Ordinary Time

Altered Arthur

2009-08-09T18:42:12Z

The Rise of General Arthur
phillip andrew bennett low
Augsburg Mainstage
2211 Riverside, Minneapolis

Sat., Aug. 1 @ 5:30 p.m., Sun., Aug. 2 @ 10:00 p.m. Tue., Aug. 4 @ 7:00 p.m. Wed., Aug. 5 @ 8:30 p.m. Sat., Aug. 8 @ 8:30 p.m.

http://www.fringefestival.org/2009/show/?id=975

"I sometimes wonder if it's me that's being made love to. I feel like I'm being harpooned by some raging monk in the act of receiving God." Emily Jessup, Altered States.

I saw Ken Russell’s adaptation of Paddy Chayefsky's novel in 1982 with a man who aspired to be Eddie Jessup. I married him anyway. When phillip andrew bennett low gets on the stage, I have flashbacks.

This is an artist with a passion for Arthurian legend, who connects deeply – and I suspect quite personally - to the themes inherent in these texts: loyalty and betrayal, free will and destiny. The quest that is at once choice and compulsion. The burden of trying – and failing – to live up to a moral standard that preserves the social order. The uneasy harnessing of violence in its service. What it means to be worthy of love. And of allegiance.

To set Arthurian themes in the context of the first Gulf War is intriguing – though I cannot say I understand more about the nature of either leaving the theater. Nor am I sure I want low to push it. A connection between Kennedy and Camelot – that I can stomach.

I like to think at the Fringe. I like to be challenged by the material. I am grateful to anyone who sees fit to bring myth, legend, literature to the stage, and can get an audience to come out and watch it instead of sitting glued in front of the oxymoron that is Reality Television. I may, in fact, be one of the few people in the universe who wants to see low do more work with the Gnostic gospels. The piece I saw at Spirit in the House two years ago blew me away. I not only want to experience it again. I want others to experience it. I want others to understand why they should want to experience it.

The energy low pours into the esoteric, the unabashed love of brain food, his palpable, intense love of language – we need that. He is clearly a genius. But he pummels us with it. Like Emily Jessup, I sometimes wonder why I am there. Virtuoso performance does not draw you in. It calls attention to itself.

I want to see low’s work with complex, difficult material become more accessible. Paradoxically, this means I want both more and less of him in the performance. I want it to be less of a demonstration of how intelligent he is – we already know - and more an effort to engage the audience with the text. To do this he has to care enough about that audience to move them through his own experience of it so they, too, get to feel that energy, that sense of connection, that intense love. I am tired of being a voyeur. And he is capable of more. Of creating that altered state - in which both the individual and the community are fully present – which is the bard’s Holy Grail. Whether or not he is a Rockstar.

Lily Was Right. Thank Goodness.

2009-08-08T21:29:05Z

Katherine Glover

A Cynic Tells Love Stories

Augsburg Main Stage

2211 Riverside Ave., Minneapolis

Fri., Jul. 31 @ 10:00 p.m.., Sat. Aug. 1 @ 1:00 p.m. Sun., Aug. 2 @ 8:30 p.m., Thu., Aug. 6 @ 5:30 p.m. Sat., Aug. 8 @ 7:00 p.m.

No matter how cynical you become, it’s never enough to keep up. Lily Tomlin.

When the meltdown of my marriage began, I turned first to bibliotherapy. By this I mean the “Relationships” section of Barnes and Noble. (Actually, with some premonition of my future economic state, I browsed at Barnes and Noble, wrote down the titles, and then surreptitiously took them out of the pubic library.) Phillip Blumstein and Pepper Schwartz’s Peer Marriage. John Gottman’s Why Marriages Succeed or Fail. Peter Kramer’s “Should I Leave?” I was trying to work out the issues, trying on ideas. It was all just theoretical. Ashton Applewaite’s Cutting Loose. Constance Ahron’s The Good Divorce. Isolina Ricci’s Mom’s House, Dad’s House. My library card knew what was happening before I did.

“What is more important, passion or compatibility?” Katherine Glover asks in “A Cynic Tells Love Stories.” I hear the question, coming from a woman whose parents divorced when she was three, and wonder if my own daughter, whose parents divorced when she was seventeen, asks herself the same question. Or if, like me, she sees this as a false dichotomy.

False dichotomies make wonderful jumping off points, however. By the end of the hour, Glover’s stories have addressed, in one way or another, all the necessary conditions for love: Attraction. Desire. Trust. Mutuality. Respect. Acceptance. Commitment. And a strong enough sense of self in each partner that both intimacy and autonomy are possible. She does this in a way that is both smart and funny, without being sardonic. Neither insight nor imagination is sacrificed to the god of Irony.

Gottman claims a lasting marriage is not about compatibility in the matchmaker’s sense at all – compatibility of interests, personality types, values, religious beliefs. If compatibility is necessary in any respect, it is in a couple’s style of handling conflict. Most of us have been trained to believe that a particular style of communication and compromise – validation - is required. But Gottman’s research demonstrates that volatile couples – the passionate – have every bit as much a chance of achieving stability as those who avoid conflict altogether because they simply don’t see it as worth the trouble. Of course whether a lasting marriage is a healthy marriage is a different question altogether.

“A good marriage,” someone once told me, “is one in which you are more yourselves together than apart.” Is it cynicism to wonder how long any one relationship can really bear this burden? Why Marriages Succeed or Fail succeeded in describing my own dilemma precisely. I could see exactly how things had begun to go wrong. But it failed to convince me I could change anything. Like most people, we had waited too long. By the time criticism has turned to contempt, the damage has already been done.

And yet there are couples who avoid this. Whose relationships not only last, but stay healthy. Is it because they manage to remain peers, to have an equal balance of power in the relationship? Equality is a straightforward concept; equity, less so, especially when children enter the picture. Do same sex couples have an advantage over heterosexual couples in this regard, as Blumstein and Schwartz suggest, because they organize their lives, and the roles they play, in ways that are essentially more egalitarian? I used to ask this of my gay friends on occasion. Eventually I got tired of the uncontrollable laughter.

The story of Glover’s own brief marriage is told beautifully, with candor and compassion, and not a drop of self-pity. It made my heart ache. In a good way. In the end it is this story, which convinces me she is not, after all, a cynic. Anyone who can see with such clarity, who can recreate each detail of a relationship – not without pain, perhaps, but in a conscious effort to move beyond bitterness - is not jaded – or closeminded - enough to qualify. Nor does my daughter have to be. Stories like this are one of the reasons I see nurturing creativity as a moral imperative.

Recovery Act

2009-08-06T20:59:56Z

Curt Lund and Laura Bidgood - What Happened? Productions
Slow Jobs: Servicing America for $12 an Hour
U of M Rarig Center, Arena Stage
330 21st Avenue S. Minneapolis, MN

Friday, July 31; 8:30pm Sunday, August 2; 4:00pm Tuesday, August 4; 5:30pm Wednesday, August 5; 10:00pm Saturday, August 8; 8:30. http://fringefestival.org/2009/show/?id=1105

In 2000, my daughter Maggie, then in the 8^th grade, took a barrage of career aptitude tests. They were same ones I had taken the year before during my midlife career crisis, after spending ten years in the automotive industry, writing abstracts of technical articles for Ford Motor Company – a decade of my work life I prepared for by obtaining a doctorate in Victorian religious literature. There is an art to titling the thesis, just as there is an art to titling a Fringe show. Mine was “Remythologizing the Bible: Fantasy and the Revelatory Hermeneutic of George MacDonald.” In the era of deconstruction, speech act theory, and dime-a-dozen doctorates, not exactly an academic hit. I had not taken career aptitude tests in the eighth grade. I had taken Home Ec.

How do these things happen? Why do we end up where we do?

When her results came back, I asked Maggie what those tests said she should be when she grew up. She did not hesitate for a moment. “A Nobel Prize-winning author.” You do not have to be a product of the Repository for Germinal Choice to aim high. We were unable to find any colleges where she could major in Nobel Prize Winning. But both her father and I believe that a strong liberal arts education is necessary to the development of critical thought and the exercise of imagination. These qualities create favorable conditions for finding right livelihood. That, at least, was an opportunity we could provide.

This May she graduated from Hamline – Phi Beta Kappa, with a double major in history and religious studies and an honors thesis with the impressive title “A’isha and Fatima: Matriarchs and Sectarian Identity in Medieval Islamic Literature.” The hits just keep on coming. She was the Multifaith Alliance Coordinator at Hamline from 2005 to 2009, and the Inaugural Steven and Kathi Austin Mahle Scholar for Progressive Christian Thought. She won the Eliza M. Drew Award in History, the Senior Religion Major Award, the Alfred D. and Hazel Stedman Writing Award and the Louis Parish Award for Service to Religious Life, the latter two years in a row. Am I proud? Not a little. She spent her junior year abroad in Ghana, has three years of Japanese under her belt, a year of Spanish, and a smattering of Twi. She’s also a crackerjack web designer and an aspiring artist with a show opening up at Cosmic’s Coffee on Snelling in St. Paul Friday.

And unemployed. And living in my home. Yes, I can send you her resume.

At the moment she is interviewing for jobs teaching English in Seoul. Hamline has good ESL connections. Apparently half the 2009 graduating class is heading for Korea, because there are NO JOBS here. They have national health insurance. She is learning Korean. I never thought I’d see the day when I would have to send my daughter to a foreign country to improve her standard of living. Stay away from the border, I tell her. If Bill has to bring you back, I will be very upset.

How do these things happen? How do we end up where we do?

I am glad Curt Lund and Laura Bidgood have ended up here. Their show is a Recovery Act of its own. Go see it. Not only are they funny and intelligent, thus fitting my Thinking Woman’s Fringe filter, but they clearly enjoy working together. Two people who have known each other since childhood and are still a creative inspiration to one another – this is a rare and wondrous thing. Worth growing up in North Dakota for? I’m guessing yes.

I don’t know Laura well (though I did once know a Loretta), but from our production of Saving Pagan Babies together with Ann Reay and Loren Niemi, at the Spirit in the House Festival in February, I know it is easy to enjoy working with Curt. He is an openhearted, unpretentious artist who manages to integrate that vocation into his day job as Marketing Director for the Minnesota Center for Book Arts. I am pretty sure he is hiding tights and a spandex suit somewhere. (We already know he has a cape.) Because that’s my idea of a superhero. It should definitely go into his – ahem – donor profile. Such qualities are a lot more important being six feet tall with blond hair, blue eyes and good muscle tone.

Or, for that matter, winning a Nobel Prize. Even at the Repository for Germinal Choice.

Take; eat.

2009-08-05T22:46:14Z

Lane McKiernan
Food Shelf Follies
Playwright's Center
2301 Franklin Ave. E., Minneapolis

Fri., Jul. 31 @ 10:00 p.m., Sat., Aug. 1 @ 5:30 p.m., [A] Sun., Aug. 2 @ 1:00 p.m. Thu., Aug. 6 @ 7:00 p.m., Sun., Aug. 9 @ 5:30 p.m.

http://www.fringefestival.org/2009/show/?id=1078

“I do not have any difficulty believing the Host is Christ’s body,” said my Roman Catholic friend. “What I have trouble believing is that it is bread.” Apparently, however, transubstantiation is a fragile process. Because according to the Vatican, whether real bread or wafer, the priest can't make Jesus without gluten.

Orders are orders.

My son had a teacher in the fourth grade, at Percy Priest Elementary School in Green Hills, Tennessee, who was a veteran of the first Gulf War. Mr. Chase. He was a former Green Beret. Mr. Chase’s kids lined up differently in the hall from other kids. They had more homework every night than other kids. And they won all the contests on Field Day. Had it been permitted, I think Mr. Chase might have had his students dig their own latrines. Aidan simultaneously loved and feared Mr. Chase – both wanted his approval, and resented his discipline. For a young man, however, Mr. Chase was sick a lot. Gulf War Syndrome, we were told. Chemical exposure. Although he came home without obvious wounds, his immune system was shot. He took medication for this, but it made him sleepy. During the school year, if he was feeling well enough, he often reduced the dosage, something that was not recommended. But a soldier needs to be alert. So does a fourth grade teacher.

Even if it means disobeying orders.

Several years after we left Tennessee, we heard Mr. Chase had died. Not from Gulf War Syndrome, exactly. From food poisoning. He had eaten a rare steak, and the steak had contained e-coli. Not a strain that would bother anyone else. But toxic to him.

On my way home from a meeting today, I had to stop at the grocery store. I hadn’t had time to plan the week’s meals; I just knew I was out of a lot of what is normally considered healthy food. (It should go without saying that this includes dark chocolate and whole bean coffee.) I ended up in the grocery section of Super Target. Several people have recently sent me that list known as the “dirty dozen” –fruits and vegetables whose pesticide content remains dangerously high, even after they are washed. So I went first to the organic produce counter. What was there was small and mean looking, and expensive. Most of it had been flown in from Mexico or South America. I found organic chocolate, but none of it was fair trade. There was organic, fair trade, whole bean coffee, but Eight-o-Clock was two dollars a pound cheaper. And who was I trying to kid by paying a premium for “cruelty-free” meat? Did the certification process include an interview with the Meat?

After forty-five minutes of hemming and hawing, trying to determine the least damaging, most ethical and economical way of feeding myself, I finally said to hell with it, threw in my cart whatever looked good, and vowed to do better next time.

Not everyone has the luxury of being able to do this. Lane McKiernan is one of those people. A chemical exposure has made him allergic to a number of foods that you and I can still find nourishing – or at least nontoxic. Finding foods that do not sicken him – learning to cook without gluten or wheat, avoiding the ubiquitous high fructose corn syrup - has been a difficult process, made even harder by periods of unemployment. At one food shelf, when he tries to return things he knows he cannot eat so that someone else can benefit from them, the worker takes everything back. “If you were really in need you would eat what we gave you.” Water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink. When your body itself becomes the albatross, what then do you do?

Lane is not only chemically sensitive but transgender, and weaves this reality into the story with a refreshing matter-of-factness. There are no identity politics here: only a real person, with real needs. He tells his story quietly, without rancor. I have never heard anyone speak of working in a minimum wage, food service industry job with such obvious pleasure, even vocation; his description of early mornings at the bakery reminded me of Brother Lawrence, practicing the Presence of God. Had you asked Brother Lawrence whether he thought gluten necessary for this, I think you would have gotten the answer such a question deserves.

You might think that Lane's show would be a preachy, uncomfortable experience. Instead it is full of beautiful moments, both in the interludes of music and juggling by Walken Schweigert and Katie Burgess, and in the narrative itself. There are kind people as well as the insensitive, unskilled in withholding judgment. Lane presents them without comment. That is life. And this is advocacy at its finest, a call for justice which draws people in rather than shuts them out. Anger is reserved for a system that fails the poor and the disabled, and for the elected officials who balance the budget on the backs of those least able to make their voices heard.

And even anger with the system, and those who represent it, is tempered with humor. When a social services bureaucrat accuses Lane of trying to get benefits with a fake ID because the gender on it is wrong, his bewildered response - “I didn’t know whether to be upset at the accusation of fraud or pleased that I finally passed.”- gently ushers me into his world and gives me a hook to hang my hat on. It is the courage to laugh at such experiences that saves a person from despair – and feeds a community’s capacity for compassion. Because in the end, we must all give. And take. And eat.

*Not a Meat Pie

2009-08-04T23:20:30Z

Nancy Donoval
Every Pastie* Tells A Story
Playwrights’ Center
2301 Franklin Ave E Minneapolis, MN 55406

Fri., Jul. 31 @ 7:00 p.m. Sat., Aug. 1 @ 8:30 p.m. Tue., Aug. 4 @ 10:00 p.m. Fri., Aug. 7 @ 4:00 p.m. Sat., Aug. 8 @ 7:00 p.m.
http://www.fringefestival.org/2009/show/?id=1079

You will not learn to make them twirl. There. Let me get the only disappointing thing about this story out of the way. If you were looking for pole dancing, you will also have to go elsewhere.

