Listeme

Some of the things I’ve done wrong raising this boy: Occasionally I played video games with him instead of doing the dishes. Once in a while, we had ice cream sundaes for dinner. We racked up large library fines together. We read entirely too many comic books. I told him that parents get a Halloween candy “tithe”. I didn’t let him beat me at tic-tac-toe. Or hangman. I was going to write something sentimental here, but I find I’m too close to some emotional edge. I keep veering away from heartbroken tears. It’s not the fact that he’s grown up and is about to leave. All parents everywhere know that day comes. It means we've done our job. It’s all the missed opportunities, the real mistakes, the blunders and wrong turns. On the eve of graduation, those hammer at my soul relentlessly. I should have done this. I should have done that. So I iron his gown for tomorrow (“cool iron only, Mom!”) and know that I’ve honestly done the best I could possibly do ...

I’m like a little kid , sitting in the middle of small piles of toys and shiny things. These are the things I can’t conceive of leaving behind. I’ll skip the descriptions of socks, blue jeans, and tee-shirts. Two zip-lock bags of pens, different kinds for different moods. My favorite books. Stationery Em gave me for my birthday – with orders to use it to write to her. One of my carved elephants. A teeny baggie filled with cicada wings. Baby pictures of my children. Older pictures of them, too. Not everyone recognizes that a magpie’s piles are full of treasure.

My haircut girl , Linda, is on vacation this week. I hope she’s having a nice time, but, honestly, she’s messed things up for me greatly. It takes someone like me (i.e., a slightly neurotic and self-conscious person with very stubborn hair) a long long time to find the right person to work with her hair. Linda is very soothing. She is far more beautiful than I thought I’d ever tolerate in a haircut girl – thin, exotic, great hair. She has a German Shepherd, which her husband and son like, but she wants a cat. She is the only person I know who’s gone off and gotten married using one of those marriage packages. “Bahamas Cruise and Wedding Package”. She loved it. I like Linda. I’m comfortable with her, and she does my hair the way I like it. (People probably think I chop at it randomly myself to get this tousled effect, but no, I pay a lot of money to have someone else do it for me.) But Linda decided to go away this week. She recommends Trish for her clients. Okay, I can ...

I start out with these grand lists when I plan trips. Projects to do before leaving. “Complete landscaping backyard.” (Well, one can’t leave for a trip when the backyard is incompletely landscaped. What if the neighbors had to go back there to rescue a wounded bird or something? How embarrassing.) “Put all eight letter bingos on index cards, with extensions and anagrams.” Then there’s the packing list itself. Shampoo (including brand and fluid ounces). First aid kit including suture kit. All the shoes I’ve ever worn. Number of books to bring: number of days x 3. The packing list grows to pages and pages. Up until about two days before the trip, I continue to methodically gather these items and work on the projects. Then panic strikes. I realize that the backyard progress so far is a pile of broken slate and three barberry bushes which should have been planted in May. The suture kit is really my mending kit, which is missing all the buttons from when Em made puppets...

Funktionslust . It is the pleasure in doing what one does best. A dancer. A singer. A cheetah. A painter. There is a pleasure in the doing. It is a significant pleasure, and it is not just the pleasure of a job done or the admiration of an audience. It is a joy that begins when the pianist limbers up his fingers in an empty house. I love the word itself. It looks made up, for one thing. It looks more than vaguely vulgar. I play with the sound, the meaning, the origins. I have fun with the word. For words – words are my funktionslust. Spoken words: conversations and jokes and stories and arguments. Written words: essays and stories, letters and conversations, and now electronic conversations. Word games: Scrabble of course. Boggle. My brain feels so alive when I play games. The pathways are open, wide open, all channels blazing and blaring. It is a fierce joy. Last night, I went to scrabble club for the first time in a couple of weeks. I did not have time fo...

More on the countdown. Finals are in full swing. Trails of last minute projects run upstairs, through the storage rooms, veer spatteringly into the bathroom, and end at the front door. (Finish the projects over the weekend? Haha!) I’ve not raised four perfect children. Heck, I’ve not even raised one-half of an organized child. They are busy and happy, and they operate under the motto that if one pile of papers is tolerable, five or six must be downright desirable. They love to learn, but this is not always reflected in their grades. They don’t always get along with one another. (Opinionated and stubborn are not just basenji traits.) These kids have strong feelings about everything from politics to video games, and sometimes they clash. They are good humans, though. In a long-ago speech I heard (at church maybe?), the speaker’s general point was that many parents try to raise their children to be happy, while many others try to raise them to be successful, and although t...

Why do we like Snape so much? Why do we grin in the dark theater when he first comes on the screen? Of course we like the others… the perpetually surprised Ron, the gorgeous and brilliant Hermione, kindly Dumbledore, kindly Mrs. Weasley, kindly… well, there sure are a lot of kindly grownups. Maybe that’s part of it. I mean, we were all children, we all dealt with lots of grownups, and honestly, how many of them were really kindly? They fed us; they made sure we didn’t get struck by buses. Not all of them liked us, though. Some of them pretended, and we were fooled for a little while. Maybe a kindergarten teacher with a sweet face and tiny hands and a gruff voice that only came out when things got “out of hand”. A shocking surprise to a five-year-old. Or a beautiful and distant aunt who gave gifts but couldn’t bear dirt and noise… and we didn’t know that before we leapt into her lap happily, covered in mud. Some grownups were scary. Some never tried to seem sweet. Ou...

