Tangent

Pray for Ricky Lewis.

I have no idea who Ricky Lewis is. An underlined name inside the front cover of a second-hand Bible I picked up somewhere a few years ago, maybe more, since I seem to feel time passing slower than it is.
Am I supposed to know Ricky Lewis?
Will I know him in the future? And what is the future? Is it an already planned timeline, dotted off segments of linear space like the ones I used to draw in History class? Really I would have to argue that my life, if laid out linearly, feels more like a cosign or secant with some tangents snuck in there.

He could actually look like the guy I see walking along the sidewalk everyday with the angry-pumpkin-eyes.

No.
Maybe Ricky's the tall, skinny pale guy. He and I pass on the sidewalk at odd times.
It's crossed my mind that he might be the Angel of Death.
"I've pigeon-holed him," I think.
Maybe not death at all. Maybe his skinny fingers and bald white head with the cigarette stuck in his pie-hole is the visage of utter bliss.

[i need to rewrite badly....]

The planets lined up just right to play the game of Christmas the way it had been programmed in my head.

I reacquainted myself with the carvings on the trunk of the big beech tree alongside our house

Edges

I teetered between packing and bouts of sickness.
Not real medical sickness, like the flu, but the leftovers of Lil, like bad food I might not ever crave again. I had tried to get behind her eyes, under her skin, to look out from her vantage point along our historical timeline.

I didn't agree, even, on the colors she saw.

From her eyes I saw me as unambitious, too laid-back, lacking in a business kind of confidence, what I interpret as cockiness.
"I have lots of potential. I'm just a late-bloomer."

...once upon a time...-- I now knew why fairy-tales started that way-- it had been unclear where the edges of me ended and she began.
Now I was sick at the edges of me bleeding out, into the vague few days I had left in this town. I oozed singular themes of my current life-- packed boxes, fresh strawberries, fall leaves, coins, Miles Davis-- like strange acronyms that spilled out along the hardwoods of the near-empty house, the cold sidewalk, the garden, until I felt edgeless and fat outside my skin.

ee cummings

I found this poem by e.e. cummings on a rumpled piece of paper in a stack of....stuff on my bookshelf. I think I had had it shoved in a pocket for a while in honor of poem-in-a-pocket day, or something like that.

Portraits, VII

my mind is
a big hunk of irrevocable nothing which touch and
taste and smell and hearing and sight keep hitting and
chipping with sharp fatal tools
in an agony of sensual chisels i perform squirms of
chrome and execute strides of cobalt
nevertheless i
feel that i cleverly am being altered that i slightly am
becoming something a little different, in fact
myself
Hereupon helpless i utter lilac shrieks and scarlet
bellowings.

e.e. cummings

I didn't finish on purpose.

Shell

I don't really know where I'm going with this, by the way. And most people think I'm crazy, but aren't we all?

I went out looking for the aurora borealis last night here in southeastern Minnesota. I really do live here-- have for the past 5 years-- but only for another 2 weeks, then we're moving to Raleigh, NC.

No aurora.

Onto it, then.


Within the month after Lil left, I got rid of the house. "Got rid of." Like I was some half-witted hermit crab just sloughing off the stuffy old, boring shell on my back, scuttling naked across the beach looking for another, more hip, shell.

[it could take me as long to get a character someplace as it took Thomas Wolfe to get his characters somewhere...jesus c.]

I packed some of my belongings everyday. Broke down a room and stacked the boxes, til the place smelled of stale corrugated cardboard and packing tape and the rooms began to echo the way they do suddenly when a picture is taken down and the books are stripped from their shelves.

I have a friend who prefers her shelves empty.

"Why have shelves?" I asked her.
We were half-way through a bottle of inexpensive shiraz and a couple cartons of chinese, on the floor in my old shell.

"They're beautiful shelves," she responded.

I wanted to see Aunt Evelyn again.
I know I keep bringing the "dime-thing" up, but since I had relied on their appearances-- on the sidewalk, in the files at work, dropping out of the sky behind my back-- I was--kaPOW!-- without a compass, a timepiece, and I hit the throttle. She was gonna die before I could drive to Connecticut. So I said a rosary. My mother always seemed to do that when something was foreboding.
"Say a rosary," she would whisper.
"Say a novena." I don't even remember what a 'novena' is.
"When was the last time you went to confession?" she had asked me when I was home--CT--a year ago.
"Uh, 20 years ago," I said.
Dizziness, procrastination. "Lead me not into t....."
"Mother, I will never go to confession again."
"Never say 'never,' she said. I detested that phrase.
"Isn't that the better part of a title for a James Bond flick?"

And I shrugged it off with a glib movie remark.

My mothers' rosary beads are

buy strawberries

The atmosphere was all wrong.
The wind was suddenly laced with prickles of cold when she left. She left the door unlocked-- that happens when you leave your key behind-- allowed dried leaves to blow inside the door, the way I've seen them where the wind has caught them on a little tornadic twirl around the front stoop. She took the strawberries, goddammit.

I had to go to bed without knowing if I was still alive.

Thank God my niece's drawing of rocket-day was still on the refrigerator.

I ran my fingers along the waxy ridges and valleys of crayon-- the blue, green, purple, yellow tracks of them. I could nearly smell the whole 64-count box of them. That scent that has become instinctual, programmed into my memory slots where drawing implements and tools reside.