I said I was attending the Thinking Woman’s Fringe, but that doesn’t mean I’m not seeing funny shows. It’s just that all of the funny shows I am seeing are also intelligent. Nancy Donoval’s storytelling flawlessly integrates humor and intelligence and I never get tired of hearing her tell. Since I’m her Girl Friday this year, doing last minute errands, recording (when my recorder works), postcarding, fetching cups of hot tea, helping get the props off the stage at the end, I’m hearing her tell a lot. Nancy’s stories are remarkable not only for their humor and intelligence, but for their accessibility. You do not need to be a “theater person” to be drawn into this tale – you don’t need to have been a good Catholic girl, or even a girl. Familiarity with Milwaukee – not required. You only need to have once been young, and to have thought that the rest of your life was hanging on someone else’s opinion of your talent, your competence, your commitment. Nancy makes it look easy, this storytelling business – natural, like a conversation. But don’t be fooled – at each and every moment, she is a dancer on point – a consummate, meticulous artist with words. The resolution of this story leaves you richer, more capable of humor, generosity and intelligence yourself.

And in the spirit of that generosity, I pass on this resource. Girl Fridays also do research.

Barthelme the Scrivener

2009-08-03T19:14:58Z

The Twisted Grin-Assorted Tales to Amuse and Alarm
Mindless Mirth Productions
Augsburg Studio
2211 Riverside Ave., Minneapolis, MN

Thu., Jul. 30 @ 10:00 p.m., Sat., Aug. 1 @ 5:30 p.m., Thu., Aug. 6 @ 8:30 p.m. , Fri., Aug. 7 @ 8:30 p.m. , [S] Sat., Aug. 8 @ 4:00 p.m.

http://www.fringefestival.org/2009/show/?id=974

Kenneth – what is the frequency? In 1986, Dan Rather was attacked by two men who repeatedly pummeled him for no obvious reason, and between beatings, asked this apparently absurd question. The crime was never resolved, though one of the assailants was eventually apprehended. But "Kenneth - what's the frequency?" made a neat song, one Rather got over his trauma long enough to enjoy singing it with REM.

Fifteen years later, iin Harper's Magazine, Paul Limbert Allman claimed he has solved the mystery of this curious assault, pasting together two apparently unrelated lines in Barthelme’s short story “The Indian Uprising” to come up with an equally absurd theory involving the Houston author. Allman has since conceded that he finds his own theory "difficult to accept," and that the assailants could also have been "loose cannons armed with quotes."

Which, interestingly enough, describes Barthleme to a tee. I suppose when you write surrealist fantasy and play with violent themes in fragmentary bursts of flash fiction, echoing the structure and logic of the schizophrenic mind, you should not be surprised when you end up being the source of inspiration for a pair of them - the Jodi Foster of Post-Modernism.

Alternatively, Paul Allman’s piece may in fact be a tongue-in-cheek tribute to Barthelme, who died in 1989. It was written in December 2001. If Barthelme had been alive to see the former Governor of Texas shift the blame for 9/11 from Osama Bin Laden to Saddam Hussein, he might have written just such a story himself.

I appear to be attending, courtesy of my talented and interesting friends, the Thinking Woman’s Fringe. (Although the Woman's Thinking Fringe makes a better acronym.) This has been making it hard for me to review performances in a timely fashion. I just get too caught up in exploring what I sampled afterwards. I have not read Barthelme in a long, loooong time – one short story in a graduate course on contemporary American short fiction at the University of Minnesota in 1979 really doesn't cut it. After having seen Larry Ripp’s Twisted Grin, I found myself wanting to go home and reacquaint myself with Barthelme’s work. This is relatively easy to do online. So I did. I wish I could take credit for the title of this review, BTW, but at least four others got there before me.

I am amazed that there appear to have been so few adaptations of Barthelme’s short stories to the theater. Beckett was a major influence, as were Sartre and Ionesco, and it shows. Many of Barhelme's stories are monologues, often with narrators of questionable reliability. The folks at Mindless Mirth Productions really have something here – though they might want to change their name. Because Donald Barthelme – while playful - is anything but a mindless experience.

Barthelme’s stories appeared mostly in the New Yorker, where for many I suspect they served the same purpose as the cartoons – short, sophisticated comic relief. Not to say that the stories are not challenging. They are, in fact, linguistic koans, semiotic puzzles. As one critic puts it, for Barthelme the highest success is not if the story strikes us as true, but rather if it shows us how it works. I had to learn a new word - heteroglossia - just to understand some of the criticism. Sometimes I am glad I am no longer an academic.

Turns out I enjoy Barthelme more as interpreted theatre than I do just reading him – though it was interesting in several of the pieces to see what Ripp omitted. There isn’t much, and it seldom does damage to the author’s intention. Of course if it did, Barthelme, an academic himself, could hardly complain. He has read his Husserl, his Heidegger, his Barthes and Derrida. No doubt he has told bar stories at MLA conventions with Frederic Jameson and Stanley Fish. Even now the tenure of entire English faculties depended on an ideology which permits, even encourages, the subversion of authorial intent. The editorial changes of one little Fringe Festival playwright don’t mount to a hill of beans in that town.

Jon Eichenlaub does an excellent job with Some of Us Have Been Threatening Our Friend Colby, which is taken almost verbatim from the text, but my favorite stories are those in which the author backs away from fragmented absurdity and meaningless violence as abruptly as he engages it, and imagines instead a different world. We know that this world is as fragile, and as possible, as the other, and yet ending there in some way gives hope. Life is absurd, and we make stupid, even cruel mistakes, but people are essentially good. Sure, the narrator in I Bought a Little City shoots six thousand dogs, proving that power – and capitalism - corrupt. But on deciding he doesn’t like the experience, he just gives it up. At least that’s how it appears in the abridged version. “Took a bath on that deal,” he says cheerfully. And learned not to play God. “A lot of other people already knew that, but I have never doubted for a minute that a lot of other people are smarter than me, and figure out things quicker.” His commentary on the nature of God’s own apparently sadistic imagination - “He does a lot worse things every day” – loses some depth and resonance with the elimination of Sam Hong’s wife. But the essential meaning comes across.

There are times when I sense more gravitas in Barthelme than comes across in Twisted Grin. Like I Bought a Little City, The School, perhaps, loses a bit of its complexity, feeling more like a Saturday Night Live sketch (hence the Mindless Mirth) than a piece that genuinely addresses existential questions. Is it death that gives meaning to life? Or life itself which is its own meaning? Either I blinked or an element rather critical to the ending of that particular story was missing - an element similar to the absence of Sam Hong's wife. Missing that context, I was distracted at first by not knowing whether the narrator was herself a sociopath, or a jinx, or whether the students at the school were just us, confronting what we all must confront –that life, in the end, will kill you. There is also a whiff of Cold War to “The School,” as if it was written in response to the actual absurdity of schoolchildren crouching under desks to protect themselves from nuclear attack. (I was there. We did this.) Yet the story that remained fit the character Rose Johnson portrayed, and I especially enjoyed her expressiveness and comic timing.

Gravitas is there, if you wish to find it. And affirmation of what is beautiful and joyous in life, amidst the absurdity. My favorite story (as anyone who knows me could probably guess) was A City of Churches – which for some reason I will probably never know, is available online in English and Chinese. Like another reviewer who claims he “went to that school,” I have done time in that city, which has a peculiarly Southern feel to it. I feel like Barthelme has stared with me down the length of Hillsboro Parkway in Nashville, where the steeples line up like missile silos. A city where you can “live in the church of your choice.” A choice as American as the color palette of a Model T. Vickijoan Keck’s portrayal of the young woman looking for an apartment in Prester, who has already been offered a job as their “car rental girl” despite the fact that everyone has a car in Prester and nobody wants to leave it, is spot on. She has the ability to act whatever age the part demands, which is a rare gift. For the most part, Cecelia (her name in the story; I do not believe it is mentioned in the play) is the rational voice, the reasonable outsider. Of course she will not take a job renting cars in a town where no one rents cars. That makes no sense. Of course she will not live in a belfry apartment. That would be bats. Are we in the Twilight Zone? But when her guide asks, quite pointedly, what denomination she is, the woman responds with an apparent non sequitur that explodes any precoonceptions we might have had about her character:

"I can will my dreams," Cecelia said. "I can dream whatever I want. If I want to dream that I'm having a good time, in Paris or some other city, all I have to do is go to sleep and I will dream that dream. I can dream whatever I want."

In the end, the guide’s insistence that Cecelia must stay “for balance” – that they need a car rental girl to make their town complete and thus perfect, to quell their own restlessness with the illusion of opportunity – has a certain menace to it. And yet Cecelia – who the narrator of “I Bought a Little City” would recognize immediately as “too imaginative” - threatens to break open their perfection, shake things up. Who will win?

I will admit this story has an idiosyncratic, personal meaning for me. In a past life I lived inside many churches. I know, in less than playful terms, what that does to a woman’s dreams. Especially a woman who is “too imaginative.” So I’m rooting for Cecilia. Dream on, baby.

Guilt Trip

2009-08-01T23:29:35Z

From July 30-August 9, I will be reviewing Fringe Festival shows. Reviews will appear on the Minnesota Fringe Festival website of each show, although long reviews will be truncated. All reviews will also appear here. For general information about the Minnesota Fringe Festival, go to www.fringefestival.org .

Death Camp Diaries
Howard Lieberman / Jaded Optimist Productions
U of M Rarig Center Xperimental
July 30 @ 5:30, July 31 @ 8:30, Aug 2 @ 7:00, Aug 5 @ 7:00, Aug 8 @ 4:00

http://www.fringefestival.org/2009/show/?id=991

What is the difference between a pilgrim and a tourist? And which one is Howard Lieberman – devout agnostic, secular Jew – as he “does” the Death Camps? Your guess is as good as Howard’s. Because clearly he identifies with both.

We know what a pilgrim is, don’t we? One whose journey into sacred space is a quest. A tourist – well, a tourist is just on vacation. A pilgrim encounters the Other. A tourist consumes it. Been there, done that. Got the t-shirt.

And yet the distinction is not so simple, and never has been. Nor is it simple for Howard. The honesty and ironic humor with which he explores that paradox in himself is one of the best elements of Death Camp Diaries. If Howard is going to go on a psychologically grueling journey, he will at least travel first class. Not with those other Jews, always looking for a bargain. He will stay in a nice hotel. Living well is the best revenge, isn’t it? He will find a good jazz club, and friend the vocalist on Facebook.

Pilgrims have been tourists since the merry band of the Canterbury Tales first got the springtime itch. The rich Saracen and his entourage were a major force in the economy of every little oasis on his haj. For better or for worse, trade, travel and transformation have always been entwined.

Transformation is never a one way street. If you cannot visit the Death Camps without being transformed, you also cannot do so without contributing to the economy of the descendents of those who ran them. It is easy for the locals to resent tourists. They swarm everywhere, make the check out lines longer, insist you speak English. Is it Anti-Semitism I saw in their eyes, these people who claim they never knew? Or are we just being Ugly Americans?

This is a once in a lifetime experience, the Orthodox rabbi said. One you will be processing for a long time.

Howard had been back two days when he opened at the Fringe. Where he finally really does have a Good Venue. The fact that this is a work in progress does not bother me in the least. We are all works in progress.

Besides, I love watching Howard grow. In many ways all of his previous work as a storyteller – particularly his most recent performance in June with Noa Baum at Loren Niemi’s venue, Two Chairs Telling – has been preparation for this experience, so that even in its rawness, certain themes are emerging. The one that intrigues me most is the quest for identity, and how inseparable this is from community, even when an iconoclast like Howard defines himself against it.

“You call yourself a Jew?” The Orthodox says this to the Conservative, the Conservative says this to the Reformed - and all of them say this to Howard. Who gets to decide? Enquiring Howard wants to know. What does it mean to be a Jew? Is this a cultural category, an ethnicity, or a religion? I like the rabbi; I like my brother and his wife, who are also on this trip – but the rest? Do I really even want to associate with these people, with their narrow perspectives and prejudices, their “organized superstitions,” their lack of taste? If I don’t, who am I?

One way of handling this dilemma is to plunk yourself down in Lutheran Minnesota, where you are Jewish by default. No need to Measure Up. Or, for that matter, to Put Up With. But there are limitations to this approach.

Academia has a special word for people who go sightseeing at scenes of death: they are thanotourists. There are less intimidating, but no less equally bizarre alternative phrases: dark tourist, grief tourist. The category includes trips to the sites of battlefields, cemeteries, natural and unnatural disasters, prisons, slaveholds. Concentration camps. You do not need to travel outside the United States to be a thanotourist – you can go to Gettysburg, Wounded Knee, New Orleans, Ground Zero, Alcatraz, Manzanar. Eventually, no doubt, if we ever find homes for the current tenants, you will be able to tour Guantanamo. And take home a refrigerator magnet.

Thanotourists are not necessarily morbid – though Sarah Vowel capitalizes on that brand, and builds much of the quirky appeal of Assassination Vacation upon it. Theirs are educational trips. This is a safe, neutral term – even a secular humanist can use it. But is it enough to call visiting the site of an atrocity “educational”? When you can map an archipelago of such sites across Europe? And visit them on a package tour?

George Santayana said that those who cannot remember history are condemned to repeat it. The spate of “histories” purporting that the Holocaust didn’t happen are reason enough to justify the trip. See for yourself – and never forget. This is one of the primary justifications for atrocity tourism, which comes close to being a moral obligation for Jews and Christians alike. For different reasons.

In the middle of the journey of our life
I came to myself within a dark wood
where the straight way was lost.

It didn’t matter to the Nazis if you were a good Jew, a bad Jew, or even a practicing Jew. What mattered was that you were vermin. To visit the camps as a Jew is to confirm your solidarity with other Jews – whether you are Orthodox, Conservative, Reformed, secular, or Devout Agnostic. Whether you live in Israel, or Brooklyn, or Stillwater.

Those of you who know Howard know that he is always threatening to get naked on stage. What’s different is that this time he does it. And that it is not gratuitous. Indeed, it was one of the most moving parts of the performance. I do hope that by now he has stopped apologizing for possibly offending people for this afterwards. Although the fact that I do not believe there was originally a nudity warning on the Fringe site might have been the real issue.

If I was offended by anything, it was by the way he occasionally lumped all his audience members together as “you Christians” – as if he was the only Jew in the room. As if there were only two religions in Minnesota. As if we were all religious. At times Howard’s attempt to talk about his own prejudices seemed unreflective, which I do not think was intentional. But admitting that you stereotype Poles at one point and that you know those stereotypes are not an accurate reflection of reality, then talking as if those stereotypes were true several minutes later was confusing. Which Howard am I listening to now – the one reacting to his experience, or responding to it? The one who is buddies with the great grandson of the King of Poland, or the one who is convinced that given the chance, the bastards would all do it over again?

Like another reviewer, I would like to see this again in a year, or two, or five. While I deeply respect the authenticity of Howard’s personal experience, I cannot really say I was challenged by the piece – though it was clearly heartfelt. But though I am not a member of any organized religion, I have been so. And I know that religious people have the capacity for complex and nuanced thought. Unlike Howard, I don’t happen to believe religion is “organized superstition,” and I have a healthy appreciation for the Jewish theologians who have struggled with this problem – Emil Fackenheim, Richard Rubenstein, Arthur Cohen – in ways that did indeed challenge me, and remain with me, even after thirty five years.

I cannot say I know these thinkers well. But the fact that I do know them is attributable to an Introduction to Religion class taught thirty five years ago at a small Catholic university in the southern tier of New York State. By a Franciscan friar. Father Tony Struzcynski. I think he was Polish.

Catching Up

2009-06-26T06:25:48Z

I’ve had a couple of people ask if I dropped them, accidentally or on purpose, off my Ordinary Time list. In truth there has been very little of the ordinary to my time recently – or I haven’t been sure what the real ordinary is.

The last time I sent out a broadcast email with blog links was after the entry on September 14, "Chiropractic" about my friend Nancy's clinic visit. “Going Down” (a story which is economic, not erotic, but at least I got your attention) followed, and then “American Zombie” – a pre-election Halloween story about watching Night of the Living Dead with my Crisis Connection colleagues while passing out candy to future voters: little Spidermen and Hannah Montanas. As I hand them Snickers to keep them satisfied, I wonder if their parents have dental, and if I am liable for root canals.

