Weather Report, November 30, 2009

The tailings of November, when the sky takes on the character of dingy cotton batting and the air smells of newly-cut lumber from the house rising on the corner, and the yellow-and-black sign plunged into the front yard two doors down from it speaks volumes:  Bank Owned.  Auction.

The tailings of November and the trees have at last disrobed.  I find myself enamored with the elegant scaffolding this time of year reveals.  At the corner of Hemlock and Berne a hornet’s nest is beached in the uppermost branches of a crape myrtle:  the branches shed of leaves are polished bone, the nest like wadded, unbleached linen.

The day after Thanksgiving we drove further than we should have, a lunch of leftovers packed into the trunk, spurred on by visions of waterfalls and the promise of fossils to be found on the side of the road.

The spoil heaps  where they once could be hunted were festooned with with No Trespassing signs that kept us in the car, but later, on the path that led us toward the roar of the waterfall, we found a small discarded nest, fetched up against one piling of the guardrail.  Neither the haphazard stucco’ing of mud robins resort to nor a mockingbird’s thatch of sticks,  it was threaded through with pine needles and delicate dried stalks, the embroidery of it french-knotted here and there with tiny seed heads.

We packaged it up carefully into the tupperware that had held slices of apple; we picked up shale and talked about the way there could be the the ghost-images of plants pressed into its layered pages;  we watched the water sluicing from the lip of rock above us, and threw rocks into the creek solely for the glory of their splashing.

Thanksgiving.

Coffee Break

The New Yorker Food Issue has been on the stands for a few days now.   I know this shows just how tame my life is these days, but I can’t think of a more decadent, idle or enjoyable way to prep myself for the season than to sit down and fritter away an hour or so with its languorous,  wonderfully written disquisitions on, among other things, the food flavor and fragrance industry.  I had no idea I wanted to know in such detail about the science that works to turn “a tasteless slurry consisting largely of starch, oil, and salt…into a marketable product”  — but it turns out that I do, the hallmark of the perfect  New Yorker piece being, for me, its ability to turn the mundane into the sublime.

Adam Gopnik also has a wonderful piece about cookbooks in this issue, in which he reminds us, in that elegant, unshowy New Yorker way, that:

When you start to cook, as when you begin to live, you think that the point is to improve the technique until you end up with something perfect, and that the reason you haven’t been able to break the cycle of desire and disillusion is that you haven’t yet mastered the rules. Then you grow up, and you learn that that’s the game.

 

Food for thought, indeed.

Watching Time Fly

Good God, what happened to most of November?  It’s almost time to start brining the all-natural, free-roaming, $4.00 a pound turkey!*

And for that matter — what happened to October?

Uhh…  School book fairs and the attendant volunteering demanded by them?  A random fever or two (right now, Younger Girleen’s, which has her home from school)?  A couple of cold snaps, a couple of colds come and gone?  Life, with its ability to nibble at good intentions until all that’s left are the bitter rinds?

Like clockwork, I tend to start “setting goals” for myself as soon as school starts for Elder Girleen in August, disregarding the fact that her younger sister isn’t even in school five days a week yet and meeting goals of any sort will require burning the midnight oil and arising before dawn —  or at least arising more before dawn than making breakfasts, packing lunches, brushing the teeth of a four-year old, and coaxing a seven-year-old out of pajamas and into the back seat of a car before Chorus starts at 7:30 a.m. currently requires.

If I was a true professional,  of course, all those things would be a piece of cake.

Instead, here it is, the middle of November, and though I occasionally make cake (or granola bars, from the vegetarian cookbook, with Younger Girleen and her “playdate”) and I occasionally eat cake as a furtive nightcap after the children have gone to bed, finishing one piece of fiction and whipping out a first draft of another (the goals I told myself I’d meet by November 30) — not a piece of cake.

In fact, that last paragraph was interrupted 24 hours ago by a phone call from Elder Girleen’s school to me know in no uncertain terms what a fool I’d been to just a few hours earlier decide we’d dodged the bullet and only Younger Girleen would get this particular bug.

So that’s where November went.

* Jeez louise, is she really buying a 60 dollar turkey?  Don’t look at me for the answer.

News from the ‘Hood

The truth will out in the end, I suppose — it is 6:24 in the morning, and I don’t need to be here.  Here?  In front of this computer on a cold Sunday morning when the rest of the family is sleeping.

At 6:24 on a Sunday morning, the neighborhood has been divested of its usual careless cut-through drivers and barking dogs; is, like the unnoticed new moon that arced above the trees throughout the night, defined mostly by what can’t be seen.

