although we never had much in the way of fancy or expensive toys, we made our own most of the time. My neighbor had the complete Barbie doll house, but I had a great cardboard box, a brother who worked for a tile company and who brought home tile and carpet color samples and wood to make furniture with. It was the most elegantly furnished cardboard box anyone ever had.

Just a week ago, they put the house that Jack built on the market for sale. An offer has been made and accepted. For the first time ever, some other family will live with its structural oddities. Other children will discover the bannister that is perfect for sliding down, will play baseball in the yard and climb the trees. Maybe some other father will dig in the yard and plant a garden of his own. I will go back one more time, to see it as it is and not as it may become once some other family modifies it to their tastes, to walk around the yard, to see where we wrote insults about each other on the foundation, to take away any last remaining items that are part of my life there and to say goodbye to the house that Jack built.

 

Your poem I just couldn't lick
The rhymes they just wouldn't stick
it seems there are few
words left that fit you
So I gave up and made you a limerick

My father was a strong man. I grew up believing my father could do anything. I am sure he believed it too. He was born November 24, 1911 in New Denmark, New Brunswick to Danish immigrants of the hardy and stern sort. People who had the pluck to pack up and leave their homeland for a new land and scrape out a living as potato farmers. My father learned his work ethic from a young age.

It was a hard life. Farming is hard work followed by more hard work followed by a hearty meal. When he was just a boy of two years of age, his father died of pneumonia, possibly caused by his too-weak lungs not withstanding the body-breaking farm chores in a Canadian winter.  I never knew my paternal grandmother, she died long before I was born, but I am led to believe it would be an understatement to say that she was not a warm person. His childhood was cold in all aspects.

When he was 14 he became a hired hand on another farm. He was 14, on his own, earning his own living. When his older brother decided to marry and leave the farm, he returned at 18, to take over running the farm and taking care of his mother.

My father believed in early rising. On a farm it is up at 5:00 AM and take care of the animals first. You feed the animals and then you get breakfast. In my whole life I never saw my father "sleep in". There were no lazy days. Work and responsibility always came before leisure. Whatever he did had to be done right, there were no shortcuts, no shirking.

His life on the farm was plagued with misfortune however. As hard as it is to keep a farm afloat financially, it is harder still when nature conspires against you. There was the barn that was struck by lightning and burned, taking the lives of several horses. He rebuilt the barn himself only to see the new construction freakishly be struck by lightning and again burn. He had inherited his father's tendency to asthma, allergies, hay fever and general weakness of his lungs. The dust of the farm was more than he could withstand. He sold the farm and in a particularly incomprehensible move, left farming to take up carpentry (apparently he had never heard of sawdust).

He left Canada too, but he didn't get very far. He was working in South Portland, Maine, when a young woman walked down the street and spied him. She asked the neighbor whose house he was working on, who that man was and if he were single. The answers pleased her and she was heard to remark that he wouldn't be single for long. She was right.

I know exactly how much money my father had when he left Canada in 1946. He told us often as we grew up, pointing out just how expensive we were to keep and what he would have had if he hadn't had all these kids. Frugality was his practice, although we never called him frugal. We called him cheap and stingy. There was a always a voice behind you reminding you to turn off the light when you left the room, telling you to turn off the water when you are not using it, nagging you to close the refrigerator door so as not to waste electricity and a raised voice insisting that you close the front door as he couldn't afford to heat the outdoors. We were made aware of the fact that money does not grow on trees.

My father's favorite turn of phrase was "over the hill to the poor house". We were always driving him there. A small child does not separate the dramatic from the real and I had in my mind a fearsome structure with an iron gate that we would all end up in one day if we didn't change our spendthrift ways. I assumed we would be made to do chores and fed watery gruel.
It didn't sound at all attractive. One day, I saw the poor house. As we drove up a hill by the ocean there it was, a large brick structure surround by a brick wall that had a wrought iron gate with lettering in the iron archway above. It was obvious this was it and that must say Poor House. I drive by it often now, it is actually the New England School for the Deaf. But each time I see it I think of our near escape from the poor house, effected solely by the efforts of one stingy old Dane.