On my hard drive recently I found an aborted fragment of an Epiphany letter - essentially my version of a story of Maggie’s that gripped me so powerfully I never got beyond it to talk about the rest of the family. I posted that as a blog entry. The next entry is the story I performed for the Spirit in the House festival, “Two Falling Voices,’ in late February and early March. And then silence.

Not the way to make your fame and fortune blogging.

But creative writing has never been about either for me. Although I certainly wouldn’t mind getting paid for it. Maggie even got me signed up for my first course at the Loft that was actually about trying to sell a piece of writing, though this week we switched to a course on travel writing because the time worked better for her. Still, the essential purpose is insight, not income. There is a process of making myself aware, and then sharing that awareness with others, that is lifegiving. Of recognizing beauty in the texture and complexity of life Of transmuting suffering. One of my friends, Rose Arrowsmith DeCoux, a very talented young storyteller and writer, calls her business Alchemy StoryWorks. There is more than Harry Potter chic to such a moniker. Those of us who know this secret have found the Philosopher’s Stone.

Trust the practice. Trust the creative process. Trust yourself. Then there’s nothing to fear. That mantra, paraphrased from John Daido Loori's The Zen of Creativity, has been my touchstone – my tool for finding gold, if not creating it - for the last two years. Creative writing is something I find I must do, like eating and drinking, or my spirit wastes away. I would say it is like breathing – that would be very Zen – but I am certain I cannot hold my breath as long as I have gone without writing. I could probably not go without water that long either. If I stopped eating as long as I’ve stopped writing… well, I would certainly not be facing that extra twenty pounds on the scale again. This is worth considering.

Storytelling allows me an outlet that does not depend upon connections with publishers. It gives me a audience – not to gratify my vanity so much (though this can be a pleasant side effect) – but to teach me - with an immediacy that the written page cannot - how to shape a piece so that it means something to someone other than me. And blogging allows me to share my writing with you. Right now, that is enough. Because I have found right livelihood through another kind of writing. At least for the time being.

Since the beginning of the year I have been a full time freelance grantwriter – a move I chose with intention in August of 2008, a month before the economy crashed. Great timing, huh.

Most people do not go to school to be grantwriters. I’m no exception. I’m one of Garrison Keillor’s English majors in supersaturated form – I have a Ph.D. in Victorian religious literature, having written a thesis with the impressively esoteric title Reconstructing the Bible: Fantasy and the Revelatory Hermeneutic of George MacDonald - but I tell people that I’ve always gotten a job in spite of that. First technical writing for the automotive industry – for which Victorian literature is interesting preparation – then grantwriting and organizational development.

I finished the draft of my thesis a week before Maggie was born in Port Huron, Michigan, and defended it at the University of Minnesota six months later while Paul walked back and forth with her in a front pack at Coffman Union, hoping they would finish grilling me before she needed to nurse. The full sized, bound copy with the title and my name in gold letters ended up on one of the shelves of patio bricks and boards that served as our bookcase as students. They were mine originally – I stained the boards, and the bricks are green, not gray, a rare element of style back then – and we lugged the damn things from Minneapolis to Chicago to Port Huron to Dearborn to Nashville to Sewanee and to Nashville again before bringing them back up with us to the house we bought in Eden Prairie. Post-divorce, they are once again mine. The fruit of my scholarship sits upon them, between an oversized copy of Dante’s Inferno, with the illustrations by Gustave Doré, and volume 9 of the Dictionary of Literary Biography. The latter contains the only article I ever published under my maiden name, back when I was not a Victorian scholar, but an Americanist – the entry on Edna Ferber. For anyone out there who can tell me one thing she wrote without doing a Google search, the drink’s on me.

I take that back. The Inferno apparently stayed with Paul.

When I first began working for the Institute for New Americans in 1999 – can this really have been a decade ago? - it was because of two grants I had written almost twenty years before while a research assistant for Don Ross in the Program in Composition and Communication. That research got me to my first and only Modern Language Association convention in 1982, while I was still ABD – all but dissertation. I had three job interviews there, all of them composition and computer related, none of them for a position in Victorian literature. I should have known then that academia was not my destiny. Perhaps I did, and didn’t care. The dissertation was, at that time, my way of doing what creative nonfiction does for me now. It served as a focus for awareness, for insight, and growth. The faith and doubt crisis of the Victorian era mirrored my own adolescent angst over religion. What they learned – MacDonald’s mythopoeic resolution of that crisis in particular - I needed to know.

Setting up a new business is time-consuming, and in some ways frightening in this economy. In other ways, it is the most secure option. Tina Brown in The Daily Beast in January coined the term “gig” economy - and then the phrase was everywhere. Project-by-project work is something artists and other freelancers have always understood, but the economy is now producing what Michelle Goodman, author of The Anti-9 to 5 Guide, has called the "accidental freelancer." Another blogger, Marci Alboher, has coined the term "slash" career to describe the entrepreneur that applies her skills in multiple markets, and claims this sort of flexibility is the only real job security to be had in any economy. (I cannot help but think of slash fiction, which is something quite different – unless Marci is also a Harry Potter fan.) We are seeing a lot of new terms coined these days - perhaps more than we are seeing coinage. But in truth I feel a lot better about working for several clients and paying for my own health insurance than putting all my eggs in one employee basket these days.

And it was a choice, not an accident.

There have been a couple of months, especially at the beginning of the year, when cash flow has been pretty scary. The mortgage and association fees are high, and my house is now worth less than when I bought it. The loans I have taken out while both kids have been in school have been coming due. And there are running credit card balances – always anathema to me - acquired during those few months of unemployment in late 2006 and early 2007, that I just don’t seem to be able to pay down. Apparently Suze Orman doesn’t want me to till I have six months of emergency savings, which is some consolation. Still, I have yet to figure out how to do that. When my dad learned what I could charge on an hourly rate, he multiplied that by forty hours and fifty weeks and came up with $170,000 a year. If I could really do that well writing grants, he said, my money problems would be over.

I can’t, of course. At least I don’t know any grantwriters who do. You actually have to spend about a third of your time prospecting for new business – networking, staying up to date on current issues, attending meetings. Few of these things are billable to other people, but they take up time. Then there are the leads that don’t lead anywhere, the clients who for one reason or another take more time than you are authorized to charge them for, and the jobs that, for whatever reason, do not go as planned. Sometimes you can bill for them, and sometimes you can’t.

At any rate, it will be awhile before I find myself with a six figure income.

There is also the feast or famine phenomenon. In the early part of the year I had few new opportunities – now there are often more than I can handle, and on short notice. Recovery Act requests for proposals have been coming out fast and thick the last few months, with increasing urgency now so that proposals can be reviewed and money can allocated before the end of the federal fiscal year on September 30. A lot of nonprofits who have never applied for federal funding before are trying to do so now. Often they think they can handle the very complicated process themselves, in their spare time, and only realize two weeks before the grant is due that they need help. This is the type of job established grantwriters run screaming from. I’m not established, so I take the job. And scream silently.

In truth I am not a person who likes deadlines. I can handle them, unless they bunch up like fabric beneath the foot of a sewing machine. But I don’t like to. I am chronically late these days, trying desperately to get “just one more thing done,” and would prefer to have been born before the invention of train schedules. Deadlines are good motivators, and helpful in some ways for perfectionists. But when I find my life lurching from one to another with little time for sleep or leisure, to nurture relationships, or do to that daydreaming Brenda Ueland says is so necessary to the creative life, I become tense, anxious, and depressed. There were a few weeks recently when the days were for gathering information and making appointments, and the nights were for writing. Sleep found room where it could. I would like fewer deadlines, less often. But for now, the trick is learning how to choose among options, and find balance.

I do love the freedom of being my own boss, and working at home. And I love the days without deadlines, when I can go into fugue state if I want to, and spend all day on a single project –like catching up on my blog. And I love the variety of this work. I love learning about the issues, and the ways in which compassionate and talented people strive to address them, to serve the public good. Most of all I love the fact that my writing can provide the resources to make change happen in the world. Preparing a strong case for an organization and getting them funding is a gratifying, heady, powerful high. And it feels a lot more like a real contribution than a dissertation on microfiche sitting on a dusty shelf on Zeeb Road in Ann Arbor. Though it is fun, after a few drinks at cocktail parties, to take out the large volume bound in black with my name in gold letters, and make guests Touch the Book.

Perhaps I will have to have my avant garde artist friend Tom Cassidy illustrate it someday. I do not believe he has ever defaced a dissertation.

Up until now my business has been focused on grantwriting, and the name and tagline I have used for that business, which has never been formally incorporated, has reflected that. Formula 501c3: We Make Nonprofits Shine. The old brochure and price sheet, which I hardly ever needed, used 1950s retro clipart of a housewife in high heels and a housedress, spiffing up the lampshade with a feather duster.

Then a mysterious thing happened. As an introvert, organizational life often saps my creativity, and leaves me starving for solitude. Though the original Ordinary Time began as a column in a church newsletter, the first piece was written on a Sunday morning, in the reprieve from service given by a sick child. Much of my time as a clergy wife reflects this paradox.

But for reasons I do not entirely understand, when I work to grow capacity in Northstar, the Little Storytelling Organization That Could, my personal creativity and my productivity flourish. It seems that my private creativity is tied in some tangible way to the creative capacity of all. This means something.

So it is time to rethink my earlier approach, to create an artistic vision statement and a business plan simultaneously, and have them inform each other. To bring my whole self to the work. When that is done, I think I will know again – in both the secular and the sacred sense – the meaning of ordinary time. Because this, as the Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield says, is my path with heart.

Two Falling Voices

2009-03-30T15:29:56Z

This story was told as part of a performance, Saving Pagan Babies: Catholic Culture Clashes, featuring myself, Ann Reay, Loren Niemi, and Curt Lund at the Spirit in the House Festival, February 27-March 9, 2009. I am grateful to my fellow performers for helping me shape this story, and for producing such jewels of their own; to storytellers Nancy Donoval and Regina Carpenter, who provided incredibly useful feedback; to Dean J. Seal and the volunteers that made Spirit in the House possible, and to Northstar Storytelling League for providing promotional support.

In retelling history, I have stuck to facts whenever possible, but allowed myself to imagine and infer motives and conversations. In addition to the sources on the life of Mary Jemison cited in this story, and my own independent research on the Sullivan campaign, I want to acknowledge the influence of Deborah Larsen’s historical fiction The White, published in 2001, a stunningly beautiful book which gave me additional insight into the character of Mary Jemison.

In the storytelling community it is often said that not everything in a story need be factual, but all of it must be true. May this be so.

*****

When the people of the longhouse, the Henosaunee, returned to the Chemung River Valley in the spring of 1780, after the Sullivan Campaign against the Six Nations, they found the corpses of pack horses - the horses that had carried Sullivan’s cannons, driven to exhaustion, slaughtered on the scorched earth.

Forty towns of the Six Nations –Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Tuscarora, Mohawk… Oneida – were no more. Twelve hundred longhouses, a million bushels of corn, and beans, and squash – the Three Sisters - torched. That winter hunger had put an end to the oldest democracy in the world – the Iroquois Confederacy – to make way for our own.

The Seneca warrior Hiokatoo turned in disgust to his chief. “What kind of savages would treat an animal this way?”

“They are Christians,” Cornplanter replied. “Their God had a Son who took their place and died for their sins. What they do to horses does not matter to them.”

Hiokatoo got down from his own horse: sleek, powerful, its eyes dark and liquid. They were Seneca eyes. “The God of the whites is no Great Spirit. He is small and mean and stupid.” Hiokatoo began to gather the bones for burial.

Cornplanter watched the warrior in silence. He had seen Hiokatoo kill a white captive by nailing one end of his intestine to a post and letting the raiding party take turns chasing the man with hot pokers till he disemboweled himself. The wife of Hiokatoo was a white captive. Cornplanter’s father was white. Cornplanter got down off his horse to help bury the bones.

They left the skulls there to shame us. Staggered them along the trail like Stations of the Cross. When the settlers came they named the town Horseheads, in honor of the Revolutionary War Hero General John Sullivan. The Chemung County Historical Society says Horseheads is “the only town in the United States dedicated to the service of the American military horse.”

*****

It’s the town I grew up in.

In 1965 I was nine, and my family moved into our new house on the outskirts of Horseheads, a house we built ourselves, like pioneers. The lot was on the edge of a golf course, so we would always have a nice view of nature. My favorite book that year was Indian Captive: The Story of Mary Jemison. It was a true story. I loved the blue-eyed, blonde haired girl ripped from her white family at twelve during the French and Indian War and adopted by the Seneca, who named her “Corn Tassel” because of her yellow hair – her beautiful yellow hair. A homesick girl who, when a trader finally told her that her family was all dead, realized this was her home, and learned to love the Indians.

I loved Lois Lenski’s Indians too - their gracefully rounded faces and hands, limbs sturdy like trees, like trees that lift and move and carry, trees that build things. I looked for their world beneath my own – beneath the blacktop and the golf course and the housing developments. I couldn’t find it. I wanted to live in that world.

I took the book out from the library five times in a row.

Eventually Mrs. Berlozan told me that until there were two more names on the card that were not mine, I was not allowed to check the book out again.

I didn’t know how Our Lady would feel about my liking this Mary so much. Had she died a martyr, thrown to lions or shut in a tower or gored to death by a mad cow, it would have been different. But she lived, and she lived a pagan. I tried not to think about it.

Our Lady was my favorite part of being Catholic. She had her own altar, her own statue and candles. God the Father was scary, Jesus too perfect, the Holy Spirit…hard to get a grip on. Mary interceded for you, like mothers do. I loved the rosary, the click of beads, the grave beauty of the Latin phrases: Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum. Hail Mary, full of Grace. The Lord is with Thee. Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners.

I could follow along with the English in my St. Joseph’s Missal, but I really didn’t need to: it sounded like prayer. An older brother of a Protestant friend of mine had called Latin a dead language, which confused me. What did that mean, dead language? It seemed very alive to me – as alive as Jesus and Mary were, certainly, although they lived on this earth a very long time ago. And if I’d learned anything in church, it was that there was more than one way to be alive.

My father was a Protestant. Not as bad as being a pagan, but bad. Sister had shown us that when Protestants pray, they hold their hands like this, with their fingers laced together – but when Catholics pray, they hold their hands like this, pointed upward to God, their thumbs in the shape of a cross. And whose prayers do you think are going to heaven? Sister asked.

That was when I was taken captive.

*****

“It will be better for us,” my mother said, “to worship together as a family,” “And to pray in English.” My Protestant friend’s older brother agreed. People should worship in the vernacular. I looked the word up. It meant “native to a country.” It was from the Latin, vernaculus. Go figure.

St. Matthew’s Protestant Episcopal Church was musty and dark, like the papery leaves of the 1928 Book of Common Prayer. The Mass – no, the service – was in English: the King’s English, the language of Shakespeare. What was native about that?

We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; And we have done those things which we ought not to have done; And there is no health in us.

There were old people everywhere. Their papery skin was lined with such prayers. Even the children looked old.

At St. Matthews, they only brought Mary out with the other decorations at Christmas. She had no altar, and no one called her Our Lady or said prayers to her in any language.

I needed a Mary.

After Mrs. Berlozan forbade me to check out Lois Lenski’s book, I did a risky thing. I went to the adult section of the public library.

I found the 1824 biography by James Seaver, who interviewed Mary Jemison in her nineties. His sentences were long and sanctimonious, like the Book of Common Prayer. Yet beneath that voice, I found the voice of Mary. Her native voice.

It was not Corn Tassel’s.

My hair was chestnut. Not blonde.

I knew from the beginning they were dead. Two days after they put the moccasins on my feet and separated me from the rest, I watched my family’s scalps prepared, scraped and stretched and dried over the camp fire. I recognized my mother’s red hair.