Though through the curtains, here, I can glimpse light and the flicker of television, though the curtains, there,  that means a child  across the street has awoken way too early and the parents have done what parents ought to do and set him in front of the television set for that last thirty minutes they long to spend sleeping on Sunday morning, which, after all, has long been called a day of rest.

The sky behind the peak of the house next door grows paler, more pearly, and that neighbor is finally asleep — 86, the police woman who showed up night before last said, she’s 86 years old; though it was 80 she used to coyly tell neighbors, leaning over her chainlink fence, while her ratty dogs barked and leapt and pirouetted around her and she occasionally whacked them with her cane, as might be expected from an elderly country woman who once worked in the cotton mill four or so miles from here, who was married for the first time at sixteen, who has outlived everyone who meant anything to her  — three husbands, a beloved son, innumerable barky dogs.

The sky pinks, the trees remain Sunday morning motionless.

Miss N. next door is, in her terrible loneliness, the best, most self-serving argument I can think of for having more than one child.

For she has no one now and has no business living alone.  Most likely she used to lie to the neighbors about her age in an attempt to convince all and sundry that she was younger than she actually is, and competent.

Which, over the past year, it’s become increasingly clear she is not.   Is it dementia?  Loneliness taken beyond the extreme?  A reaction to her inhaler or her blood pressure medicine or some other medication I never even heard she takes?

For Miss N. has decided:  The neighbor to her right (not us) parties all night long.  She throws bricks at Miss Nell’s house!  She took up with the mosquito sprayer for the City (Atlanta, city under siege, never sprayed for mosquitoes even the days when it was sitting in the catbird seat and certainly doesn’t now).

The neighbors catty-corner play the bongo drums.  Even when the house is between owners and empty, they’re in there playing the bongos!   All night, every night!  Can’t you hear it, honey?

The neighbors catty-corner to the left: well, they must not be getting along.  Because he’s sitting outside on the wall that borders their property, all night every night.  Even when it rains!  He pulls a tarp over himself to keep dry.  He’s sitting out there drinking.

These are the things  Miss N told me back when she was still speaking to me.  Now our relationship is a little strained —though I’ve put in my share of time calling social workers, Miss N’s distant relatives, neighbors with connections in the mental health profession —because she has told her other neighbors — just as she leaned conspiratorially over her chainlink fence and told  me, about them — that The Husband and I show our children the backs of our hands nightly.

When Miss N moved into her house in 1969, did this describe the neighborhood?   It’s almost as terrible a vision of humanity as Cormac McCarthy’s was in The Road.

Second Sight (II)

I.

Once upon a time, I lived in a boxy, badly-built house with a person with whom I had considerable disagreement over what are surely a relationship’s most important parameters.  Should a person wed?  Should a person buy a house, hold down a job with more than the minimum responsibilities attached to it, make sure one had health insurance? Should a person have children?  He felt that the answer to any and all of these questions was a resounding no way; I  — under my breath, behind his back, in my dreams — thought certainly yes.

Anyone with half a brain could see just how short-lived a union like that was going to be.

But because the two of us were clearly lacking in the brains department, for a while we lived together in a boxy, badly-built house in an area of Austin that has since gentrified itself out of existence, next door to a person whose house was equally as boxy and as badly-built, though he owned his, and we just rented ours.

This neighbor had certain traits Austin tended to favor back in those days:  he had a job he’d held for years and what he considered a comfortable living arrangement.  He’d long ago answered in the negative every single question the two of us were struggling over.  He had no savings, no significant other, no children.  He was in his forties or fifties — because we were twenty years younger than he was, we found it difficult to tell the difference.  He had put together for himself a life that was completely serviceable and streamlined, a life that contained no fat. His furniture was crap, his house was dirty — but he was free, or at least believed himself to be so, which might be the same thing in the end.

He also happened to be, he told me the first time he knocked on our front door, extremely good at finding things, and he’d just that day found an earring he thought I might like to have.  He offered it up to me, in the middle of the palm of a hand held flat.

I was not about to wear an earring my next door neighbor had found somewhere, no matter how beautiful it might be, but I’d grown up around people who found — or longed to find — things.  At age 5 my brother found a 50 dollar bill in a grocery store.  For many years my father was very good at finding college class rings.  And at that particular point in my life, I already happened to be working for someone who claimed to be very good at finding things, someone who considered himself extraordinarily lucky and would in fact in a few years go on to win the lottery — twice.

All of which might explain why I would follow that neighbor into his dim, dusty living room to see the collection of things he’d found.