I blame a lot of my personality on my father. He was a stubborn cuss with a very dry sense of humor and could be bitingly sarcastic at times. This was hard on my more delicate siblings but something in me always rose to match it. I remember the day he was watching TV and a show about water conservation came on. Just then my mother called him away to some task. When he returned, I had turned off the set. He remarked accusingly "Oh, you didn't want to learn how to save water, did you"? "On the contrary", I replied. "I was saving electricity, no one was watching the television".

My father never was shown love or emotion as he grew up and he never really learned as an adult. As a parent he was undemonstrative. Some of us felt unloved as children, but I don't remember ever really stopping to think about it. We weren't close in some ways but there was an understanding of each other that was real if unspoken.

Once he had a job in a very nice house in an affluent town nearby. The occupants of the house were away all day while he worked and he took me with him. This in itself was an honor, to be allowed to accompany him, it meant that you were not so useless and distracting as to be a hindrance while he worked. It was one of the most memorable weeks of my life. He worked sawing and hammering and building cabinets all day. Occasionally I would be asked to assist in something , holding a level while he marked a wall, sanding, holding a board steady while he drove the first few nails. For his daughter that was an acceptance that was beyond any words of affection. He was a perfectionist and if you were a nuisance, you would not have been allowed near what he was working on. It gave me confidence to know he thought me capable. When I wasn't being a carpenter's helper, I helped myself to the absent family's piano and sheet music. He never once complained about the racket, he loved music.

I suspect my father had a very good singing voice but you rarely heard him sing and when he did, he would do it in a comical way, but oh boy, would he whistle. I have never been able to whistle at all myself, but my father used his whistle like a fine instrument. Now and again we heard stories of a very different person than we knew, the young fellow who took the horse and wagon to the Saturday night dances and who played a mean fiddle. I never saw my father play the violin in my whole life. When he left the farm and got married, he started a new life with new responsiblity and that was not part of it. I think my mother discouraged a lot of recreational activities. I saw the young man who loved music now and again, when I would play a Glen Miller record or when we watched Lawrence Welk together. I wish it had been possible to know him better.

My father didn't ever talk of retirement, no one imagined it was possible for him to retire. He reshingled the roof on his own house and remodeled the upstairs when he was 70. My father worked seven days a week building cabinets and installing them and doing general carpentry work until he was 79 years old. He may never have stopped but for being struck with a serious condition called Guillan Barre that attempted to stop him altogether. He spent at least a week in ICU with a ventilator as his chest muscles were among those affected. There was a feeding tube as he could not swallow. Many young people who are afflicted with this disease take years to completely recover. For my father, the time between onset and his release to resume his normal activity was less than two months. Of course, when he informed me that the doctor had told him to resume his normal activities, I was suspicious that he may not have told the doctor what his normal activities included and the doctor was mistakenly releasing him to live the life of a normal 80 year old man.

He never really did get back to normal though. Perhaps it was the toll it took on his body, perhaps the several days he spent not getting enough oxygen before they realized he was not breathing well, but he lost something after that. He had never looked his age before but over the next ten years it began to show and his mind lost its sharpness. My father never carried a notebook when he worked. He measured a job and had all the figures in his head. When he returned with the finished cabinets and set them in they were an exact fit and never needed adjusting. He often would say he was just a farm boy who never made it past the eighth grade but he was one of the most intelligent and mathematically gifted people I ever knew. In those last years though, the inability to work and his own awareness of his impaired mental faculties caused a feeling of defeat and uselessness that I don't think he could overcome. My father only knew how to work, and that was taken from him.

My father died on May 28, 2004. He was 91. I have on my livingroom table a copy of a photo, scanned and enlarged, that was taken for his passport in 1946 and I know exactly how much money he had on him when it was taken.

3:45 am Can't get up this early, that is ridiculous. Close my eyes and promise myself to awaken again in 15 minutes.

4:00am Still sleeping, in my confused and half unconcious state I forgot yet again that it never works to go back to sleep once you have awoken.

