Backed with black felt only. It helps to not be a purist in this case because that felt is acrylic.
The recycling bin this morning is a lesson in why you should hire a copy editor. Some of these author copies were ordered early on and are full of typos. *Some were ordered after a batch of typos were fixed but then additional typos were discovered. Repeat from * to end three times.
“Batch of typos” is a phrase that will forever give me the chills.
As recently as last week I found, not one, not two, but THREE, more typos.
So I’m to be commended for chucking the old copies which honestly had become a form of clutter.
Below are fragments that I jotted down while listening to others’ writing. Some are direct quotes, others not. Attribution by initials and used with permission.
To use as a writing prompt, select one and set a timer for 30 minutes. And then just write. Keep the pen moving.
Sometimes you can’t make it up. MT.
Occasionally, her mind flickers to that man. OV.
Mostly, we are stumbling. I am stumbling. LT.
The emptiness of the streets surprised me. SH.
To be on a journey is to live on scraps and to not feel at home. MR.
Will the haunting never end? EL.
Some things don’t wait for you. OV.
I’m wondering when the reckoning will come. LT.
Why does hair have to be so complicated? EL
There’s no good way to measure what this winter did to us. MT.
A photograph doesn’t lie, until it does. MT.
Everything feels like prophecy today. SH.
How do you imagine the backyards of your childhood? MR
She was just starting to get it. LT.
My dad once said to me… MR
We deprive ourselves by always looking for the best. SH.
Lately death had been nagging at her. EL.
There’s a delicious quality of observation. Not a voice of conclusion. CC of LT
She realized that she had nothing to say. She was, however, impeccably dressed. MT.
How do you reach anyone anymore? MT
She had learned the art of repression and it had helped her in emergencies. LT.
People do start in the middle. CC
In the northern climes, we lack the ability to be languid. CC.
In my notifications, I get “look back” compilations from Amazon photos. They’ll show me, for instance, 20 pictures from the same day from the last five years. These from Hawley, Mass. caught my eye.
For several years in August, I joined others for a writing retreat in this small hill town north of Amherst. I forget the beauty of the place and how much, as a Berkshires kid, I really miss landscapes like these.
Where feels most like home to you?
One more thing. While rooting around old files, I found this posted poem. I wrote it in June of 2017 — early in Mango Mussolini’s first reign, in other words. Parts hit hard because of that. I think it’s a good poem.
My mother didn’t seem afraid of much. Then again, maybe she was afraid of everything. She certainly feared rejection. Certainly she feared a few of my father’s moods. Dying. She could snap and crackle with leonine brassiness easily mistaken for confidence. She bossed people around, refused to seek out permission for things. Again, looked like confidence and maybe it was. Inside, I know she often yearned to be accepted and loved and felt that she wasn’t. Or at least, not enough. That’s a wound that competes with confidence.
But don’t get me wrong. (Don’t get me wrong is a thing I might’ve said to her as I equivocated in true middle-child fashion, a stance easily mistaken for the absence of confidence).
Don’t get me wrong: a sure hand informed a lot of her life. Design: boom she had it. That indefinable thing we call taste. Instincts: bam. She trusted her gut. She trusted her gut and couldn’t understand why I didn’t. She could read people and was often right about them in a way that made me temporarily hate her.
She knew how to teach. She knew how to teach those with talent spilling out of their pockets. She knew how to see talent in those who kept it under lock and key. She knew how to teach troublemakers and nerds alike. It made her powerful in a certain realm, beloved, even. Yes, she was beloved in the art room, but not the teachers’ lounge where her constant smoking bothered some and her guttural smoker’s laugh was often laced with contempt.
In spite of a certain penchant for being stubborn and opinionated like my mother, I am more my father’s daughter. I share his love of solitude, his appreciation for an argument well-made. For most of my life, he was an atheist. I consider myself agnostic.
He’d been an altar boy growing up in Queens. His mother had swished her nylon-encased stout legs to Mass every morning. I remember the rosary beads dangling from her hands. You’d think after growing up like that it might have been a bigger deal giving it up but it didn’t seem that way. When my father stopped going to Mass, it was as if he took off an ill-fitting jacket and let it drop to the floor. Shrug. That was it.
He elevated science. The planets in their travels, for instance, were elegant and enduring symbols of a different kind of holiness. He bought a telescope and showed us kids Jupiter’s red spot, the moon’s shadowy craters. Mathematics satisfied him too. How many times in helping me with advanced algebra did he say, “let X equal” and how predictably did I groan because I got that part and wanted him to go faster. But no. Math is nothing if not taking things in order.
His sacraments? Walking through the woods. Fishing.
He didn’t understand why I cared so much about what other people thought, which was maybe his way of saying: trust yourself, trust your thoughts, your perceptions. Trust your ability to walk away from things.
My mother said, You worry too much. I didn’t think I worried too much. I thought I didn’t worry precisely enough. Imagine worrying about your worry.
My father left early. My mother did too, but 14 years later. One son met her, neither son met him.
Yesterday, a guest on a news program reminded me a little of my father – clear blue eyes, aquiline nose, a slight spray of freckles. I happened to be sitting with my brother and said so. He shrugged. Oh come on I insisted put glasses on him and you’d see it.
Nobody in my family really resembles anyone else. Or not for long anyway. My sister and I perhaps sounded alike but that’s it. My maternal grandfather mistook me for his middle daughter right before his death, but I was ten and changed a lot afterwards. My brother got that same grandfather’s nose, but no one got my father’s long, narrow one or my mother’s underbite.
