Winter Me

Here it is December, and I am flying in the face of my annual fall depression. A breakup, a move, and a zero tolerance for cold (see previous posts about my passionate thoughts on winter) are all keeping me from enjoying the carefree existence that I know that I deserve. I get up, I make coffee, I stress. Then I stress some more. Drink more coffee. Inevitably I'm late to work, which causes more stress. So, I've decided to write something, anything, every day. Writing lifts my mood and keeps me from thinking about, well, me. Because me, especially Winter Me, causes stress. It's a full and unhappy circle that only writing, yoga, and sunshine can cure

So, here we go. Let's start with a poem. About a fish. That I killed. Baby steps, people.

Killing Fish

Why does water seep out of this broken thrift-store tank

As if the Indian sea is behind it?



A crack in the glass.

Water drips like shiny rupees onto the floor.

I am confused by my own ineptness,

or maybe I’m surprised this fish trusted me with its life at all.



The instruction manual said to use fresh water, not salt.

Food, oxygen, twenty gallons of clean water.

A tank, deep and wide enough to house this ocean-bound jewel.



Carpe, carpio, or sapphire carp?

I don’t even know your real name, fish.

What would your Hindu countrymen call you?

Nothing I call you sounds magnificent enough.



You are only a fish, but I speak to you like a lover:

Like the time I asked you 100 important questions about India.

I wanted you to tell me ancient stories only I could hear.



The tank is half empty. Still breathing, fish?

You were built for the faster currents of the Indian Ocean.

Surely your kind has survived greater hardships than this.



OK, listen up, Allah! This is your fish. I am not a believer.

I am not a professor, or a caretaker, or a fisherman among exotic men.

I am just a bystander, who should never have tried to own anything as beautiful as this fish.



What was it that Gandhi said? The body only temporarily houses the spirit?

In life there is no pain, only the illusion of pain?



I will be you then, fish, our next time together on earth.

Come back for me and feed me to the sharks.

It will be a wretched end, but we will both gain enlightenment.



Stop breathing, damn fish! Give it up to the cosmos before I cry.

This is not supposed to hurt, and we will both be better fish for it in the end.

The Art of Losing

The art of losing isn’t difficult to master.
--Elizabeth Bishop "One Art"

This weekend, our cat died.

Here are the facts: She was six years old. She was a tortoise-shell tabby. She was a notorious escape artist that loved to be outside. She was loved. I’m going to write it again, so that I begin to accept it: This weekend our cat died.

Oh, I try to reassure myself with the Circle of Life explanation, that all things go back to whence they came, and I sing to myself that to every purpose there is a season, but these are the stupid facts: She was attacked by a Siberian Husky, off his leash for the first time in his young life it seems, and clearly, he didn’t know how to handle the responsibility.

This weekend our cat died.

A neighbor tried to comfort me with the idea of a “Rainbow Bridge” to another place, where all dead pets go to play until their owners claim them in the afterlife. I should be comforted by that. But these are not the facts. The facts somehow comfort me.

So many things seem filled with the intent to be lost…

Her life was a series of homes lost: the original home she ran away from because she was a notorious escape artist. There was the shelter, from which she didn't run away, but probably wanted to. There were our homes. Moving five times in five years she adapted to her new surroundings, escaping from each and every one, but always returning—sometimes scraped, sometimes tired. This last move was a return to our house with the big yard, and it was this home she liked the best, I believe, because it was the easiest place to get lost. She died in that big yard, in the garden in which she loved to hide and watch me weed and plant, weed and plant. Our secret.

…that their loss is no disaster…The art of losing is no (Write it!) disaster.

The real tragedy here is the telling of these facts to my son, yesterday. I studied each change in his eyes like an actor waiting for my next emotional cue. His eyes looked at me first with amusement because his mom had gotten so uncharacteristically serious, then with disbelief, then with grief. I thought well, here is the moment, that dreaded moment, that I always wanted to protect him from. Here is when he realizes that I’ve been telling him lies all along, about how nothing bad will ever happen to him or to anyone or anything he loves because I, his mother, have always told him that this was so.

As I fumbled through the facts, I knew I would never be a master at the job that had been given to me. But I don’t want this job ever again. Nothing I could say could ever explain that scene in the front garden--no fairy tale, no mythology, no lie was ever going to bring her back to him, his first pet--this cat that he loved and lost.

My Hope Project, Day 30

Recently, I watched with unnatural fascination a saga of nature, starring a persistent, uncommonly ugly spider that decided to take up residence on the review mirror of my car. It had spun a perfectly symmetrical, silver web that I never noticed until I got into the car one morning. I never would have seen it, except that the sunlight hit it just the right way as I pulled out of my parking spot. As I drove to work, I resisted the urge to brush the web away and watched as gnats, flies, and winged creatures of all shapes and sizes hit the bulls-eye, then were eaten. Its method was precise: As the insect would hit the web, the spider would crawl out from under the rear view mirror, grab its prey as it struggled, chow down quickly, then scramble back under the mirror and wait. That day, I drove way too slowly, watching the miracle of death by spider unfold. Unfortunately, by the time I arrived at my office, the web had withered and was stuck to my window, obliterated. Surprisingly, the next morning, the spider had found a way to duplicate the web--just as perfectly--and the feeding process started all over again. This creation-destruction cycle went on for approximately five days, until the spider must have decided that it had had enough and moved on. I kind of miss it if you want to know the truth. I looked forward to seeing that web every morning.