Earrings, bracelets, necklaces, old coins, new coins.  Passports.  Keys.  Expensive pens.  Wallets. Dollar bills.  I’d never seen such riches.  You found all this? I asked. Just lying on the ground?

It’s all in how you look at things, he told me.  You have to see everything in front of you a certain way.

The only way I could imagine this strategy working was if you spent your life doing nothing but looking down at your feet.

II.

Years after the boxy, badly-built house, at a point when I’d had just enough career successes that I would be able to keep alit the tiny flame of career for another ten years,  for six months I lived at the end of a oiled caliche road. Beyond two gates I had to climb out of my car to unlock and then lock again.

Every time I left the property or came back to it, the heavy links of chain that secured those gates left on my hands the mineral smell of metal and flecks of rust, and after a while, it just got to be too much trouble  — to go anywhere I didn’t have to.  Besides, after such a build-up — out of the car, drive through gate, back in the car; repeat — what could the white-painted house that sat at the end of the road and the acreage that surrounded it possibly be, but some sort of precious treasure, hidden away, locked up for safekeeping?  It was like something from a fairy story!

While I was in the white-painted house at the end of the caliche road, I was working on a book, in what had to be the most conducive surroundings for book-writing ever, but even in such places one can’t write 24/7, so every day at about four in the afternoon, I knocked off work, turning off my computer and setting off to walk the 200 some-odd acres of cedar scrub and limestone that stretched beyond the house’s front door like a sea.

Sometimes, I walked along the creek that wound through the property downstream, along a flood plain of smoothed rocks above its banks that seemed to be the easiest course:  past hillocks of juniper grass, skirting the thickest fretwork of the cedar’s painful branches.  I went where the land told me to go, because for the first time in my life it seemed best to have no direction of my own, no agenda.

Other times, I followed the game trails that stitched the property together, and one afternoon, when the fall light contained the pale thin yellow wash of beaten egg and wind blew the long grasses between the cedars sideways and silver, I stooped to examine something the ivory color of old bone that lay in the middle of the  path deer had worn along the backbone of the hill.

And that —that was the first arrowhead I ever found.  And as I stood there fingering the dips in flint mottled like old china,  I realized that —it’s true — once you know what to look for, you know what to look for, and you’ll never mistake an arrowhead for something else.

III.

These days, I live nowhere near light of such a rare vintage, or such wildness.  When I step outside my front door in the mornings, the sound of Interstate 20 is borne toward me, rising and falling, as ever-present as those long-ago cedar, but creating a very different sort of sea.

Some mornings, the police helicopter beats beats beats the bush of our quadrant of southeast Atlanta, some afternoons — particularly on sunny Saturdays — so many walkers pushing baby carriages or being pulled along by dogs amble along the sidewalks that you might mistake these blocks for Mayberry, instead.

There are a few of us, though, for whom walking is more than just a fair-weather avocation.  The sikh who walks quickly, a white blur moving quickly through the neighborhood before daylight.  Curtis the toothless addict, who was the first person to welcome us into the neighborhood ten years ago, with a knock on our door at 11 p.m. and a garbled request for money.  The woman who walks, rain or shine — for hours — pushing a triple stroller freighted with swaddled sleeping infants.

Fixtures of the neighborhood all, and all, I suspect, pegged as just a trifle loony.  And I, I am afraid, am one of them.  But oh— if you want to know a place, really know it, maybe you have to walk it.

John Graves, a Texas writer who writes of land and our connection to it as well as just about any writer I can think of, in one of his books said something that’s stuck with me for years, something that might apply just as strongly to urban Atlanta as it did to the Texas he was writing about —

when you’re somewhere you don’t especially want to be and don’t belong, you tend to wall yourself off from sentience like a hibernating bear, whereas in surroundings that you care for and have chosen, you use eyes, ears, nose, tastebuds, and whatever other aids you can muster for reception.  You notice.  And, noticing, you live.

When I moved to Atlanta, I didn’t care for it, particularly, and the fact that I was living here seemed less a choice than it did a cruel fate. But when you walk around a neighborhood for ten years you begin to notice things, and sharpened observation of a thing might be that small first step —toward love for it.

There are hawks that ride the thermals above the interstate here; who troll convenience store parking lots for pigeons.  There are hickory nuts, and figs, and dandelion greens — such plenty!  There are ukelelehs with missing strings, left at the curb outside the church that ministers to the mentally ill, and punched metal tokens uncovered in the parking strips in front of Edwardian bungalows, and the whisper of instruction barely readable beneath their grime when you wipe it away with a thumb:  Good For One Fare. There are art-deco vanities missing only a single shingle of veneer and wheat-sheaf pennies, dated 1951.