I talked on the phone to my brother, my aunt who told me to come "home"--Connecticut-- "to hell with that girl," she said. "Ed died a long time ago."
Ed was her deceased husband.
"I missed him at first, but, hell, I don't need him."
Yeah, I could see the correlation.
I called my mom and fell asleep as she talked. The dial-tone scared the crap outta me at 2 a.m.
Alive.

I had made it a practice to eat a strawberry each night. The sharp acid/sweet opening of my tastebuds was proof of being alive. Just that.
"Am I alive tonight?" I eat a strawberry.
"Do strawberries taste like anything on another galaxy?"
A valid question.

Back to "You don't need her." My aunt drinks Miller Lite. She's nearly 90. I liken it to the gasoline that keeps a decent engine running when the body is pitted and flaking apart as it runs along the roadway. Aunt Evelyn would be an old blue Buick. She might have had one of those, even. She could cook the hell outta some fresh crab, too. As long as she was alive, the possibility existed that she could heat up a pot of boiling water again, herd my sister and brother and I out onto her dock to lure crabs with lumps of fat tied in twine, and finish the day stewing the catch into a rich crab sauce for the next week.
The potential for her to do great things.

The house didn't feel like it had with Lil gone.
"Too big?
too small?
Not right at all," like some silly kid's rhyme.

I think a space can be like that. Besides, the dime thing. Alive that day, for sure, I had to consider my life: first-- buy strawberries.

one unheard message

I stopped finding dimes.
Dimes. Ten-cent pieces. Smallest of the silver doubloons. Elusive, sometimes.
I had had a glut of them.
All over the place.

I swear one even fell out of the sky. "cross my heart and hope to...."

This is why I'm in Minnesota. Or, why I have been here. Cuz now that the dimes have dried up, I figure it's the gods' way of telling me to get outta town. See what I mean? This silliness, diversion, dizziness all started with that first rocket I built. I'm convinced, as I walk along the sidewalk in the rain, that each crack in the sidewalk, the slippery moon in the tree branches, the dimes, my shoes, all hinge together like the ligamentous joint of a clam shell.
"Am I slightly off?" I whisper to myself.

[if i'm even THINKING of trying this NaNoBlogMo thang http://nanoblogmo.blogspot.com]

My niece and I had rocket-building day. I was unable to escape it. My adult glue-sniffing lecture aside, I introduced her with my 14-year-old's enthusiasm to the endeavor. We constructed a simple beginner rocket with a parachute recovery. Waited patiently for the 24-hour glue drying to complete. She painted the body canary-yellow and the balsa-wood parts- nosecone and fins-- passion-flower purple. Then I showed her how to sand the imperfect joints in the launch pad's rod to even out the trip the rocket would take before it was free of the pad. We loaded batteries into the electronic launch remote, picked the perfect spot in the middle school's soccer field, connected the launch clips to the engine fuse wires and laid down on the grass close to the remote control ready to sizzle and slice a purple-tinged wormhole through the still air.

She was a natural, my niece, her knees and ankles and pink sneakers kicking aside the humpy, humid air in a run across the field to catch the odd jetsam falling smooth on a full orange and white chute. Jesus. God-help-her, but it was exciting, to touch it that had touched clouds and comet-dust and ancient sediment of atmospheres.

That was it, though. A few more launches to use up the few engines.
She went home and drew a picture of she and I in the field for my refrigerator.
She sat the rocket on her bed-side table. Up close, it now had a sharp, bitter scent of burned fuel.

i don't have blue eyes 

Strong Coffee: rockets and soapbubbles

I was thinking of rockets and soapbubbles.
As a kid, that's all I ever thought about. They went together in my head. Soapbubbles were like planets, all iridescent and lighter-than-air. Until they were nearly out of sight and collapsing in on themselves in a whiff of ancient water, or else they were crashing into an oak leaf.

I kept the Estes rocket catalog under my pillow right next to my rosary beads. It was as coveted and as sacred as the annual Sears Wish Book that I got my electric guitar from one Christmas.

It hardly mattered that I was the only girl in Rocket Club in the 7th grade. That I was an ugly four-eyed little tomboyish geek prime for peer harrassment. The Estes rocket catalog made it all go away-- like I was riding a soapbubble right outta town.

Here I was at the hobby shop picking up an Estes rocket catalog for the first time in 25 years--somewhere in Minnesota. 25 years ago I would have told myself I was a lunatic if I thought I'd ever be in Minnesota. "Maybe Morrocco, but not Minnesota," is what 14 year-old-me would have said to 40 year-old-me. "What's in Morocco?" my 40-year old asks.
"They have buried treasure there and Ingrid Bergman and food that smells sweet and spicy," my 14-year-old responds.
Ah, yes, Ingrid Bergman. Good reason to go to Morocco. Grab the next rocket out, I say.

The new 2004 Estes rocket catalog was destined for my niece. "Say a rosary for her genetic milieu," I say to myself. She was 10. She suddenly was struck with the desire to fly kites. And build a rocket. Kids who fly kites-----eh, whatever. Whatever. But, kids who want to build rockets---- now there's chaos theory, fractal geometry of genetics, or just stubborn dreaminess that will, no doubt, lead her into procrastination and dizziness. Amen. "...pray for us sinners." I could almost feel the alabaster beads in my fingers.