The Seneca sisters who adopted me named me Dehewamis, Two Falling Voices, because I took their brother’s place and ended their mourning. My sisters loved me, as they loved him. When I could feel at all, I hated them.

But eventually winter turns to spring, as it always does. And my sisters were persistent. It is hard not to love back. And things were better; my life was better, when I could love again.

I might have been twelve when I was captured. I might have been sixteen. I can’t remember.

My marriage to Sheninjee was an arranged marriage, but eventually winter turned to spring, as it always does. I found I loved him.

It was my right as a Seneca woman to name our children. I named my son Thomas, after my father. Then a fever killed Sheninjee. And winter came.

After the French and Indian War, after the death of Sheninjee, the King of England offered a bounty to anyone willing to ransom white captives. The Seneca chief said I had a choice. I would not be taken against my will.

I considered this. I could still speak English, although I had forgotten how to read or write and I no longer knew the Christian prayers. I looked at my brown Thomas . He had the dark eyes of Sheninjee.

I chose not to be redeemed.

In the spring, when Thomas was three I caught the eye of the great warrior Hiokatoo. I found myself looking back. It was not an arranged marriage. I chose him.

The courtship was a strange one. He told me stories, as warriors do. My sister thought he was bragging. He told me every brutal thing he had ever done. But at the end of each story, he would search my face, as if to say, This is what it means to be a brave. This is who I am. Can you face it? I opened to him.

We had six more children. All in all I had three sons and four daughters. I gave them all Christian names. They took the place of the family I had lost. Perhaps that was wrong.

After the Sullivan campaign, before the Winter of Hunger, I hired myself out as a farm hand so my family had corn. In the treaty with the colonies, I came to own land. And I became…naturalized. A naturalized citizen of the United States.

Eventually, Hiokatoo died of consumption, well past one hundred, still telling stories to anyone who would listen. Not his sons. Whiskey told them stories.

In his fifties John, his firstborn, my second, murdered first Thomas, then James. Finally strong spirits brought a tomahawk to John’s head too, spilled his brains.

I buried all three.

I was glad Hiokatoo had been spared this. This was not what it meant to be a brave. I faced it for him. Took his place.

*****

On the outskirts of Horseheads, on the edge of a golf course, I grew up in the home my parents built. Houses rose up around us, one or two new ones each summer, till the creek bed went mysteriously dry, and the fields full of puff balls and thistles, milkweed pods and garter snakes were gone, and the green was all for sport.

On Saturday morning, the construction workers were on overtime. People were eager to move in. I went downstairs and sat in a patch of sunlight coming in from the bay window. The light poured down, a wave of particles, full of the dust unto which we shall return.

The house was quiet, I thought, until the refrigerator motor suddenly went off. No, this was quiet. A turtle dove sighed in the chimney. Then the metallic clunk of the machinery began again, drilling a new Artesian well.

Perhaps she thought it was the grinding of corn. Perhaps the scrape of a scalping knife, the beating of drums before a gauntlet was run, the clinking of coins in a false redemption.

A volume of the encyclopedia was next to me, open to those plastic overlays of geological strata, The names sounded like books of the Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus; Igneous, Sedimentary, Metamorphic. The shaft hammered down, drilling for water. Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum.

I let my prayers drill down, down, past ranch houses and farm houses and log cabins, till they struck the soft thatch of a longhouse, and the Finger Lakes filled with living water and their names once more held the flowing vowels of the Iroquois: Seneca, Keuka, Cayuga, Owasco, Canandaigua.

And there she was, the thick chestnut braids tumbling down, the beaded buckskin tunic, the trousers, the moccasins. Mary Queen of Captives, Two Falling Voices, ora pro nobis peccatoribus.

Praying for me.

American Zombie

2008-11-02T21:42:43Z

Halloween was scary this year. First of all, my coworker Linda brought Kitty Litter cake in to work, and I had to watch people eat it. I don’t care how many tasty ingredients it includes, the idea of Scoop and Snack just makes me gag. But apparently crisis line counselors are made of stronger stuff. When staff found out my level of discomfort, they all had to come into my office and munch contentedly in front of me. This was while I was trying to push the send button on the United Way Health and Independence application, due October 31 at noon, which was scary enough in itself. It will probably take me until Thanksgiving to recover. In the meantime I highly recommend that should we encounter one another, the words “cost per unit of service” do not pass your lips. “Diversity audit” is a good phrase to avoid as well. I also don’t intend to get anywhere near a partially melted Tootsie Roll.

Halloween night I ventured to White Bear Lake, way out in the wilds of Ramsey County, to have pizza at Cathie’s house with Linda, hand out candy to princesses and vampires, and watch bad horror movies on her big screen TV. Cathie and Linda and I have been working together in the Little Nonprofit Shop of Horrors a year and a half now. We’ve done a lot of therapeutic drinking together, but we’ve never been to each other’s homes. This was an important bonding ritual. Besides, I never get many Trick or Treaters at my house. I’m surrounded by too many other townhomes with dark windows, the neighbors don’t know each other, and the kids don’t come.

I have to admit I am a complete horror movie wimp. When I was a kid, I used to avoid changing the channel on the television on Saturdays for fear I’d encounter Frankenstein. Poltergeists know what scares me. Over the shoulder camera angles creep me out for weeks. But I figured with two other people mocking the cheesy effects, I would be sufficiently insulated from my own wimpitude. At least while we were all in the same room. I had never seen Night of the Living Dead, but it was So Very Retro, I thought I could probably handle it. I mean, who can take zombies seriously, right?

Never underestimate the power of an academic.

Night of the Living Dead came out in 1968. Romero claims that the film wasn’t about racism, and that Duane Jones, the black man who played Ben, simply read best for the part. But ten minutes into the film I was itching to Google it into its historical context. It drove me nuts not to be able to pull out my laptop and look up deets while I was watching. You can accuse me of many things, but being a couch potato is not one of them.

At home the next day, I found everything I was looking for, and more, in Stephen Harper’s article in Bright Lights Film Journal. Harper calls Night of the Living Dead “a dramatic appeal for communication and cooperation in the face of paranoia and violence.” Its discussion of identity and metamorphosis, of what it means to be “human” or “thing” in the context of the political and social anxieties of the 1960s is fascinating – as is the analysis of race, gender, and genre. The zombies are supposedly created by radiation from space, and radiation makes the Cooper family quite literally nuclear. The fate of Ben and the fate of Martin Luther King are horrifically aligned. In the still photographs of carnage and the dead at the conclusion of the film, you can see the Vietnam War.

But even though Harper’s primary purpose in this article is to set the film in historical context, he can’t resist discussing the theme of catastrophe and apocalypse, and the way Americans religiously cling to the ideology of patriotism, which Romero vigorously critiques. When Harper does this, however, it is not to a 1960’s context he refers, but to essays of Slavoj Zizek written in response to the bombing of the World Trade Center.

Which is why Linda and Cathie and I found ourselves watching the film with a whole different cast of characters in mind.

The hero is a young black man, Ben, a “clean, articulate guy.” (His real name is probably too foreign-sounding to use.) A gaggle of dead white men come after him, and he holes up in a house with a catatonic blonde, who is scared witless when she and her brother are attacked by a zombie . (This is entirely realistic because all blondes were powerless before pantsuits.) Meanwhile, John McCain and Sarah Palin are hiding in the basement with their special needs child, who has been bitten by one of these reanimated corpses. They have a young couple with them. Eventually, they all realize they are in the same bipartisan house, and will have to work together to get out of it.

Ben and McCain (whose name in the movie is Harry Cooper) start debating over how best to defend themselves. The debates go nowhere. So the media tells them what to do. Get to safety. The National Guard will protect you. Cremate your dead, and shoot all zombies in the head. Harry says the fundamentals of the basement are sound. The efforts Ben has made to defend the upstairs are just too flimsy. Ben wants to get the truck filled with gas, try to make it to a safety station. Harry wants to sit tight.

The young couple switches their support over to Ben, who has the best plan of action. They make a break for it while Ben throws Molotov cocktails at the field full of boomer zombies – you knew he was really a terrorist, didn’t you? - who lumber at them with their arms outstretched, demanding their social security checks. They are all white, but now there are also some women. One, of course, is naked.

The young couple reaches the truck, but when it comes time to fill up the gas tank, disaster strikes. The truck explodes. Boomers feast on roasted college students. We’re eating our children’s inheritance. And also their intestines.

The blonde sacrifices herself for Sarah Palin. (Now that’s not realistic.) But the special needs child stabs her mother with a garden trowel and goes back to chowing down on her father’s arm. This kid is going to need a lot of social services. Who’s going to pay for that?

Let's feed her the Kitty Litter Cake.

At the end, Ben is the only one left alive. Till the sheriff shows up. Beat ‘em or burn ‘em, he says. Shoot anything that moves.

We had some debate at the end of the movie. I saw the look on Ben’s face when the rescue squad came. I think he knew exactly what was about to happen. Cathie and Linda are not so sure. They’re still trying to keep hope alive.

Me, I just don’t want history to repeat itself.

Going Down

2008-10-24T12:31:56Z

The economy blows, but can you blow off the economy? Unfortunately not. I'm looking for Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed behind the counter at the Bailey Savings & Loan, lending away their honeymoon, but Frank Capra isn't directing this film.

This morning I woke to MPR tellinng me the Asian markets had gone down ten percent while I slept. But those were just words coming at me over the airwaves as the coffee kicked in. What struck me with more force was a conversation, and an image, from the night before.

I'd been working late on a proposal, and was coming home past seven, hungry, tired, and with a near empty tank of gas. I had a nine a.m. meeting the next morning, but I resisted the temptation to go straight home and assume I could just get up early and stop for gas beforehand. That's the sort of thinking that makes me perpetually late for appointments. So I pulled into the Marathon station, where regular was a surprising $2.39 a gallon. I had trouble getting my card verified - the entry pad was oversensitive and kept doubling the numbers I entered for my zip code - but eventually we started guzzling. And the numbers began to roll. In a leisurely, almost antebellum fashion.

As I waited, I overheard the clerk on duty talking to a vendor whose truck was idling in the parking lot. The clerk was standing outside the door to the station, wearing a white shirt and polyester pants, a headband round some dirty blonde ringlets. In her hand was that long pole with the hook on the end that is used to change the gas prices. At the end of that pole was a 4. It looked like she had been fishing for lottery numbers. Or auditioning for a part on Sesame Street. Today is brought to you by the number 4...

"I've done this three times today," she said. They remarked on how remarkable this was, so soon after Staycation Summer.  As recently as a month ago, gas was $3.47 a gallon. I wanted to put one of those theater hooks in her hand, and set her to work pulling down the Economic Experts.

Instead, somebody else pulled into the station, and ran over the cord that trips the bell.

Every time a bell rings, an angel checks the Dow.

Me, I go to twincitiesgasprices.com.  At 5:24 this morning it was $2.24 a gallon in Roseville.  I'll be curious to see what it is when you click.

Chiropractic

2008-09-01T04:20:45Z

There is a passage in George Eliot’s Middlemarch about the patterns created by the flame of a candle against scratched glass. The image has one meaning in the context of the novel, but in my memory it has aligned itself with other truths:

Your pier-glass or extensive surface of polished steel will be minutely and multitudinously scratched in all directions; but place now against it a lighted candle and lo! the scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round that little sun. It is demonstrable that the scratches are going everywhere impartially, and it is only your candle which produces the flattering illusion of a concentric arrangement.

For Eliot this was a parable about how people interpret the events of their lives egotistically. But the image calls to mind for me narrative structure itself: the way events and material things tend to form patterns of meaning when you hold a certain light up to them, patterns that might appear nonexistent or completely different to another person, with another candle, at a different angle. The question is whether the patterns are illusions, or whether the illusion is that any reality exists we don’t ourselves create.

And the truth of the matter is complicated. Because the need to make sense of the multitudinous wounds and scratches in our lives is very real.

Labor Day Weekend I spent Saturday morning at the chiropractor. My friend Nancy threw her back out and was unable to drive there. I have never been in a chiropractor’s office, and this one was not what I expected.

What did I expect?

Something less Dusty Rose and more New Age, I guess. Chiropractic is, after all, a form of Complementary and Alternative Medicine. In other words, a lot of Woo Woo.

But this was a generic doctor’s waiting area. There were two groupings of six chairs each, one on each side of the room, and a tall counter that acted as a retaining wall between the clients and the receptionist. Each cluster of chairs had a landscape to look at, innocuous, painted by someone with an eye toward colors that complement the furniture. Over-the-sofa painting. The walls were done in a beige speckled wallpaper designed to look like fresco. All in all, more home-and-garden than homeopathic. No insurance card need be ashamed to be presented here.

Nancy, walking with a cane and in considerable pain, managed to find the one chair that had a back support pillow. I was surprised that there were not more of such accommodations about. Some were available for purchase, though: the Chiroflow Waterbase Pillow (Feel the Flow!) could be had for only $49.00.

On the wall was a large magazine rack. In a chiropractor’s office, the rack has something for everyone. Entertainment has a special report: "Living on Camera." The blonde on the cover is MTV’s Lauren Conrad of Laguna Beach. Lauren’s head is on a pillow, her hair fanned out carefully before her, in full make up. On one shoulder you can see a satin lingerie strap. Her eyes, accentuated by liner, are wide and innocent. There’s a camera pointed down at her from behind the magazine title like a gun. A large camera with a fully extended telescopic lens.

“Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and think I am being filmed,” says the quotation below the picture.

This never happens to me.

I wonder if a Chiroflow Waterbase Pillow would help.

Sports Illustrated is having its Fantasy Football Preview, but the reality-based theme for this issue is Back to Work: NFL Training Camp 2008. Names roll like credits below: Shockey. Taylor. The Mannings. Favre??? On the front cover is David Tyree, in full NFL regalia. Mr. Miracle in the Dessert, Lancelot the Wide Receiver, our Knight in Shining Sports Gear. Currently listed on the NY Giants web site as “physically unable to perform.”

I have the strange feeling that these magazines came here on purpose, were driven here by friends, hobbled in on canes. Arranged themselves in concentric circles on the rack.

Both issues of Golf Digest have the same person on them – one is a young woman, and the other a middle aged man, but they share a single soul. It stares out of each, steely-eyed and firm of grip, following through and watching a tiny white ball bounce onto the green, just past the edge of the magazine cover. They have slammed that ball into precisely the corner of the universe God intended it to be. Could you do that with a poorly aligned spine? Of course not.

Nancy fills out a sheaf of papers, and they call her into the Inner Sanctum, where the Arcane Mysteries of Alignment are performed. “It is scary how much I look like my mother,” she tells me as she tests her balance on first one foot, then the other. Her mother is in her eighties and suffering from the early stages of dementia. Nancy has had a hard year, in ways that have affected her emotional health, her physical health, her economic security. This weekend is the anniversary of the breakup of a long term relationship that catapulted all three into crisis. And her back remembers.

The young receptionist smiles cheerily, clipboard in hand. The door closes behind Nancy. She is gone a long time.

Over the intercom they are piping in classical MPR. There’s nothing really unusual about this, anymore than there is anything unusual about the magazines on the magazine rack. Except that the radio seems to know it is in a chiropractor’s office, just like the magazines on the rack seem to align themselves naturally to the physical and emotional stressors of the clients that read them.

The first piece is Dvorak’s Slavonic Dance No. 15. Gypsies leap from chord to chord like bridges over the Danube. I am Slovak (well, half). Nancy, as it happens, is Slovak. I decide to do a little alternative medicine myself. I imagine her leaping over first one obstacle in her life, then another. With music like this in our blood, shouldn’t anything be possible?

Now a Handel concerto is playing. Nancy’s spine is first a French horn, curved in upon itself, brassy and muted; then an oboe, straight and reedy. Perhaps the register key is stuck. I imagine it opening up.

Pachelbel’s Canon is not really a canon when it’s played as a piano solo. But MPR overlooks this.When I was a child visiting my grandparents on the farm, my grandpa used to play the piano. You Are My Sunshine. Jesus Loves Me. Shine On Harvest Moon. He was a small town rural minister. I don’t think he knew Pachelbel.