4:30am The alarm goes off. I have taken great pains to make sure every available noise that this clock radio makes is now sounding as loudly as the volume settings can permit. I jump, still asleep, into action, flailing arms and hands at the clock trying to discover what button makes it all stop before the neighbors call the police. I start to close my eyes again but some sense has started to creep into my half consciousness now and I force myself off the bed and go to start a pot of coffee. Of course, I hit the button on the computer tower first, so that I don't waste precious time waiting for it once my coffee is done.

4:45am I sit with coffee cup in hand in front of a flickering blue light. By now I have nearly worked out what day of the week it is and if I should even be up this early. I have ruled out the possibility that it is a weekend and must now prepare my body and mind for a workday. But first the coffee. The best thing about this first morning coffee is that it doesn't even have to be good coffee. It has to be strong and hot and plenteous, but it doesn't have to be good. This morning I had the pleasure of some Dunkin Donuts coffee a friend gave me and it is excellent. If they don't have Dunkin Donuts where you live, you should move.

4:50am I open Yahoo! Messenger. I sign on as invisible initially, I am not ready to type yet, it took three tries to get my password right. But as I open it there is the excitement of perhaps finding an offline from a friend and I eagerly wait for one to pop up. Alas, there are none. I do have a zingy new email notice but I don't follow the little envelope as I know it is only about buying DVDs and I will get around to deleting it later. Is it any wonder I have 34 new emails per Yahoo!? I simply don't have time to delete them all and it makes me feel special to have an abundance.

5:00am I open Outlook with expectancy and see nothing there either. No new email. I click the Send/Receive button several times, in case Outlook has forgotten something. Still nothing and the day has not been going well so far. I sign into chat and proceed to the room.
I clumsily type hellos to all there and go for my second cup of coffee. I return to the screen to stare at the scrolling conversations and although occasionally thinking of something to add, I find the task of actually typing is still beyond me and I decide to take my shower. By this time, no one really expects me to be typing and so I am not missed.

5:10 am (I take really quick showers) The chat room looks much the same as it did before I left and I still have nothing to say. I still have no email or IMs and I begin to feel abandoned. Suddenly a stupid idea about blogging my morning comes to me and I open Wordpad, thinking once again how much easier life would be if I could only remember to install MS Office one of these days. I begin a chronicle for my blog, trying to keep my feelings of isolation and abandonment out of it.

5:47am I assume I have been typing all this time. Must be this I am typing. I wonder if I should go get dressed for work now and resume typing later or finish this and then start getting ready. I ponder the time schedule and think of how annoying it would be to have to finish this after work. I think that I would only bother blogging this if I were still half asleep, later I will be much too rational. I think I will get more coffee.

5:54am I am pouring coffee and for some reason starting to pack the boy's lunch as it is all I have the alertness to do at this point. I hear a chime and rush back to the screen only to find, as I suspected, it is a drive-by IM from someone I don't know. It says Hi, r u there? I fight the urge to say "No, I am not here" and click the little x in the corner. I move the Wordpad window to the right, so that I can see the chat screen. I am hopelessly lost as to the conversation and make no attempt to catch up.
I do take a moment to iggy fartflyer who is posting something in a huge and fat red font although why I care I don't know.

6:03am I should stop sitting at the keyboard and get dressed but I decide to read blogs instead. Luckily no one added anything in the middle of the night so I skim comments only and return to check that Outlook thing again which is obviously broken. However I have packed the boy's lunch and that is such an accomplishment I award myself five more minutes of sitting here, doing nothing, waiting for something interesting to happen. After all this time on the net, I still expect interesting things to happen. Must be that I am not awake yet.

6:13am Hark! I hear a knock. Finally someone is online, someone who can actually stand me. Well, at least I think she can stand me. She is not invisible so at least she isn't hiding, that is as good an admission that you like me as any.

6:17am I realize how stupid this blog is and scan all other blogs for entries that equal its stupidity. I actually find more than I expected (I had to go blog hunting for stupid blogs, but luckily they abound). I quickly drop this into the blogspot before I am too rational to avoid doing so and then push myself away from the computer. I have decided finally, it is Tuesday and I have to work today.

It is such a cold bed
upon which I lie,
such a cold foundation
(lies)

Voices mutter
yet I am mute
stripped
(lying)
exposed.
The slamming of a door
startles
yet I am rigid.