The subway token I gave to Elder Girleen, who tucked it away in her box of treasure.  The wheat sheaf penny I handed to Younger Girleen, who accompanied me on the walk I was taking when I found it.

You’re a good finder, Mama, she told me as she studied it.

It meant more than most of the accolades I’ve gotten in my life, that momentary praise.

Second Sight (I)

We’re actually beginning to settle into a bit of a fall routine here, which, among many many other things, includes passing a cold around the house like a hot potato.

It’s not swine flu.  Honest.

On Saturday, the Husband, who as of this month has been married to me for 14 years and now knows me almost better than I do myself, swung by the library and stocked up on a stack of books for all the readers in the family, both great and small, in case anybody needed to take to their beds and nurse their colds.

The stack contained a baker’s dozen of coffee table books for me of the genre that can only honestly be called “house porn.” And though looking at such might be cruel and unusual punishment for some, for me it was exactly what the doctor ordered, and I spent a happy couple of hours on Sunday paging through glossy photographs of living rooms containing only an ornate mantelpiece and an Eames chair.

Like most aficionados of such things, I have very particular predilections.  I like the furniture I’m looking at to be mid-century modern, the rooms that furniture sits in to be completely absolutely clutterfree  — the better for me to concentrate on the aesthetics of the shadow cast by the orchid sitting in the handcrafted vase on the kitchen counter.

For years I’ve thought looking at books like this —not that I think much about this bad habit, it being a particularly mindless pleasure — made me hungry to possess a house that looked like the ones being depicted in the photographs, which tended to dilute the pleasure  with a touch of anxiety. If only, I would think, if only.

But this weekend I realized that the hunger books like this instill in me isn’t actually to have a different life, but to be able to see the life that I already have differently.

I actually already have what I long for:  it’s just that I often tend to focus on what’s outside the frame, instead.  The children’s dirty clothes flung on the floor instead of the perfect wedge of cloudless blue-glazed sky in the window just above it.

Coffee Break

There’s a very good piece  about children’s (picture) books in this week’s New Yorker that dissects some of the ways they “record shifts in domestic life.”

From a social-commentary standpoint, this is fascinating to think about.  As the review points out,

Newspaper-burrowing fathers have been replaced by eager, if bumbling, diaper-changers.  Similarly, the stern disciplinarians of the past … have largely vanished.  The parents in today’s stories suffer the same diminution in authority felt by the parents reading them aloud (an hour past bedtime).

And I can’t think of a more spot-on observation than the review’s description of “a Manhattan playground”:

A toddler whirling into a rage is quietly instructed, “Use your words.” A preschooler who clocks his classmate is offered the vaguely Zen incantation “Hands are not for hitting….”

Ah, yes.  Here in Atlanta, we are equally guilty, guilty guilty.

It happened before I really even noticed, but at seven-and-a-half Elder Girleen has already left those picture book days behind — chapter books are where it’s at.  She reads voraciously.  Her life depends on it.  And it’s an honor — to be able to live vicariously through her,  to be able to experience again that magic of discovery of the written word.

She’s devouring plenty of contemporary books, but she’s dipping into old faves as well.  One of her godmothers already passed on her complete collection of Nancy Drews.  The other gifted her A Wrinkle in Time.  And I, thinking ahead to the holidays, ordered a set of books that I read over and over and over again when I was a little older than Elder Girleen, and still think about occassionally as an adult.  The first of them arrived yesterday; after reading the above-mentioned New Yorker article, I decided to “vet” Uncle Robert’s Secret before tucking it away until Christmas.

These books, half a dozen mysteries that were published in the 60s and 70s as a boxed set, were by a Georgia writer  and (I believe) Atlanta Constitution journalist named Wylly Folk St. John.   Maybe I loved them most for their locales, because they were nothing if not regional.  The dilapidated victorian houses of Atlanta’s West End during urban renewal, a grimy-around-the-edges Savannah(?) or Tybee Island (?).  Pirate treasure.  The lost Confederate gold.  Man, I loved these books.

And the thing I was struck by most, revisiting the first of these as an adult?

What on earth is Elder Girleen going to make of the freedom these nine, eleven and thirteen-year-old protagonists have?  They tell the aunts who are watching them they’re downstairs watching television  — but really they’re heading out to roam the woods, hang with neighbors (who smoke and drink and engage in all kinds of nefarious activities).  They’re rowing boats across lakes; investigating strange lights that glimmer in creepy family graveyards.