Most of the time he played his songs on a real piano, but if you climbed into my grandfather’s lap after supper he might decide a more convenient keyboard had presented itself, and he would lay you out across his knee and start to play a tune along your spine. Inevitably the tune would slip and slide, down to your belly or up into your armpits, and soon it was nothing but a tickle fest. “What is wrong with this pianner?” he’d say. “It just keeps wriggling about!” And we would dissolve into spasms of giggles.

I will the chiropractor to work in reverse for Nancy: smooth out the spasms, straighten the keyboard, make the music behave.

But when she emerges at last (to the strains of The Marriage of Figaro), she actually looks worse that before. “There wasn’t much adjustment he could do,” she says. “The area was too inflamed.” He gives her exercises to perform.

She will go home and follow her doctor’s advice, and eventually her back will get better. But first she must wade through concentric circles of pain.

In the meantime I imagine her spine as a candle, flaring up, a flame illuminating the window of her own experience, making patterns where before there were none.

Mashed Potatoes

2008-08-17T17:05:37Z

I don’t have a lot of experience speaking Truth to Power, but I know about the power of lies. I was six years old when I told my first. And because the universe has an amazing sense of reciprocity, I immediately got a lie back in return.

I can follow a trail of lies like breadcrumbs, back to that day.

I am sitting on a red plastic chair at the gray laminate table in our kitchen on Stuart Street. My parents bracket the table like parentheses: my brother sits to my right, being a pest, because that’s what God invented him for. Across from me, where my mother can reach her, my sister sits in her high chair, humming as she eats. Mmm…mmm…mmm…. It’s against the rules to sing at the table – and humming is a type of singing, my mother has told me in no uncertain terms - but Stacey doesn’t count, because she is a baby. Mmm…mmm…mmm.

On the table in front of me is Mt. Everest on a plate: a heap of cold mashed potatoes. My chicken leg is a greasy bone. The canned peaches are gone. I have even eaten all of the green beans in cream of mushroom soup, though I have tucked the mushroom bits beneath Mt. Everest. Now they sit there, those potatoes…white, lumpy, cold. And I must eat them because they are there.

I don’t like mashed potatoes.

“Everyone likes mashed potatoes,” says my father. “What’s not to like? They don’t even taste like anything! They’re just something to put butter and salt on.”

But they do taste like something. They taste like kindergarten paste.

I don’t like mashed potatoes.

“Scott’s eaten his,” says my father. “He’s in the Clean Plate Club. He likes mashed potatoes.”

Scott’s eaten his. He’s in the Clean Plate Club. He likes mashed potatoes.

"What's that missy? Let's not have any lip now."

I try putting another pat of butter on. It sits there on that cold mountain like a frozen brick of dog pee. I turn over the shaker of salt, and it snows on Mt. Everest.

“Enough of that,” says my mother.

Stacey has eaten all of her mashed potatoes – or rather, she’s eaten about half, and is wearing the rest. Baby fuzz sticks up like patches of crabgrass where her fists have left potato deposits. My mother sighs, pulls Stacey out of the high chair, and sits her on the edge of the kitchen sink. She starts The Wipe Down.

My father tells me to clean my plate, and then I can leave the table. Those are the rules. My father is an elementary school principal, and principals like rules. Rules are what make my father sound like a principal, even when his voice isn’t coming out of the loudspeaker.

Babies don’t have to follow rules, because you can’t reason with them. They don’t have any language. So you can’t make babies eat what they don’t like. They just spit it out. Or put it on.

I envy babies. What’s the use of having language if nobody listens to what you say?

I don’t like mashed potatoes.

When Stacey is finally clean, my mom takes her into the living room. She joins my dad and brother, who are watching Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. Around the frame of the kitchen door I can just barely see the cheetah chasing down a young antelope. Eat or be eaten. That’s the rule of the wild.

I know the pounce is coming, but I still jump.

My mother sees me and comes over to close the door. “You can watch TV when you’re done,” she says. “The Flintstones are on in ten minutes.”

The Flintstones are my favorite show. The Flintstones are not just a cartoon: they are a cartoon for grownups. The Flintstones are on at night. My parents watch the Flintstones. The Flintstones even star in their own commercials – where they smoke Marlboros. You can learn a lot about being a grownup by watching The Flintstones.

Like the week before, when Fred and Barney got free tickets to the Saber Tooth / Mammoth game, then they found out it was the same night they promised to take Wilma and Betty to a prehistoric flower show. What to do? They dab on dots of boolahberry juice, and take to their beds. The Mesozoic Measles! What bad luck! No, you go to the flower show with Betty, dear. I’ll be fine.

But when Fred and Barney come out of the sports arena they discover something they had not realized before – the flower show is right next door. And before you can say - Uh-oh. The jig is up - there are Wilma and Betty. Fred and Barney stutter and mumble excuses; Wilma and Betty put their hands on their hips, scold their husbands, turn up their noses, and walk away. But then the next day, Fred and Barney have red spots all over the faces. Turns out they are both allergic to boolahberry juice. Wilma and Betty have a good laugh, and all is forgiven.

You can learn a lot about being a grownup by watching The Flintstones.

I take a bite of that mountain of kindergarten paste. I try to swallow, but my throat refuses to open, and I gag, loudly. I hear my mother heading for the door. “Sit down, Dorisanne,” my father says. “She’s fine.” I could choke to death in here, I really could. Nobody would care.

The Flintstones are a Modern Stone Age Family. They have pterodactyls that play records and pelican garbage disposals. They have a dinosaur for a pet. I don’t even have a dog to feed my potatoes to.

We do not have a garbage disposal at all, much less a pelican garbage disposal like the Flintstones. But we have a sink. I stand on my chair, leaning over so I can see the drain where my mother rinsed the mashed potatoes out of my sister’s hair. No clog.

No clog.

Here is my ticket to the Clean Plate Club.

I must move quickly like the cheetah, silently tipping the plate over the sink, waving it back and forth. The mashed potato mountain hangs there, defying gravity. I have to part it from the plate with my fingers. I turn on the water, and Mt. Everest erodes before me. Bits of mushroom re-surface like boulders. I wash all my troubles away.

Then I push open the kitchen door, and announce: “Clean plate!”

My mother raises one eyebrow, but says nothing.

My father asks me if I finished all my potatoes.

I hold up the plate for his inspection. “They’re gone,” I say.

He gets more specific. “Did you eat all of your potatoes, Paula?”

A moment of panic. Eventually, I know, those potatoes are going to leave the sink trap. Where are they going to they end up? In the bathtub? In the toilet? Can they do that?

“Tell the truth, now.”

There is no escape. My father knows everything. The jig is up.

He doesn’t want to spank me, but he has to, he says, or I will grow up to be a liar.

"This is going to hurt me a lot more than it hurts you," he says.

Of Beads and Brakes

2008-07-29T04:04:23Z

Aidan’s summer booklist is self-assigned. Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror, Ken Wilbur’s A Sociable God, the Epic of Gilgamesh, a thick history of China. And Chuck Palahniuk. This is the guy who wrote Fight Club, the film version of which has become something of a cult classic.

“You wouldn’t like him,” he assures me. “The guy’s brilliant, and nihilistic, and funny. But he’s not maternal reading.” I do an Internet search on Chuck Palahniuk, read some plot summaries. So this is transgressional fiction. My son is right. I do not want to know about sous chefs who ejaculate into the hollandaise as an act of cultural subversion. Nor will I ever again order Eggs Benedict. Could we go back to Redwall, please?

But Pahalniuk comes into town to promote his new book, and Aidan has to go. The Triple Rock on Cedar hosts him. Apparently the man puts on quite a show. “He was throwing inflatable dolls into the audience,” Aidan tells me. “But I didn’t get one.” Too bad. I could have used a passenger for the commuter lane on 394.

“What are these, Aidan?” I have found an unusual bookmark in the history of China - a string of beads. They are about the size of the ones on the wooden rosary we were given for Maggie when she was born. She teethed on it.

He is marking a passage in the book with one of four colored markers – one for dates, one for names, one for trends and one for quotations – a study system he has invented for himself. “Anal beads,” he says, without looking up. “From Chuck Palahniuk.” He shows me the actual bookmark they are attached to. Written plainly on one end: “For your book, not your butt.”

He highlights another quotation.

Certain he does not want to spend the summer delivering pizzas, Aidan finds a job within a week of coming home, at a deli a couple miles down Shady Oak, Pastrami Jack’s. The work is easy by comparison, he says, and he still makes tips. Good thing he does not want to deliver pizzas, because not long after he tells me that the brakes on his car sound bad. I don’t even have to back the car out of the driveway before I know bad is an understatement. Those brake pads are not even a memory: this is metal-to-metal.

The car is ten years old and has 170,000 miles on it. We bought it in 2000 or 2001 for $8000 from Paul’s parents. Aidan crunched the front end up right after he got his license, pulling out of his dad’s driveway on the way to school; he’s been quite good since. Now both front and rear brakes need to be replaced, and the front need new rotors; they can’t even be reground.

We both agree that an $800 brake job makes little sense, especially with gas at $4 a gallon. The car was once a necessity for moving between two households and getting to Eden Prairie High School, but neither kid really wants or needs a car in college, and both are now pretty much living with me when they’re home. So the 1998 Toyota Corolla is prepared for a Goodwill pickup.

And we are now the proud owners of a used Kymco Agility scooter, with a 49cc 4 stroke engine that gets 80 mph and a top speed of 35 mph. Your basic Taiwanese Vespa. My brother-in-law’s riding lawnmower is only about four times more powerful, but no matter. The scooter has minimal environmental impact, something Aidan is very conscious of. It’s fun to ride, and it gets him where he needs to go. He has almost finished paying me off for it, and when he does, if it doesn’t affect the insurance, I will transfer the title to him. If I am very, very careful, I may be allowed to drive it around the block someday.

The Rising Sophomore

2008-07-29T03:26:21Z

Aidan the rising sophomore is home for the summer, after having 4-pointed his freshman year at Augsburg. Like Maggie, he has decided that living in one place makes more sense now that he’s in college. He stops in at his dad’s frequently, but my house is base camp. I am glad of the opportunity to know better what is going on in his life.

The first weekend he is home we also host his new suite mate Alex, who lives in Tacoma, and whose plane does not depart until Monday – a polite young man, interested in music, but of yet undetermined major. I come home from work to find three Auggies on the couch watching TV – Aidan, Alex, and a girl I presume is Alex’s girlfriend, because he has his arm around her. Later, on the phone to Maggie, still in Ghana at the time, I make mention of this. “Oh, Mom,” she says, and I can practically see her eyes rolling over the phone. “That’s not Alex’s girlfriend. That’s Aidan’s girlfriend. Alex is gay.”

Nice of the African News Network to keep me informed.

I check in with my son. “Your suite mate is gay?”

“Well, really, two of my suite mates are gay. But they’re not, like, a couple.” He sees the look of surprise on my face, and a look of concern comes over his own. “You’re OK with that, aren’t you?”

“Sure,” I say. “Sure, I’m OK with that.”

I try to explain to him that when he was born in 1989, we weren’t even sure we could name him Aidan. We were afraid he would be nicknamed AIDS.

“I just didn’t know you had a lot of gay friends.”

“Well I didn’t in high school,” he says. “But at Augsburg they seem to have all the interesting conversations.”

Interesting conversations are important to Aidan. Interesting conversations, and books. And bands.

He and his high school friends Chris and Chloe – with whom he has different kinds of interesting conversations - hear of an opportunity to be in a commercial for a new store, Discland. This is it - their 15 seconds of fame.

The three of them go down on the appointed day, careful to wear the right T-shirts emblazoned with the right alternative bands, the ones that show their utter and complete, cutting edge coolness. They plan their patter, what CD or DVD they will pick up, what they will say. “You should listen to Track 2, man! It’s awesome!”

When the commercial is done, it is posted on You-Tube. They appear for a split second in the beginning. “Gee, Mom. You can’t even read my shirt.”

Aidan and I can go days and days without exchanging more than a hug and a few words, a cup of coffee shoved unceremoniously into a hand, a grunt of farewell between toothpaste spits from behind the bathroom door. We try to share a meal at least once a week, but between his schedule and mine, that can be a challenge. Occasionally we will have a Saturday or Sunday morning together out on the porch, an episode of the Daily Show together, some time playing with the nutsy cats. And some interesting conversation, often at unexpected times.

The girlfriend from Augsburg, though she lived in Hopkins and was home for the summer, did not last very long. It seems none of the girlfriends at Augsburg has lasted very long. After a few days a familiar face begins to reappear around our house – his high school girlfriend Chloe, now a junior. Chloe of the Discland commercial. They had broken up at the beginning of his freshman year, as high school sweethearts often do when college separates them. We’re just friends, I hear. But the body language begins to change in subtle ways, and when I come home to find them watching Fight Club on the couch, his arm is around her. I try out the word “girlfriend” again, with some trepidation. Can I be misinterpreting this too? This prompts one of those unexpected conversations.

“You called Chloe my girlfriend, Mom. Is that what it looks like?”

“Well," I say cautiously. "That’s what it looks like to me when a boy has his arm around a girl while they’re watching a movie. But I’ve been wrong before.”

He grins. “No, I think you’re right this time.”

“You don’t know?”

“It’s just that I thought we were going to break up when I went to college, and we did, but I’ve been noticing that every girl I went out with afterwards, well they were nice girls and all, but I always found something wrong with them. It’s like I sabotage every relationship I’m in.”

A boy who talks about relationships. What a rare find. How did I give birth to such a boy?

“I think I still like Chloe more than anybody else. I think this might just last awhile.”

“Well go for it boy,” I say. I still like Chloe too.

It has been fun getting to know this kid again, and to learn what's going on in his life.

What Would Trollope Do?

2008-07-22T12:40:59Z

Three hours a day will produce as much as a man ought to write. Anthony Trollope, Autobiography.

Anthony Trollope – one of my favorite Victorian novelists, both in terms of the quality of his work and the character of his life - knew what he was talking about. He paid a servant £5 a year extra to wake him up at 5:00 a.m. with a cup of coffee. He was a novelist from 5:30 to 8:30, then he stopped writing – in mid sentence, if necessary – and went to his job as a functionary in the post office, where he found time to invent what the British call the “pillar box,” allowing mail to be picked up en route more efficiently.

If he finished a novel at 8:15, he started in on the first 250 words of the next one. By working in this way he produced 47 novels in the course of his lifetime, including some of the best portraits of clergy life, and the effect of that life on families, that have ever been written. I could do much worse than to follow the advice of Anthony Trollope.

Yet I find myself wondering what on earth Anthony Trollope would make of the class I am taking right now – not a class on writing itself, but a class on The Writing Habit. Why would someone who can push a button on her Mr. Coffee in the morning and save £5 on a servant need to take an 8 week, $240 course in order to find time to write?

I’m not quite sure, but there are sixteen of us. We meet from 5 to 7 p.m. on Tuesdays in a classroom at Open Book, the arts organization in which the Loft Literary Center is housed. Our instructor is a popular “creativity coach,” a warm, friendly, humorous woman who has made a business of figuring out how to motivate people to do this work. The first half hour to 45 minutes is “check in time,” where we each report on the goals we had set for ourselves the week before in terms of establishing that habit – goals we witness and sign in pairs to hold each other accountable. The goals are divided into three areas - “process” time, in which we are supposed to focus on creative activities that “prime the pump” but do not necessary result in product; “self-care,” in which we make sure to replenish the resources that make creativity possible, and “product time” in which we work on a particular project that we are trying to move forward.

And in the time we spend gazing at our respective New Age navels, Trollope would have written 2000 words.

Let me say right off that I like my instructor, even if she may be the Unholy Love Child of Stephen Covey (The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People) and Julia Cameron (The Artist’s Way). “Who wants to go first next?” she asks. We are doggedly unhierarchical, and fight over the ironic delight of being the last person to go first.

Someone admits that they forgot what their process goal was this week, and did something else instead. “Was it in the spirit of your process goal?” we ask. If so, that’s OK. We debate for awhile over whether taking a walk is process time or self-care. The technical answer? It depends.