Willingly
I offer
vitals
expertly excised
and examined.

Yet I lie
(lie?)
wide eyed,
expectant.

Coldly catalogued
disspassionately
Dissected.

Yet I lie
(lie?)
uncovered.
Wide eyed,
The light blinds.

The testing
completed
they move on.
Heartlessly
providing
no covering
no offer of warmth.

Expectantly
yet I lie
Still.

Today, at least
I did not think of you.

Today
my mind did not conjure you
nor did it stop to linger
on images of times unpassed
my name in your mouth
and the touch of a finger

Today
I did not wander the
many paths not taken
in visions did not awake near you
nor from tender dreams
suddenly awaken

Today
I did not drift in streams
of memories yet unmade
did not whisper secret wishes
nor softly sigh to find that they
were by reality betrayed

Today, at least
I did not think of you.

The pain doesn't show
But lingers
Plucks with nervous fingers
At the threads of your life

Take a little fear
Compress it
Tuck it away
In little emotional drawers
Labeled and Filed for future reference
Push them, Pack them tightly
There is always room for one more
The face in front reflects
While you
collect

where would it have been
that little spark
before
or if
it existed
tell us
faces expectant
make us laugh
not one
asks about the fear
tell us
hands clap
it's rhythmic
it's frightening
it isolates you there
unto yourself
and only yourself

Some people stood
some and stared
some
nudged one another
some
and spoke
conspiratorial whispers
but
not to me
saying naught to me.
I lit another cigarette and smoked it
defiantly
in defiance of nothing.
Anger flooded over despair
over me
As I watched myself
in shop windows strolling
aimlessly
alone
apparently.
These feelings were like
The ashes on my cigarette,
Grown long and heavy
dropped
crumbled
scattered
In pieces innumerable
Invisible.
Returning to me in
The sound of my footsteps
falling
carefully
measured
footsteps on these
cement blocks.

Bitter morning,
Grey wind beating
Greyed sails,
Sharp wind
Beating the faces of grey men.
Dull water dully pounding
The grey planking.
The sea sounds hollow.

With the piercing cry of the gull,
The seagull's shriek.
With the shouts of hard men
The groans of tired men, the grumblings
Of the tired ship,
With the lonesome whistling
Of a lonesome seaman's air
The cargo is unloaded.

And this was all they brought,
Imported griefs and brittle bones.
A vacant old world face.
I've never felt so empty,
To be left alone in such a hollow morning.

I'm sorry to go through this all again but if you'd been there,
At the dock. I stood
Spellbound.
I'd never seen such desperation,
Except in your eyes.
I don't think I can tell you what I really mean.

But alone here in a hollow morning
I became aware.

And here in the bay, Here
In the mouth of the bay
Where the glacial sea bares
Its icy teeth upon the banks,
I would have told you.

I see you always, near water
I see myself always
Clinging
To rocks awash with sea foam
Looking
For a look in your eyes.
Now such hollow eyes.

And that was all they left
Imported griefs and a brittle life.
I've never felt so empty.
Left alone in this hollow morning,
I've never felt so empty.

My car hates me. I don't blame it actually, I allow those children to ride in it and fill it with toys, clothes, candy wrappers, three week old chicken mcnuggets, and an assortment of sticky half-eaten candy that they use to decorate the inside of the roof. I also have a foolish tendency to watch the road while driving and ignore the scotch tape and Kim Possible stickers with which they are covering every available space of the rear windows. I could explain how it is possible to turn a four door sedan into a rolling garbage can, but it would only sound as if I were excusing myself for my lack of parental vigilance. Truthfully, I buy them the food to fill their mouths with something other than bickering and shrill sound effects while we drive and maintain a level of peace that keeps me from following stray thoughts about driving into oncoming traffic. (Stop gaping in horror. Sure, like you never thought of that.)

I drive a black 2000 Ford Recall. Well, Ford actually calls it a Focus. I am not sure what they were focusing on when they designed it. This particular model of vehicle has had no fewer than nine recalls since it was introduced. The amazing thing is that almost nothing that goes wrong with my car is mentioned in any of these recalls. I should have known better than to buy another vehicle from the same dealership who sold me my last Ford. That Escort was very dear to me, I loved that car, but as with the Focus it had strange and ridiculous things go wrong with it. When I recevied the recall notice that said the ignition might catch fire, I decided that might be a good way for it to go and threw the notice away. Alas, it never did combust, the transmission went long before I got to see it go up in a blaze of glory.