The closer it gets to June 14, the more apparent it becomes: I’m insane. I’m outfitting this place like a bunker. Extra bottled water, because you never know what might happen to the water supply. Not just stocking the first aid kits… creating new ones. Batteries everywhere. Should I buy yet another fire extinguisher? I bought an extra can opener. The upstairs linen closet has no room for linens; four jumbo packs of Scott tissue take up every spare inch. (You know how many rolls to a jumbo pack? Twenty. Number of days I’ll be away? Forty-two. Apparently I think they’ll use nearly two rolls a day.) I have posted every phone number I can think of on every level of the house. “Okay, we’ve tried Aunt Emily, the church, Grandma, 911, and Pizza Hut; no one is answering… oh, thank goodness, Mom left us the number for my old fifth grade teacher! Try that one!” Clearly I’m worried that these children won’t last five minutes without me.

The pad of paper by my bedside is now a bona fide tool for self-analysis. First, the character sketch. I’m not sure if I dreamed him, but when I woke about 2 am, there was this merry little boy, maybe nine years old, just begging to be put down on paper so that the world wouldn’t lose him forever. Or at least so the author wouldn’t. So I jotted some notes. In fact, while I was jotting, I gradually woke more and more and ended up filling the whole four-by-six page. Rather pedestrian imagery… flashing black eyes, dark dark hair, a little bit too long, unbrushed, stone under his bare feet. But more kept fleshing out. It was an underground scene, rows of cells, prison cells, and the boy was running along and peering into the various cells. No one was paying him any attention at all. In fact, as I wrote, I decided this was important. I made him a little more hyperactive. An attention-seeker. He wouldn’t walk from cell to cell, I decided; he’d bound up and down the stone hall...

So many countdowns continue . Finals begin today, the last stretch before that child/man finishes school. The stack of books/clothes/towels/buckets/pens/flashcards grows bigger as I keep packing for Odyssey. My to-do lists are still entirely unmanageable – but they are down to two. Two pages. I’m not good at countdowns. I get tense and teary. This is the last week of school. This is the last time I’ll have to clomp downstairs, refraining from morning grumpiness, and say: “Hey, you planning to go to school today? The bus leaves in 12 minutes!” (Actually, I have five more chances to say that.) Last things bug me. I’m positive that next Monday morning I will even be sad when the little rat puppy wakes me for the “last time” (meaning until I get her back in six weeks). Good things just should not have to end. When I was very young, it was a great treat to go to a real swimming pool, the kind at the YMCA, and swim for 50 minute sessions. I spent the whole 50 minutes dr...

What am I supposed to do ? This situation comes up infrequently but often enough to make me feel like a failure. One child does something. Okay, it is not a good thing. Let’s say it’s five dollars missing. Stolen, we presume. Worse, it’s taken from a sibling. So we have this situation. One angry-eyed teenager, convinced that Nothing Will Be Done about his missing money, and three innocent-looking siblings, all managing to look very very sympathetic about their sibling’s plight. Unless someone confesses, it is unlikely that I will track down the guilty party. I don’t have surveillance footage or exploding ink pellets (or whatever the current technology is). I refuse to play that old elementary school teacher game: “okay, we’ll just all be grounded until the guilty person admits what they did.” I will not punish the innocent. And yet I still have the angry-eyed boy, waiting for his justice. Waiting for his five dollars, actually. This time, I can solve at least one pr...

The Ginger Ale Games are over. (I won.) I woke this morning in a cold panic. I didn’t have enough time to get everything done before Odyssey as it was; how can I recover from losing an entire day? So I made a couple of phone calls, canceled two days of work I’d agreed to do – and suddenly I’m a day ahead! Several things on my to-do list are fairly sedentary tasks, so I managed to pick away at those yesterday. One important task: transfer some of my story ideas from my idea file (okay, file is a very optimistic name for a shoebox of index cards) to an idea document so that I don’t have to lug every single scrap of paper I own to this workshop. I found myself mystified by some of these so-called ideas. Some are full paragraphs. One has a sketch, a map, and a diagram – and I have no idea what any of those represent. One card reads: “you never know when you might find a dead body in a restroom stall.” Well, wise words, I’m sure. Another reads: “lack of acetylcholine make...

Forgive me , but there really isn’t much to do in the middle of the night when one has a desperate case of the flu (or food poisoning?), which is why I turned on the television. That ridiculous show “The Nanny” is on several times, I’m sorry to say. ESPN has semi-interesting things, including profiles of professional video game players (who insisted every 30 seconds that playing video games is a sport.) Paraphrased: “I train for this eight hours a day, just like any other athlete.” Local cable channels have great hearings about zoning: “So we decided to go with the gray cedar shingle…” Very serious, very nicely dressed. I admired the participants. I found myself playing little games. Take one sip of ginger ale. Will the next sip (every 10 minutes, of course) occur before the next commercial break? It was almost exciting.