People can spend an inordinate amount of their check-in on their self-care regime. We learn who has meditated six times a week, who is getting eight hours of sleep a night, who is buffing up at the gym. I think of the desperate middle-aged job seekers in Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bait and Switch: The Futile Pursuit of the American Dream – the book I had the misfortune to be reading when I was forced out of my own job. The longer these people remained unemployed - the more looking for a job became the job - the more escape seemed to be found on the treadmill. If you’re not going to be going anywhere anytime soon, I guess, at least you can burn up some calories.

Occasionally one of us admits that we completely forgot to put in any product time. We scrutinize that person’s activities carefully, because inevitably there is something hiding in the week that “counts” as product. We must go easy on ourselves, to avoid building up creative resistance, or giving in to the Saboteur.

OK, my Saboteur is a little cynical. Sometimes I need to tell her to just shut up and listen.

We do a guided imagery meditation to free up our imaginations. I have done many of these, and I know the drill. You’re walking along a beach. You feel the sun on your back, the breeze in your hair…

Yada, yada, yada. I walk along the frickin’ beach.

You come to a spot that is marked with an “X”- just like it would be if you were walking on a treasure map - and you start digging.

Oh please.

Eventually you pull up a beautiful box, and when you brush it off and open it up it is brimful of treasures. These treasures are all the thoughts and feelings and experiences you have to write about. Now open your eyes and write down everything you saw in the box.

There is only one thing at the bottom of my velvet-lined box. A band of gold. My wedding ring.

I cry through the whole hokey exercise.

Anthony Trollope sits in the chair next to me, embarrassed and confused. Women are never prepared for these things. The imaginary hanky he pulls from his breast pocket is of no use to me, and the Saboteur has to run to the rest room for toilet paper.

Tears splash down on the hand I hold discreetly to my sniffling nose. I keep on writing.

Slow Summer

2008-06-29T15:57:24Z

Summer often brings me back to my writing. I’m not quite sure why. It may be the memories of childhood that associate that season with having all the time in the world, and remind me of what is important to my health and well being that I have neglected over the winter. Something rebels in summer, insists on slowing down, and paying attention. Last Saturday, sitting in my ratty cottage garden on the longest day of the year, paying attention to the green things, and getting up to pull the occasional weed, I made a commitment to myself and my own creative life to not take any new task on unless I could find something to weed out first. I spent that weekend crafting a difficult (for me) letter to the National Storytelling Network conference task force, for whom I had agreed to do sales calls, and reneged.

I am not a professional storyteller, nor do I have any desire to be at this time; but storytelling is an integral part of my writing process, and the discipline of performance gives me a far better sense of why anybody might want to hear – or at some point read – what I have to say. If I don’t set aside time to write, there’s no point to my being a storyteller. National’s in trouble now, and they need heros. But my inner hero is tapped out. I am going to have to find a different way to be supportive.

I have a friend who updates people on the activities of his life and what’s going on in his heart and mind with a solstice letter twice a year. He’s behind on that. My hope was that Ordinary Time would do something similar for my friends, but since beginning it right after my 50^th birthday, I’ve had long periods of inactivity, the kind I am told are death to serious bloggers. I am now 52, and, as I like to tell people, finally playing with a full deck. Somehow the juxtaposition of serious and blogger still strikes me as funny. But I’ll concede the point.

There are two kinds of serious bloggers. One is the kind that has time to blog first and earn money later. Or who doesn’t need to earn money. People who blog on a certain theme, like Tim Ereneta, who does a storytelling blog called Breaking the Eggs, or my friend Teresa, who posts her observations and opinions on everything from fundamentalists to Farscape as Anomalous Data, fit into this category. (OK, to be truthful, she mostly posts on Stargate, but there’s no alliteration there.) As does my daughter, who writes of her experiences as an exchange student in Ghana in Stand Still, and my friend Kay, in her quirky Tiny Pictures Telling Stories.

The other is the kind who earns money blogging. Heather Armstrong, better known as Dooce, is my favorite money earning blogger these days, though I seldom have time to read her. She has a lot of sassy observations on motherhood, mental illness, and the Mormon religion – I’d like to say she post-its for 3M, but I’d probably get sued. Then there are the political bloggers, who apparently rule the world, except that the rest of us don’t know it. Then there’s the likes of me. Why do I do it? When I do it, that is?

Well, to update my friends on the activities of my life and what’s going on in my heart and mind. (Part of the criteria for being a friend is that, within reason, you actually want to know.) Of course, I’m behind on that. Life often moves at too damn fast a pace to sit down and figure out what’s going on. That sucks. That needs to change. You see a lot of things changing and growing in the summer, and you want to change and grow with them.

Blogging is also a midway point between process and product for me. Between the blah blah blah of the journal writing I do to get stress and whining out of my system – which you don’t want anyone to see, but where an occasional interesting idea or observation comes up – and the pieces I want to publish or perform. At least that is my working theory. Of course blogging is a form of publication, and I am a certified perfectionist ™, so one of the things that has kept the posts from coming is my awareness that once they’re out there, they’re out there, and I can’t take anything back.

Except that that’s not entirely true. You reread a post and decide it’s not really ready for sharing, you can pull it, or make it private until you’ve figured out how to say this better or that better. (There was actually a posting in April that fit into that category. I can see it, but you cannot. Be grateful.) And it’s not like the world is hanging on my every word – I’ve posted things before that a week later seem to me to be stuff that should have stayed in the private journal, big time – and then gone private with the entry, and I generally find that unless I’ve sent a notice around saying I’ve posted, the only people in my life who are savvy enough to have an rss feed and know I’ve said anything at all are Teresa and Kay. (My daughter, as far as I know, does not “friend” me.) We’ll see how soon it takes me after this post to hear from them.

I still need to figure out how to avoid that perfectionist trap in order to blog regularly, and make the “work in progress” approach to blogging work for me. On the other hand, I don’t want to lose the sense that a blog should be interesting to other people. I have a friend who is an excellent storytelling coach, Nancy Donoval, who helps me keep the crap out of my performance work – well, she tries, anyway – and so I’m a little ahead of the curve there. There’s a book out there every blogger should read – No One Cares What You Had for Lunch – and I will confess, I haven’t read it. But it’s on order.

At any rate, I’m back, and trying again to be more regular. (Good Lord, I am middle aged. Do we choose our own metaphors, or do they choose us?) I’m aiming for a post a week, although there’s so much to catch up on this first month may be more frequent. As usual, I’ll send a note around every three posts or so, letting people know what is here. In the meantime, my thanks to all my friends (whether or not they have “friended” me), and to my ratty cottage garden, for giving me a reason to slow down and pay attention.

Culture Shock

2008-03-08T03:49:36Z

Ghana, situated as it is next to the Cote d’Ivoire, was once the Gold Coast colony. Its top two exports continue to be gold and diamonds. The entire country of Ghana is 92,000 square miles. Minnesota is 87,316 square miles. The Prime Meridian goes through Ghana, which had Maggie a little uncertain as to what day it would be there when she arrived, I expect because she had confused it with the International Date Line.

About 2 million of the 20 million people who live in Ghana inhabit the capital city of Accra. Maggie told me that it seemed a lot larger and more chaotic than Minneapolis, and for good reason, as Minneapolis itself has less than a quarter of that population – 369,051 in 2006. The Twin Cities metro area is home to 3.5 million, and 60% of the state’s population, but suburban sprawl accounts for a lot of that.

I subscribe to the RSS feed at AllAfrica.com, eager to learn about current events in my daughter’s new home. The language of journalism is different in Ghana – more florid, even with topics that seem to us to require plain language. From an editorial in the Ghanaian Chronicle, I learn that the lack of adequate sanitation has created a unique problem for the city’s trash collectors: “Residents of Teshie, where the story was reported from, ease themselves in polythene bags, wrap them nicely and then dump them into the litterbins.” Do they not know better? Of course they know better. But when many of the poor in this city of 2 million do not have toilets, packaging one’s “excreta” and disposing of it in a waste bin may seem preferable to using gutters as “places of convenience.” Which is also a problem. A city with open gutters into which raw sewage flows in 80 and 90 degree weather is going make its 2 million inhabitants intimately aware of each other.

The British colonization of Ghana ended in 1957, so its recent independence is not quite as old as I am. There were the usual series of military coups, and the country has been a stable democracy with a constitution and a multiparty government since 1991 – so its current incarnation is not quite as old as Maggie is. My dissertation predates their constitution. How stable, I think, can a 17 year old democracy without enough toilets be?

But it’s all a matter of perspective. On the phone she tells me how she was randomly invited to take part in a panel discussion on the college radio station. The topic was American students at the University of Ghana. The focus of the conversation: the recent episodes of violence on U.S. campuses, and whether the presence of so many American students was a threat to the safety of campus life. Are you afraid to go out at night when you are at home? They ask. Does everyone carry a concealed weapon? At least here, my daughter writes, when I go out clubbing, I don’t have to worry about rufis – I never let men buy me a drink (even though I am now legal for life), and when they insist on buying me a coke, they always open it up right in front of me.

I am afraid to ask what a rufi is, because I think I already know. And I realize then that my fears about how she will adjust to a different culture are way too late. She has been living in one since the day she was born.

Everybody Gets Malaria

2008-03-02T17:13:05Z

I do not hear from Maggie until February 13, two days after she arrives, which has me a bit worried, since she promised to let me know she had come in safely. I do know it may be difficult for her to get Internet access or a phone, but I keep thinking of Heathrow and terrorists and a girl who is perfectly capable of losing her keys three times a day (let alone a passport and visa), just like her mother. When I do hear from her, I forward the note to her dad to make sure he knows she’s OK, and find she had been able to get through to him by phone, and he’s not been worried at all.

But angst is what I do best, and I am superstitious enough to believe that if I worry sufficiently about something, this will prevent it from happening. And given that I have little control over what does or what doesn’t happen to the child I have birthed, I take what little sense of empowerment I can get. Plus it passes the time.

She does finally get through to me by phone, several journal entries later, after she has bought her own cell. (She had borrowed one to make the first call.) She is six hours ahead of me, and it is 45 cents a minute for me to call her, so I do. When the line opens up the noise convinces me that my signal is traveling along an undersea cable (though it might well be being bounced off a satellite), but when she actually answers, it is as if she’s in the next room. She admits to being “a bit overwhelmed,” but still sounds excited, describes the cool way people say “hell-o-o," tells me something bit her on the bus, but that “everybody gets malaria” and it’s “no big deal.”

I look up malaria online (not a good idea), find the symptoms include “fever, shivering, arthralgia (joint pain), vomiting, anemia (caused by hemolysis), hemoglobinuria, and convulsions.” If you manage to get bitten by a mosquito that carries P. falciparum and develop severe malaria, you can add splenomegaly (enlarged spleen), severe headache, cerebral ischemia, hepatomegaly (enlarged liver), hypoglycemia, and hemoglobinuria with renal failure to that list, as well as blackwater fever, “where hemoglobin from lysed red blood cells leaks into the urine.” With the other two types of malaria, caused by mosquitos carrying P. vivax or P. ovale, the disease can go chronic, due to the presence of latent parasites in the liver. “Describing a case of malaria as cured by observing the disappearance of parasites from the bloodstream can therefore be deceptive. The longest incubation period reported for a P. vivax infection is 30 years.” No big deal.

She assures me she is taking her pills.

I have still not found out the difference between an American and a British keyboard (apparently in Ghana they have the latter), but her journal complains vociferously about the slowness of the “high speed” Internet connections (“Spider Solitaire becomes the Int’l Student’s Ultimate Pass time”), till a boy from Nigeria shows her how to access another network, which because it does not go through the University filters, is actually faster. "About the speed of dial-up," she says.

She is living in a hostel called Pentagon, which I have to remind myself is just a shape. Several days after she arrives her favorite President makes a whirlwind tour of Africa. Apparently he is more well liked there than he is here, which probably explains why he went for a visit – W. likes to be around people who like him. In Ghana, they’re going to name a highway after the man. (This, of course, makes "my way or the highway" even less of a choice.) Maggie and Aidan and I once got stuck in traffic in Chicago for two hours while The Decider's motorcade went by, so in some strange way this makes sense to me.

One of the diseases Bush is focusing on for this visit is malaria. "I'm oftentimes asked," he says on February 20, " What difference does it make to America if people are dying of malaria in a place like Ghana? It means a lot. It means a lot morally, it means a lot from a—it's in our national interest."

Wonderful. Now I can relax.

Legal in London

2008-03-02T05:22:11Z

On February 4, I got up at 3:30 in the morning and put my firstborn on a plane to London, where she was going to spend a week in a hostel with her roommate Stephanie before boarding a flight for Accra, Ghana, for her semester abroad at the University of Legon. This was not an easy thing for a mother to do. I am, of course, immensely proud of her: the way she worked out all the details, the finances, everything. But I tend to worry about little things, like clean water and bedbugs and malaria. Her roommate was going to Senegal, and leaving a day earlier from London. I didn’t even want to think about her navigating Heathrow by herself, let alone Africa. Sure, she went to Japan for a month when she graduated from high school, but that was a chaperoned, preplanned trip.

And this is more than a month. She will stay until June 15 – unless, she tells me the Saturday before she leaves, she decides to take an internship over the summer. At any rate, she will celebrate her 21^st birthday on another continent. She tells me with blustery pride that as soon as she gets on that plane to London, she will be legal for the rest of her life. An odd collocation of space and time.

Of course all the things I worried about she pooh-pooh’ed…up until a day or two before she was to leave. On the drive to the airport, the conversation was all about clean water and bedbugs and malaria. And now I must be reassuring, though I am no less worried about such things than I was. You will manage, I say. And she will, of course. Her dad and I watch her get on that plane, and then we go back to our separate lives, and we wait.

The hostel in London is not nearly as dirty as she feared it would be, given that it was so cheap (thank you Jesus), and there is Internet access, so she posts in her journal. She knows enough about London to be suspicious of cabs that are not black, but when they arrive so late that there is no tube and no official cabs running and no way to get to the hostel, they take their chances with a nice man who shows them a lot of official looking papers, and get where they need to go. “Honestly the only reason I believed him was because the font on my oyster card and the font on his id were the same. Funny thing, details like that.”

Maggie’s had problems with crowds every since she went to a Franz Ferdinand concert at the Xcel Center and had a scary experience in the mosh pit, but she seems to be able to deal with the “underground crush” without getting freaked out. She goes to the National Gallery and sees a favorite picture, Paul Delaroche’s The Execution of Lady Jane Grey (“it’s just eerie. I love it.), as well as “Hans Holbein the Younger’s painting with the twisted skull thing.” Anybody who can identify that one for me wins a prize. Although she has announced her intention to clean up her language some so that family can read her blog, she remains somewhat cavalier about her spelling. And I don’t think she is thinking of her grandparents when she comments that she walked the length of Hyde Park and “my ankles are pissed at me,” or when she describes what a British version of Avenue Q is like:

They changed A LOT for Britian--including my favorite line of the song "Schadenfreude" (happiness at the misfortune of others) in which Gary Coleman is listing off situations in which you feel good that other people are doing dumb things: "Watching a frat boy realize just what he stuck his dick in". Unfortuantely they don't have frat boys here, and so they changed it to "a drunk guy" which just wasn't nearly as personally satisfying. Ah well.

The cost of things in London – eight bucks for a one way subway ticket, for example – is alarming, even though they’d been prepared for it. She notices that stores have second story display windows in London, because of the double decker buses. Neither she nor her roommate is impressed with modern art at the Tate, calling her time there “kind of a scavenger hunt titled ‘Find a piece that doesn't seem stupid.’" In her final entry in London, she describes going out to look for a market and ending up with her roommate in “a kind of not-so-good part of town.”

The odd part isn't that London had a bad part of town, but that both of us mentioned that we felt more 'at home' there than anywhere else. There was just something about it that seemed like the Midway, and that just felt better. Of course, it was daylight--at night it would have been a different matter. It's interesting the things that make us feel at home that we don't think about until it's not there--and it's not really even a concious thing.

And then she gets on another plane.