I write this, not because I like spiders, or because the miraculous ecosystem that was going on next to me was just another reason not to wash my car yet again, but because I think I'm trying to find hope. Because I've lost it lately. I keep hoping that the Divine Pattern of Nature, the True Course of All Good Things, will find a way to right itself naturally and make me a happier person. I'm not afraid to admit it--I've even lost hope in myself. My life is chugging along rather quickly and there doesn't seem to be a lot of good things happening to me or to the people I love, quintessential little guys if there ever were any. Bankers are getting richer and the corporations I am fueling with my paycheck are getting stronger. Oh yes, the economy is rebounding (haven't you heard?), and Evil Big Oil is drilling deeper, but no one seems to be listening to their conscience. And its screwing me, and everybody I know, over. And so I'm looking for hope, or a reason not to completely give up on finding it.

So I've taken to observing little things like spiders. I'm hoping to find signs of hope in the every day things, not in big things I have no faith in anymore, like banks. I'm on about Day 30 of My Hope Project, and so far, the Universe hasn't found too many ways to inform my sorry ass that my life is going particularly well. But occasionally I am surprised.

Today, hope came from all things--a water slide. (You should probably know that I am afraid of water slides because of all of the tragedy that they promise: of hitting my head on the way down and drowning without anyone noticing, of someone landing on me on their way down, of losing my swimsuit top, of looking middle-aged silly, oh, the list goes on and on. I hate water slides. Water sliding and skiing are the most dangerous sports in the world if you ask me, but I'll save the stories that explain each of these phobias for another entry.)

Today's hope came from a water slide and my son's wise and mischievous smile, as he held my hand and dragged me groaning and protesting up the 29 concrete steps it took to get to the top. Today, hope came because my son urged me to a race and laughed at my fears. Hope came because he got me to let go today, to remember all the possibilities for happiness that I've been given, even if I'm having trouble finding them right now. Hope came because I didn't lose my top, I didn't drown, and I did let go, even it was for only thirty seconds, on a water slide.

That Fargo State of Mind

I was born in Fargo, North Dakota.

I have five vivid memories from the years of 1964-1971 that I lived in Fargo.

1. I was always cold and it always seemed to be snowing.
2. The boy across the street, Brady (who I was in love with), ran me over with his bike, which still included training wheels, because I refused to get out of his way.
3. Because the Vietnam War was on television every night, I thought it was a dramatic television show, like Perry Mason, only with dead people.
4. I was deathly afraid of losing my boots in a snow drift and getting frostbite, or being suffocated by a snowdrift, looking for my lost boots.
5. I wanted to marry Paul McCartney.

Those five memories have pretty much set the course I've followed the rest of my life:

1. I hate cold weather.
2. Men, with their proverbial bikes stuck in proverbial first gear, have, at certain stages of my life, run head-first right over me only to move onto the next relationship hair flying in the wind, no hands, and no training wheels.
3. I use fiction of all kinds, including my own, to escape thinking about the bad things in life, to avoid change, to avoid dating, to avoid housework, and to keep myself from brooding. Usually about the cold weather.
4. Did I mention I hate snow?
5. I married, and divorced, the cute guy in the band, although unlike Paul, he was a drummer and lacked a bank account.

It doesn’t surprise me at all that the Coen brothers made a movie called Fargo. I even like that it’s about something bad, like a brutal murder, because nothing bad ever happened there, except on television, or far, far away. It’s all wrong, which is why the city of Fargo was ripe for dramatic tension of the Coen Brothers sort. I’m just sorry I didn’t think of it first.

Fargo isn’t so much a place, as it is my state of mind. It goes with me everywhere, and even though I keep forty miles away from it, I will always be close by for the rest of my life. Never mind that most of the movie wasn’t even shot in Fargo, but in Brainerd, Minnesota. The state of mind in Brainerd isn’t much different. I know, because I’ve been there, too. The Co-Bros just thought Fargo sounded better as a title. And it does, especially if you speak with that famous Fargo accent. Do the people of Fargo talk this way? Sure they do. Heck-ya. My mom still does. Heck-ya. Even when I read about Fargo, I can’t help but slip into a Fargo dialect. It’s no wonder I love to start the day with Get your coat, we’re goin’ in the boat, then we’re goin to the Fargodome to see a show-ya. I even still say “uff-da” when I’ve had a bad day, like the main character, Margie, played by Frances McDormand. My aunt was even called Margie. I think most of the women over 40 there are named Marge. I wish my name was Marge.

So readers, tell me about where you were born. Is it a state of mind or just a place?