The books I loved because they reflected (at least partially) the world I lived in might as well be about the 1870s of Little House on the Prairie for her — an irretrievable, expansive past when children could run wild.

Weather Report, October 15

Rain, still.  The cell phone tower on the other side of I-20 is swathed in clouds.  Along my morning walk, cardinals eddy upwards, tiny sparks of color amidst the gray.

The guy who scavenges cans on recycling day is dressed in gray; trudges through the drizzle head down, hooded like the Grim Reaper.

Weather Report, October 5

It’s a rainy day down here in Georgia, and the neighbor said to be a dealer just walked down the street with a proudly unfurled red and white umbrella clutched in one hand.

Of stories, and how we prefer them

You can’t tell by looking at the sky today, but a little over a week ago, Atlanta was practically afloat, and during one of last week’s downpours, the Girleens and I found ourselves stranded for a few hours at our neighborhood library — where I found myself reading a lot of book jacket copy while I stood in the stacks keeping an eye on them as they read Judy Moody books to each other.

Granted, the whole topic I’m about to embark on is truly shallow, particularly if mentioned in the same breath as flooding that actually caused a great deal of damage (there’s a terribly misbegotten pun in there somewhere, if you can untangle it) but it takes a foot of water lapping at the curbcuts to keep a mom still for longer than a few minutes these days (there’s laundry to fold!  there’s math homework to do!)

And here’s my question, the one that seemed particularly burning by the time I’d worked my way to the end of the fiction stacks:

When on earth did every single novel out there start having to include a mystery within it?

Oh, I’m not talking about the actual mystery genre, which has always been with us, and always will —  there’s nothing inherently wrong with that.

I’m no snob.   (Well, that might be debatable; maybe I am…). I like a good who-done-it as much as the next escapist.  Sometimes you just plain need those page-turners, those propulsive narratives that pull you through a book.

My issue du jour might be more with the recent elevation of such narratives  to every single end cap of a book store’s fiction shelves — when, o when, did a Mystery (capitalization intentional) become  such an absolute prerequisite plot twist for … what used to be called literary … fiction?

The jacket copy of almost every single contemporary novel I picked up contained a reference to”searing,” “heartbreaking” mysteries and “devastating” and  ”explosive” secrets.  I’m not just talking the ever-popular “child in peril” subgenre of domestic fiction — you know the kind of book I mean, it’s got a sky blue cover that contains a photograph of a single child’s sneaker left forlorn on the pavement.

I’m talking debut novels by the Bright Young Things of American Letters.  I’m talking basically every novel written these days by someone between 25 and 60.

Is this even worth mentioning?  Probably not, but I was struck by this current tic most in books about what used to be called, somewhat derisively “the domestic” arena (not necessarily only those written by women).  If “family” was mentioned in the first paragraph of a book’s jacket copy, you can bet, dollars-to-doughnuts, that a searing mystery or harrowing secret reared its head in the second — usually one that included a snatched or vanished child or a more historical mystery that took place when the novel’s protagonist was a child and witnessed a murder or was somehow close to a snatched or vanished child.

What to make of this?

There’s a dissertation in there somewhere.  Maybe this need for every single narrative we read to contain a mystery (the comforting assumption being that by the end of these books these mysteries will be at least somewhat … solved)  addresses social anxiety, a need for a “quick fix”  and a culture of fear (or the unspoken desire to “disappear” children?)  Maybe it speaks to the notion that in our reading, as we’re told we have in so much else,  we’ve gotten lazy — if the plot doesn’t propel us through it, we can’t be bothered.

Maybe it’s that (and personally, I think this is a biggie) we live in times that value solid functional frameworks above all else.  What used to pull readers through novels considered literary? The way they were written.  Style.  And character development. Somewhere along the way, these things became window dressing — great if they’re there, but the main thing is plot, plot that moves along at a merry clip.

But the thing that’s most interesting about this phenomenon, at least from the point of view of a blog about writing and motherhood, is the possibility that , just as a “working” parent has more legitimacy in many circles than those who “stay at home,” writing that locates itself within that “domestic arena” is still not considered interesting (or valuable, or readable) unless it borrows from more popular genres.

Enter the deus ex machina of the Searing Mystery!

It’s an amusing party trick — trying insert one into the literary novels of previous decades and see what you come up with.  For Whom the Bell Tolls.   Mrs. Dalloway.  Middlemarch.

Sorry about such a long post, but you get the idea.