Modern Love

2008-02-09T15:09:45Z

The month of February often brings a lot of poets and storytellers out of the woodwork because it has a holiday in it dedicated to Love and Martyrdom - which in my household is redundant – but storytellers and poets love both of these themes. One of the legends of St. Valentine has it that he was decapitated; in other words, he lost his head; this is possibly how he got associated with romantic love. Rome saved the head, though – even before eBay, things like that were valuable - and one of the ways Mother Church had for a long time of celebrating his feast day was to display the relic of his skull surrounded by roses. In this way St. Valentine also became the Patron Saint of Deadheads. At any rate, this is the story I plan to tell on February 9 at the Open Tell at JavaJack's, should there be time.

I came across George Meredith's sonnet series Modern Love, which is the story of the death of a marriage, as an undergrad, probably first in that old cookbook the Norton Anthology of English Literature, and there was one sonnet in particular, number 16, that grabbed me with an intensity that just would not let me go, although at twenty I could hardly have understood why.

In our old shipwrecked days there was an hour,
When in the firelight steadily aglow,
Joined slackly, we beheld the red chasm grow
Among the clicking coals. Our library-bower
That eve was left to us: and hushed we sat
As lovers to whom Time is whispering.
From sudden-opened doors we heard them sing:
The nodding elders mixed good wine with chat.
Well knew we that Life's greatest treasure lay
With us, and of it was our talk. 'Ah, yes!
Love dies!' I said: I never thought it less.
She yearned to me that sentence to unsay.
Then when the fire domed blackening, I found
Her cheek was salt against my kiss, and swift
Up the sharp scale of sobs her breast did lift:-
Now am I haunted by that taste! that sound!

As I have been haunted for years by that sonnet.

Now if you are a connoisseur of sonnets, you are understandably shocked and outraged by this one. Because it defies convention. Even before you get to its subject matter, you’ve got a revolution on your hands here – this is a sixteen line sonnet. That’s like writing a five line haiku. Sonnets, by definition, are 14 lines. You know, like this Old Faithful:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove:

O no! it is an ever-fixed mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wandering bark,

Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle's compass come:

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

If this be error and upon me proved,

I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

Lots of Valentine's Day cards will be sent by one college sophomore to another with Shakespeare's 116 in them. Meredith's Sonnet 16, with its pair of extra lines...not so much.

George Meredith, a young poet with a shamefully middle class background – his father was a tailor – married the widowed Mary Ellen Nicoll in 1849. She was the daughter of Thomas Love Peacock, the English satirist, best known for his friendship with Percy Bysshe Shelley, and she’d grown up in an iconoclastic household full of romantic notions about free love and the equality of women. Her first husband, Edward Nicoll, was a sea captain who died three months after their marriage trying to rescue a drowning man in the Shannon Estuary in Ireland. She was expecting their first child. Five years later, she married her brother’s friend, the handsome, brilliant and charming George Meredith. He had to propose six times before she finally agreed to the match. He was 21; she was 28. They were very much in love.

So what went wrong? What ever goes wrong? There were problems with money. With inlaws. With sex. There was one healthy son, Arthur, and many, many miscarriages. And there was the painter Henry Wallis. He was a friend of the family. He painted Mary Ellen first, though that portrait has been lost; we only have a pencil sketch. Later Meredith himself modeled for a historical painting of Wallis’s, the Death of Chatterton. Thomas Chatterton was a romantic icon, a poet who forged medieval manuscripts and committed suicide at the age of 17. Keats and Byron and Shelley LOVED Chatterton. For them, the younger and more tragically you died, the better. And what was the difference between art and forgery anyway – if Beauty was Truth and Truth was Beauty, what else did you need to know? The Romantics left the Victorians this question with the same degree of responsible thought that we gave the next generation when handing off global warming and the national debt. Here: you agonize over this. And they did.

Two years after the Death of Chatterton, Mary Ellen Meredith left what was by now a dead marriage and set up her own household. She had a small private income, her two children, and her own writing to support her. Divorce was impossible, but so was the charade. Then Wallis came along and took her off to Wales for a holiday. The following April, there were three children. Once there was tangible evidence of adultery in the form of Harold – Henry affectionately called him Felix, for love child - Mary Ellen lost all rights to the son she shared with her husband. She never recovered from this, living pretty much as a recluse with Felix and her daughter near her father. She died at the age of forty - of kidney failure. Her father was devastated, and never wrote again. None of the men she loved were among the three mourners at her funeral. Meredith remarried, this time more happily. But it is his unhappy marriage that made the best art. Imagine that.

What is particularly fascinating about Meredith to me is that although he never forgave his wife, he tried very hard to understand her. He saw the inequality of men and women as a social evil that hurt both sexes, and the women in his novels have been compared to George Eliot’s in their fullness and complexity. What I think caught my imagination about this sonnet, even before I knew why it would be so important to me, was how it captures an epiphany at the very moment when you understand that the realization has come too late. The author sees with perfect clarity exactly what he has lost, and the inevitability of that loss. There is no trace of bitterness – though that is not true of all Meredith’s sonnets – there is just the purity of grief. And somehow the sonnet transforms that.

The Romantics thought that you had to suffer to make art. The Victorians thought you had to make art to survive suffering. I did not understand that distinction as a college sophomore, but I do now. Paul and I have been divorced for a little over three years. The wounds are no longer raw. Paul has remarried. Now, where there was fighting and bitterness, there is polite indifference. We parent by email. There were no custody issues. The kids have adjusted well. It is a safe arrangement, most of the time. But there is a scene in the death-throes of our marriage that still haunts me like the fireside scene in Meredith’s sonnet.

Paul is trying to figure out what I want him to do. I don’t know what I want him to do. There’s nothing he can do. I’m just unhappy. We are returning from a storytelling event at the Hopkins Depot; he’s trying to become more interested in what I’m interested in, less preoccupied with his own job and more willing to let me be something other than a clergy wife. He is enthusiastic about one teller, critical of another – but mostly he is thinking about what stories he would do, how he would perform this or that. Paul has what my therapist would call “a strong personality.” But he is trying.

He does not seem to notice that I have gotten quieter and quieter, that my responses are increasingly short, until we have pulled into the driveway of our home in Eden Prairie, the one we would be selling a year later. And then he gets it. He turns and looks at me, and I will never forget that look, that strange mixture of love and despair. “You don’t want me there, do you.” I am quiet. “Because I colonize everything you do.”

And I think that is it, he is right.

But what makes me want to cry is the fact that I also know with complete certainty that no one else in the universe would be able to come up with such a perfect phrase for what is happening. And even as I am losing him – even as I am pushing him away - I know he is irreplaceable.

The Epiphany Letter

2008-02-09T15:02:57Z

Begun on Christmas Day; completed on Epiphany

Dear family and friends:

Good news! There is no evidence of global warming in Minnesota this Christmas. Quite the contrary. The snow is soft and deep, like a cotton ball diorama, the kind kids would make using mirrors as ice skating ponds and trees stolen from the electric train set. Maybe a birthday cake ballerina would stand in for a skater. More snow is falling as I write, and the house is cold. So I do what all good Minnesotans do: I put on another sweater.

I have resisted getting the plastic up on the windows this year. I am my home décor, you see, and doing so always reminds me of Marabel Morgan greeting her husband at the door dressed in nothing but Saran Wrap. A woman who had tried this advice wrote in to Time after The Total Woman was reviewed there. She had been very pleased with the results. “He’ll never bring unexpected company home to dinner again.”

The Total Woman came out in 1974, two years after the Equal Rights Amendment was proposed, a year after Roe v. Wade. The year I graduated from high school. So I was paying attention. Gender roles were still a curiosity to me, and though I believed theoretically that I could do anything a man could do, that I could choose my own way in the world – even ask boys out on dates if I wanted to - I had not actually made the attempt.

At the Roman Catholic college I attended, I never read Kate Millet or Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan or Germaine Greer – never even had a female professor - but rather absorbed “women’s lib” secondhand from the culture. It was the Marabel Morgans and the Phyllis Schaflys who were in the news, and who made the most noise. Easy, it seemed, to reject them, to snort in derision at their reactionary ways. Perhaps a direct dose of feminist rhetoric would have more thoroughly inoculated me against the saran-wrapped, submissive woman who found her way into my life anyway, and who I could only manage to exorcise by opting out of the husband at the door altogether. A good man, a man with whom I shared a great deal of mutuality and affection, which somehow wasn’t enough.

Oops. This is a Christmas letter, isn’t it.

Since some of you only hear from me once a year, I figure continuity is important, so earlier I went looking for last year’s letter to see just what it was I had said about 2006. I could not find one. It was awhile before I remembered why: last year I was unemployed at Christmas. Although there were good things that happened earlier that year - including a lovely trip to New England with a friend for my 50^th birthday, and my first paid performance as a storyteller at Northstar’s Tellabration! concert in November – I was not feeling particularly jolly at its conclusion. So 2006 will go down as the Christmas Letter That Wasn’t.

In February of 2007 I regained my status as one of the gainfully employed and became Director of Financial Development at Crisis Connection, a 24 hour mental health hotline. Although Crisis Connection has been around almost 40 years (it began as a service for teen runaways on bad trips who needed to “rap”), it still thinks of itself as a grassroots organization, and has been running on a shoestring for years. A very frayed shoestring. In the last five or six years, the organization has spent down its cash reserves trying to build up an earned income component till it literally has nothing left in the way of a cushion. The months with three pay periods have been especially tense. I was hired by a new Executive Director trying to implement a financial turnaround, of which I am a key player.

No pressure there.

But as the numbers come in, it appears we may actually be succeeding. During my first year (ten months, actually) individual donations increased 64% over 2006, and corporate and foundation support 107%. I am proud of these figures. Special events have not done as well as expected, but at least I have a more realistic line to work with in the 2008 budget. Overall, we gained 33% in “nonassured revenue” (that’s me). Most importantly, we are doing the hard work it takes to honestly assess our competitiveness in the market vis à vis for profit call centers. We will end this year with a deficit of about $40,000, which is actually a significant improvement over the last three years. If we are successful in implementing the 2008 revenue plan, we will eliminate the deficit altogether and have a healthy start on a cash reserve.

I don’t expect to see any cash reserves in my own immediate future, however, not with two kids in college. Aidan graduated from Eden Prairie High School in June, and enrolled in September at Augsburg College in Minneapolis. Like Maggie, he lives on campus, but I see him - and his laundry - occasionally. He is majoring in Medieval Studies. (I knew we should never have let him read all those Redwall books.) The program is small but outstanding, largely because of one very charismatic professor who has built it up from scratch. The boy who used to spend hours online playing Anarchy and Everquest and Ragnarok now sits on my couch and reads me passages from Will Durant’s The Age of Faith. “Mom, listen to this sentence. This is a great sentence.”

Aidan has never been the student in the family. Although the aptitude tests kids are exposed to in elementary school once suggested he belonged in a “gifted and talented” program, up until recently he has never been motivated to focus on anything he is not passionately interested in. I still remember a knock-down, screamer of an argument we had over completing a consumer science (what we used to call “home economics” when it was for girls) assignment. It was stupid, he didn’t want to do it, he didn’t care whether he failed the class, he didn’t care whether he went to college. Resolution of argument: I didn’t care whether he cared. He would do the assignment, or there would be no Anarchy or Everquest or Ragnarok.

But in the last year or two of high school, something changed for him. Possibly it was seeing his sister in college, and knowing he wanted to go. Perhaps it was the teacher they both had in common, who facilitated his involvement in a historical reenactment. (He played a wicked Jean Paul Marat, and was pushed around the halls of Eden Prairie High all day by his fellow reenactors in a metal tub on wheels with a blood soaked rag around his head, calling for revolution. Nice work if you can get it.) Perhaps it was the discount he got for good grades on his auto insurance. I don’t know. Whatever it was, it stuck. Now his father and his sister and I get Christmas lists asking for a “respectable translation” of the Epic of Gilgamesh, “the original man and his furry companion saga.”

Maggie is a junior at Hamline, a bit further east on 94 in St. Paul. She is further east in a lot of ways, pursuing a double major in history and religion, with a particular interest in women and Islam. She, too, pays close attention to gender roles, and is particularly fascinated with nonwestern ways of defining and experiencing them. I must admit that is sometimes hard for me to understand. I have heard the argument, for example, that hajib is a way of liberating women from being treated as sex objects. Were I given a choice, I suppose I would choose hajib over saran. But I prefer not to be subjected to either.

Over Christmas break Maggie has been working on the outline for a paper on female Sufi saints, part of an independent study project. We have been having some interesting discussions about what it means that an Islamic society would honor women’s baraka, or saintly power, in a way that spilled over into the political realm. About what it means for a woman’s power to be derived from celibacy: to substitute submissiveness to God for submissiveness to man. And about whether submissiveness need be in the picture at all. She has been both intrigued and frustrated by the Sufi paper, because so few of her sources are available in English, and she finds herself working on what could well be a Master’s thesis - if only she knew Arabic and Bengali.

During winter break she is working at the Minnesota Historical Society, where she had an internship over the summer working on the Greatest Generation Project, transcribing stories. You can get a look at the final product at http://www.mnhs.org/people/mngg/index.htm. The project they now have her working on focuses on the turbulent events of 1968. Interesting stuff to read, she says, though like most interns she gets tired of scanning and making Xerox copies so that other people can actually work with the material. That is the complaint of a future graduate student if I ever heard one. In February she will go to Ghana for her junior semester abroad. I am trying very hard not to see this as inherently any more dangerous than her cousin’s junior semester in Italy, and I am not entirely succeeding.

Pius XII declared Saint Clare the patron saint of television in 1958 because she saw Mass projected on the wall of her room one day when she was too ill to attend. Apparently her powers are in decline these days: she doesn’t even bring in public access stations. So I was home part of the day on December 27, waiting for the Comcast guy to come. My experiment with going off the grid had been a miserable failure: I didn’t need TV that much, but I couldn’t live without high speed Internet. We had a weak signal from the neighbor that cut in and out, and Maggie was using that to do some Sufi research. Suddenly she came thundering down the stairs breathless, her face flushed. “Mom!” she cried. “Guess who died!”

I am not exactly proud of this, but my first, hopeful response was “Dick Cheney?”

It was not Dick Cheney.

Benazir Bhutto was a personal hero of mine: an Islamic woman leader with a strong voice and real political power – a woman like and unlike myself, living in the messy world, negotiating from a position of privilege for the welfare of her people. A woman who had seen her own father hanged. A woman who attended Harvard and Oxford before consenting to an arranged marriage. Who could have stayed in London, or Dubai, and watched her children grow up. A woman who instead proved that her sex could do anything men could do – even get assassinated.

Why does it surprise me that my daughter would look instead for role models not to Hilary Clinton or Benazir Bhutto but to the Islamic saints of the 13^th century?

Between starting this letter on Christmas day and finishing it on Epiphany, I spent most of this week working on a story of my own that I performed at Ball’s Cabaret last night – a story that had love, and laughter, and companionship in it. I thought I was performing something light and frothy, something that would help me remember fondly a person in my past who is no longer present. Instead it left a hole. I miss that kind of love, and laughter, and companionship. I miss that person. Such feelings are important, and they need to be paid attention to. Just like trying to figure out what kind of woman you want to be in the first half of your life, or the second.

By now I think you’ve all come to realize that I could not write a traditional Christmas letter – a superficial review of family accomplishments – even if I wanted to. Although I think it might be better for my psyche, and less of an imposition on my friends, if I could. Working at a 24 hour crisis center has at least made me more aware that I am part of a rather large group of people who struggle to get through the holidays at all, let alone emerge joyous. I have stopped worrying that this is not “normal.” This just is. I wait it out.

I wish you joy in 2008. And in whatever struggle comes your way, both Epiphany and Christmas, insight and new birth.