It’s funny how that goes. When one of my boys was younger he could go in a flash from looking like his own father to resembling mine. Now he is only his own self, which of course is the best way to be.
All this talk of parents and children can’t help but make me feel urgent about time. How little perhaps is left.
Forgive the repetition from earlier posts. Also it might be unfinished, or at least ending in a strange place, but that’s the nature of a timed prompt.
What if home is not a place but a feeling? Not original. Begin again.
What if home is a favorite author? A totetable collection of pages that opens worlds and never lets you down? A writer whose storytelling makes you swoon and whose characters grab you from the get-go. What if home is the space between Best Buy and the highway? No man’s land.
I wanna gather up all my tops and cut up the shirts with stains. Today? A faint coffee blotch mid-chest. Which leads me to say: home could be not caring about all that.
Home these days is to worry, worry, worry. To be infuriated and overwhelmed and embarrassed and deeply out of sorts. Our country, in other words, our country defies home. This regime turns home inside out. It shits on the founding fathers. It acts as middle-man for the bottomless greed of those in office.
I sit cross legged in a mid-century modern chair in a mid-century modern house. Outside helicopters offer occasional menace. Counterpoint: the neighbor’s water feature. Ah!
Ravens are much bigger than crows. I don’t know if they’re smarter or not but I can’t help feeling that every time I’m on the driveway or out on the deck, they’re sizing me up. On the path that winds around Mount Washington, they dropped walnuts in our path. Near misses. “Oh, that’s on purpose,” my brother would tell us later.
I was not one of the 20,000 people that walked shoulder to shoulder in downtown LA this past weekend. Glendale’s closer and I didn’t go there either. The tension around staying put surprised me. If I’d had a vehicle I could comfortably drive (not my brother’s truck, that’s for sure), I’d have left him with my husband and at least driven by to honk and show support, my tiny “8647” sign on the dash. But I can barely get in the truck, never mind drive it, and while I know some parts of Glassell Park and East LA, I don’t know the way to Glendale.
How easily I am undone here. I can’t find shit in the kitchen – the rasp, the second cutting board, the meat thermometer, a mixing bowl for Christ’s sake. None of the knives are sharp, turning the pink hump of a shallot into an adversary. There’s no oven fan meaning that every time you open its door, furnace-like heat blasts out and you better not have your face too close. It also means cooking lamb chops stove top set off the smoke alarms, necessitating dashing about setting up floor fans, opening doors. Needless to say, I prefer cooking at home
So maybe home is where you can find things in the kitchen.
Every other plant here has spines. Spontaneous weeding, which is how I typically weed in Massachusetts, is not a good idea here given how close many of the invasive grasses and clovers are to nasty cacti. The nettles are no fun either. Gloves, a must.
On the pleasant side: a lozenge of a swimming pool filled with salty warm water. What a pleasurable way to end an afternoon! A dunk. A paddle. A blowing of air into bubbles, life-affirming bubbles.
The sun sets over the fence that lines the pool – making the giant ficus back there go inky black. Which reminds me, when I get home, the 350-year-old beech behind my neighbor’s house will be gone. Will it even feel like home anymore?
The stupid limits I set. Once it was: when and if New England Mobile Book Fair closes, I’m leaving Newton. Then it was, if that copper beech ever comes down, I’m leaving Newton. I looked at that tree while prepping veggies or while rolling out a dough. The setting sun glared through its branches, visible from backyard, deck, family room, and dining room. Upstairs from the bed, I might see the moon wander through its dark tangle of branches.
It got sick. Many beeches in New England are getting sick. It’s not 120° temperatures or catastrophic sudden flooding, or fires taking out entire neighborhoods, but it is climate related and a grievous loss.
Imagine how it might feel (speaking of trees and regimes and protests), if our government embraced the urgent need to slow global warming. Imagine if that corrupt pretense that it’s a hoax dropped away and reality shone through, its terrifying dimensions relieving compared to denial. What if our government acted like having a future mattered more than satisfying the energy lobbies? What then?
A collective sigh. A dropping of the shoulders. A leaning into whatever it would take (and trust me when I tell you it’s not recycling). Rather, we’d feel determined and maybe even optimistic, willing as communities to endure hardships in service of the future.
Truth, in fact, has been sacrificed to profit to Murdoch to Trump and his dumb shit children, to the tech bros, who now want to violate whole communities to keep their crypto and AI factories cool.
Five million people is a lot of people. Trump coming home early from the G7 because he’s tired, defeated, out of his league, and a shell of a man is evident to everyone. I applaud the European sneers and Canadian interruptions. Our national demon spends too much time insulated. Oh, look, there’s Pam Bondi singing his praises and declaring burners of Teslas domestic terrorists. But a murderer of Democratic lawmakers? Not so much. So maybe he doesn’t quite know how incredibly reviled he is.
The reels from all over the country bringing us to tears. How unified and gratifying the crowds! The vast protests in Idaho, for Christ’s sake. North Carolina, North Florida, Oklahoma. This was not exclusively a Boston, LA, Chicago, New York thing by any stretch. He had to have seen a minute or two of coverage? But even if he’d been shielded from it all, every single world leader whose hand he shook had seen the footage and understood the import.
So I guess what I’m saying is that a return to sanity would feel like going home. This isn’t wishing for some mythic past that never existed, but for a kind of normalcy that might allow us to progress one foot after the other. Or maybe even running to preserve the oceans, the ice caps, clean water, trees.
If hate could take a person down, Trump would be long dead. How often that wish comes up in conversation amazes me. Everyone, not just my radical friends, but all of them, wish him dead and say so.