The Focus though, it has a certain style all its own. About two years ago a strange thing started to happen with the key. It refused to come out of the ignition at times. Other times it would slide right out. Yes, I tried the graphite and the spare key and it didn't seem to matter. I also noticed that when the key would not come out, the car assumed it was not off and you could put it into gear. Originally, I always locked the doors due to a foolish misconception that someone might actually try to steal it. Now I try to encourage that but so far, no takers. Eventually the ignition held onto the key more often than it released it, and although at first I blamed the key, the weather, sunspots, UFO activity and almost any other phenomena I could observe at the time, I realized that the problem with my car was that it was the one in 10,000 out of the factory that was simply a lemon. With a twist. The problem has progressed to the stage where I never remove the key because if I do, it often won't go back in.

My last encounter with the dealership came after I received several alarming letters from Ford about recalls they did not have notice of my having had repaired. Yeah, whatever. Still I thought perhaps they might decide this ignition problem is covered under the warranty. I know, I probably had too much sugar that day. But I made the appointment to take it in anyway. The first time I spoke to the mechanic, he told me he had a silver Focus in there that had the same problem. I experienced hope for the first time. I ordered up an oil change and allowed them to repair the problems on the three recalls I had so far and to investigate the problem of the key.
After one or two encouraging phone conversations with the mechanic, I really started to believe. I felt like little Natalie Wood discovering that Edmund Gwenn really is Santa. This illusion was short-lived, however.

I arrived at the dealership to find them taking apart the gear shift. Yes, the gear shift. This was the problem with the key they said. They now denied having any other vehicle ever come in with such a problem. Did I forget to mention that blonde, female customers often get spoken to by auto mechanics as if they were complete morons? I remembered that this was the same dealership that tried to sell me a $150 window regulator when a quick inspection revealed that only the $3 plastic channel spacers needed replacing.(They are still waiting for me to come in and have that part installed). He wanted to know, did I want them to order a new gear shift? I looked him square in the eye and said "no thank you, if I am lucky perhaps someone will steal it before the next recall". He didn't seem to think that was amusing and he tallied my bill. $166.50. Since everything except the oil change and the key diagnostics were under warranty or a free repair due to a recall, even to a blonde mind this seemed a little steep. I asked him to break that down for me. Soon he discovered that yes, he missed something that should have been under warranty. $144.50 please. Fine, I said. Can you please break that down for me? And surprise, I had just made it in under the wire on another repair that amazingly was under warranty after all. $122.50. I again, with squinted gaze asked for a breakdown of that figure. Well, after 25 minutes the bill ended up at $96.50 and I couldn't get out of that, since it was labor for checking out the key problem that hasn't been recalled yet and the oil change and oil filter. Besides I had to pick my son up at daycare and didn't have time to beat him down to a reasonable price for not having actually done anything about it.

My car has suffered several rear endings, a few backing intos and multiple parking lot dings and scratches. The right side mirror is held on with duct tape (a very long story in itself, but blame a 4 foot snow and a snowblower operator with poor depth perception) and as I said, is the family's recycle bin. I have taken to leaving it unlocked and key in the ignition nearly everywhere, no one would ever consider taking it. In fact recently, as a result of never taking out the key I also forgot to turn the car off. I left it running in the parking lot at work for four hours with the doors unlocked and it was no surprise to find it still there, waiting for me. I fear it will always be that way. It will be waiting for me. It hates me.

"Would you or could you ever love something that is unattainable?"

"Yes," I replied.

Yes, You don't have to own everything that you love.
Yes. Absolutely, yes. Yes with abandon. What is more deeply felt than love for the unattainable, the dream, the vision, the illusion even? A love that consumes and overtakes.
Yes. To live and die from moment to moment. To be between it all, both inspired and depressed. To be made to live and breathe and fly and to have your heart impaled and stopped in the space of seconds.

"Yes," I replied. "Yes."