Paula

A Ridiculous Amount of Turtles

2007-12-19T13:00:33Z

My room at the Anderson Center (you can see the others by clicking on mine) seemed to have a preponderance of writers in residence; but it is also possible that other artists don’t do journal entries as faithfully as do writers. There are entries from historians both architectural and environmental; painters; a few names I recognize from The Loft’s teaching roster. Mary Jean Port, whose intermediate memoir class I am thinking of taking in January (and who lists all the birds she saw – a whole page of names that I couldn’t identify even if I did see them). The poet Melanie Figg. Lance Larsen includes in his entry a six line poem, “Co-conspirators in Early Autumn,” that blows me away; I hope it is published somewhere. Down by the river, he counts thirty-one turtles on one log. The turtles are a running theme, and seem to be the unofficial power animal of the Anderson Center; Sharon Suzuki-Martinez ends her entry by blessing subsequent occupants “with a sky full of inspiration, new friends, good food, adventure and a ridiculous amount of turtles.” Courtesy of Tom Cassidy's Access to Art series, I have also shared a web page with Sharon Suzuki-Martinez without realizing it (the Tellabration! profiled there is last year's). We must be destined to meet.

Most of the residents' entries take place in the summer, but there is one cryptic November entry, followed by initials. “Here with my family. I’m sad, weary and tired. Do I for all I’m worth go on? Or succumb to the ubiquitous melancholy that surrounds and haunts me. Maybe the answer will come tonight. Maybe.” Ubiquitous melancholy. I feel like I’m reading Jane Eyre. But depression does that to you: either you become ponderous and Victorian, or completely inarticulate. In pencil below, dated two days latter, is a response. “Blessings to you MWS. PZW.” Quite likely the first writer never saw it.

In the winter months people sometimes rent the house for functions. At the end of my week, I actually did see some people – a couple who were planning a 60th birthday party for that Sunday. It is also a house where family reunions occur, which would probably suit the Andersons just fine. In my room is an Alice, who writes in a very spidery hand that her family has been coming to the Center in winters for a weekend after New Year’s for several years. Arthritis affects her handwriting, and she knows she "should leave these pages to the talented writers, sculptors, painters, musicians but I have little resistance so here is a very tiny part of my 'tale.'” Thank you Alice. She tallys 4 great grandchildren, 6 grandchildren, and 3 children, “of which two are here watching me like hawks.” Apparently she gave them a scare that trip, and they took her to the ER in Rochester. “I am resting, sleeping, doing crosswords, conversing with my intelligent family…” Alice is a widow, born and raised in Olmstead County, lately of Palm Springs. “Now I may be moving back to MN to live in a Presbyterian House in Eden Prairie, MN." I wonder what she is thinking as she looks out at Bucephalus in the snow. "I have newly 'broken up' with a 95 year old boy friend, a man I knew in Battle Lake H.S. grad in ’38. Life is full of adventures. We will play charades and other games tonight after the great grandchildren go to sleep. Last year we had a lefse bake: we are all Scandinavian – mostly Norwegian-Finnish. I think today is January 8, 2007. It is Saturday, so there is no calendar about.”

Perhaps the most important gift I received in coming here was the pride I felt in making the choice to do so, in putting down the bucks and reserving the time to take my own creative life seriously. To put my needs not before everyone else’s, but at least on a par with them. The support I received both from my colleagues at work and my fellow storytellers was affirming – yes, you should do this, I am so glad you have taken the opportunity to do this, you deserve this. One of the storytellers at our evening concert, Joan Calof, told me she had been to the Anderson Center herself for a residency, and had loved it. I wish I knew what room she had stayed in; I would have looked up her entry.

I also felt something more subtle from those who supported me: a sense of relief. They have seen how hard I work, have feared I am burning myself out, and yet they need me to do that work. They see now I can take care of myself, that I will take time for myself, and they can relax a bit, and not feel guilty. I also feel that it is important for this particular community of artists – who range from professionals with national reputations to people with “day jobs” like me to grandparents and students –which has been divided into producers and performers, into workerbee wannabes and artists who disappear from committees every time they have a gig, and who have been polarized almost as badly as “working moms” and “stay-at-home moms” – to see modeled in their leadership someone who is committed to the community but not consumed by it; who can organize and produce but also nurture her own creative life. I have not always been good at that; but when I forget, or fall victim to gender roles and martyr complexes, I can trick myself into doing it – for them. (And also enjoy the free parking.)

The week I began at the Anderson Center was cold and clear. Toward the end, it began to snow - really snow - and by the time I returned to the Twin Cities - slowly - the weather was pretty bad. But I had plans to go out to dinner and Ball's Cabaret with my friend Nancy, and by God no snowstorm was going to keep me from some actual social contact. We must have scraped the car off four times that evening, but no matter. There was conversation.

I did some good writing at the Anderson Center, though I did not have a project to finish – I just needed to get back into the habit, and also pull together a lot of odds and ends that I am trying to shape into stories. A piece on betrayal, part of a longer series I tentatively call “My Life in Lies.” Some intriguing freewriting that came out of memoir exercises from Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew’s Writing the Sacred Journey. A beginning structure for an essay on Courtship and Seduction. Had to stop on that one; need to do more research. Maybe start with an actual date.

After all, life is full of adventures.

Acknowledgments

2007-10-23T03:47:28Z

I've never put up two versions of the same story before, as I did with "Ghost" and "How She Haunts Me." I know which story works better as a performance. But I am curious as to which one my readers prefer.

There are people I should thank for helping me work the previous two stories: Ann, Dave, and Paul, for reading and providing feedback on “The Haunted Singer” back in 1995; Erica, for saying she was looking for “new bodies” to perform at Cheap Theatre, and accepting mine instead; and Sara, Dot and Kay, for listening twice over, helping with transitions, and responding with such beautiful stories of their own.

Finally, there are two people in particular I am indebted to who I want not just to thank but to acknowledge; yea, verily, even to plug. Nancy Donoval’s coaching was invaluable in getting me from October 20 to October 21, when "How She Haunts Me" was performed. I never cease to be amazed at how she can focus on the performance issues and make my writing better. You can find out more about her upcoming workshops and her coaching services at www.nancydonoval.com.

The primary difference between “Ghost” and “How She Haunts Me” is one of plot form. For more on the nuances of plot, and finding the nerve to play around with them, check out Loren Niemi’s The Book of Plots, described on his website at http://www.storytelling.org/Niemi/default.htm.

How She Haunts Me

2007-10-23T01:17:26Z

She haunts my nature;

She haunts my nurture.

She haunts my past;

She haunts my future.

She haunts for good;

She haunts for ill.

She haunts my heart;

She haunts my will.

She haunts my nature.

“You’re just like her,” my father said. “Creative.” This time, the word appeared to be a compliment. At any rate, I chose to take it as such.

We were cleaning out the basement - he and my mother were trying to pare down, - and every time I went home for Christmas, more parings ended up in my luggage.

“She would want you to have this.” The Housewife’s Guide to African Violets had already found its way into my briefcase. The photograph was a last minute addition, and I didn’t even know who it was, but I ended up stuffing it into my purse anyway, with the tampons and the Zoloft and the Tums.

I made an excuse to head up the stairs again, quickly, before anything else was conferred upon me.

“No, I can’t take the mantle clock this time, Dad. It won’t fit in my bag. If I need canning jars, I will buy some.”

It’s not that I didn’t want my grandmother’s things, but they were fragile, as she had been.

I don’t think she had what we would call a happy marriage. Her husband had been a minister –something else we had in common for awhile - but he did not minister at home. She raised four sons, three to adulthood.

I can’t say what she was like with a houseful of boys. But the clock on the mantle ticked louder when the house was empty. We'd come to visit and she'd cry when we left. Eventually she'd cry before we left, in anticipation.

Menopause was joked about by doctors in small Pennsylvania towns, but otherwise ignored. Chronic depression was even more rarely discussed, and seldom treated. Finally, like her mother before her, she broke her hip.

She had a walker, but not the will to use it. A year or two later she had a stroke. When she died, I was saddened, but not surprised. She had always seemed old to me, and sixty two was ancient.

She haunts my nurture.

I was fourteen when she died. My grandfather had wanted a white painted casket, trimmed in gold leaf. He showed us a brochure. It looked like a French Provincial dresser.

"She wouldn't like it," said my father. "Get the pine – get the cherry if you have to spend money."

At first Clay was stubborn, then his wallet got the better of him. He chose the pine.

Inside the pine box was a waxworks version of my grandmother: it was her, it was not her. Someone had put clear polish on the yellow fingernails. I had never seen them this long: she had always bitten them blunt. Now they grew.

I stared hard for a few minutes while my father prayed, afraid the closed eyes would suddenly open. Yet I knew they could not; that too frightened me.

She shouldn't wear glasses when she is sleeping, I thought. But she's not sleeping. She's dead.

When all the people had gone, my father went up to pay his own last visit. He blew his nose violently once or twice. Rearranged her blanket. Her big toe had been showing.

I went and stood beside him; still afraid, but unable to leave him there alone. He was my father. That would be him someday, lying in a box. That would be me, someday, blowing my nose.

The smell of cut flowers was overpowering. But my father took hold of my hand.

She haunts my past.

I remember the parlor heaped with flowers brought from the funeral service, the big farm kitchen full of covered dishes. There was scrapple and chicken pot pie, chow-chow and church spread; sugar cookies, shoo fly cake. But not my grandmother’s shoo fly cake.

My uncles and their wives were milling about, talking to old neighbors and second cousins. Skinny Aunt Doris had worn red to the funeral, and I hated her. Aunt Jane was pregnant - not her fault, but still in poor taste. She had a good appetite, which bothered me.

The noise in the room was almost cheerful. It drowned out the sound of the old mantle clock, as if time had stopped being important. Even my father, in some kind of nervous relief, had heaped his plate full.

My mother found me in Donnie’s room. "You've been around people all day," she said.

"And flowers," I said.

My mom smiled. "You know, no one would mind if you went out for a walk.”

I took the dirt road which ran along the cow pasture. It had rained the night before. The smell of manure hung in the spring air.

Violets were everywhere: not the delicate African violets my grandmother had tended so carefully indoors, but the common hardy weed. I picked a few, held them to my nose.

Their fragrance was light, like a music box melody, and the scent of manure still came through. But the drowsy, heavy air of the funeral finally slumped back and away.

She haunts my future.

Even that year when she gave me and my brother our Supercapes – they were aprons tied backwards around our necks with the "S's" copied from my dad's old comic books -- she never smiled, though I think she might have wanted to. It was as if the muscles in her face had forgotten how.

I flew round the lily pond, jumped a stone in the rock garden, rattled defiantly up and down the cellar door. "I’m Superwoman!" I cried. I was eight years old. I had a cape. I could do anything.

"Supergirl," my brother corrected me. "There's Superman and Superboy and Supergirl.”

"Well, that’s not fair," I said. "If there's Superman and Superboy, there should be Superwoman and Supergirl."

"Well there isn't!" My brother was the Reality Police when it came to superheros. I appealed to a higher authority.

"Shouldn’t there be a Superwoman, Grandma?"

For a moment she seemed lost in thought. That happened a lot. "I’m sure there will be,” she said finally. “When you grow up.”

Her expression, as usual, was unreadable, and I was not entirely sure I had been blessed.

She haunts for good.

Understand that despite a full semester of Home Economics in eighth grade, I was only a Halloween seamstress – there has got to be a mother in the audience who knows what this means - yet every year I dutifully reacquainted myself with my grandmother’s old Singer. Aidan’s lion costume was the last thing I made on it. He was six at the time. His father was still my husband. We had named Aidan after the Celtic saint who founded the abbey at Lindisfarne. But Aidan was more taken by the fact that in Gaelic, the name meant “fierce.”

I made it easy for myself. Chose a Simplicity pajama pattern, took the tail from the belt to another pattern. My grandmother made her own patterns, but I was not that creative.

So how hard could it be?

I spend forty‑five minutes getting the bobbin to catch, poking the thin gold thread around under the metal plate so it will be in just the right place at just the right time. The instructions in the manual look simple enough: maybe they only worked in the fifties.

Or maybe, after twenty‑odd years, the machine still misses my grandmother.

I picture those deft hands with their blue veins and ragged nails, the right on the wheel, the left on the thread trailing from the needle, dipping the sliver of stainless steel below the plate in a single motion and bringing up gold.

That does the trick.

The lasso of thread from my needle slips around the bobbin thread and carries it gently through the opening. I bring the blunt side of my scissors through the loop and the two threads run off in parallel lines toward the back of the machine, like lovers in a country dance.

She haunts for ill.

"I do like the fur at the end," my husband says.

Aidan found that himself at the fabric store. It really does look like a lion's tail. I am encouraged.

The top is done. The pants pieces are pinned and waiting. Attaching the tail to the back of the pants should be easy with the right gauge needles. A week to go before Halloween: I am definitely ahead of last year.

But halfway through, for no apparent reason, the machine suddenly begins producing 25 stitches per inch. Then I remember last year. It’s The Tension from Hell. Here's one seam Aidan won't be splitting.

I turn the pants right side out to view my handiwork.

A twenty inch long torso and twelve inch legs confront me, the tail hanging out of one leg like a cord on a lamp stand.

I have confused the crotch with the inseam.

"You can get him a green wig," my husband suggests. "He can be a tree."

"He doesn't want to be a tree. He wants to be a lion."

I stare at the microscopic stitches. Slashing my wrists with the seam ripper would be quicker and less painful.

"You could buy him a costume, you know. Why don't you? There have to be Lion Kings out there."

That’s a good question, for which I have a bad answer.

“Because,” I say, “I’m Superwoman.”

She haunts my heart.

I take the photograph out to look at on the plane, and am surprised. Twice. A dark haired woman smiles out at me, her hair bobbed too fashionably for a farm girl. She is standing at the entrance to Penn’s Caves.

Well, what do you know. My grandmother did have a woman friend. She wasn’t always alone in a houseful of men.

There’s a dimple in this woman’s cheek, which gives her a teasing, playful expression. She looks daring, maybe a little fast. Now here is someone who might give a woman like my grandmother a moment or two of bravery, of fun.

I’m curious now: I pull out the back of the frame, remove the cardboard insert. And then comes the second surprise. The spidery script written in faded ink on the back of the picture, the name and a date: Catharine, 1924.

My heart skips a beat. It was, indeed, a person I did not know. It was also my grandmother.

She haunts my will.

My grandmother put up canned goods in the root cellar. There were rows and rows of Mason jars - peaches and tomatoes and apple butter - along the walls on shallow shelves beneath the kitchen pantry. The homestead hadn’t been a working farm since my grandfather had answered the call – but each year my grandmother canned like she still had a Victory Garden.

My friend Barb, who was in the first grade and knew everything, said that cellars and basements were the same thing, but she hadn’t been to the root cellar. It had a floor of packed earth, cool and gravelike. The dirt smell frightened me. Concrete kept things where they belonged.

The cellar steps had wooden planks you could see between, and fall through, surely. But my grandmother said no, no, not a big girl like me – not a girl who was going to kindergarten - and she sent me down, weak-kneed, for preserves, into that dank place, whose spidery corners you could not see into.

I made her promise to stand at the top of the stairs, promise. And she did. She always kept her promises, but still I came up quickly, by leaps and bounds, afraid of the earth, not minding the gaps.

“Now see?” she said. “You are a brave girl.”

Afterwards I sat in the kitchen window seat, soaking up sun with the African violets, eating bread and jam till my heart stopped pounding and my breath was slow and steady, liked the measured beat of the mantle clock.

She haunts my nature;

She haunts my nurture.

She haunts my past;

She haunts my future.

She haunts for good;

She haunts for ill --

She haunts my heart.

She haunts my will.

Ordinary Time

Altered Arthur

Lily Was Right. Thank Goodness.

Recovery Act

Curt Lund and Laura Bidgood - What Happened? Productions Slow Jobs: Servicing America for $12 an Hour U of M Rarig Center, Arena Stage 330 21st Avenue S. Minneapolis, MN

Take; eat.

*Not a Meat Pie

Nancy DonovalEvery Pastie* Tells A StoryPlaywrights’ Center2301 Franklin Ave E Minneapolis, MN 55406

Barthelme the Scrivener

Guilt Trip

Catching Up

Two Falling Voices

American Zombie

Going Down

Chiropractic

Mashed Potatoes

Of Beads and Brakes

The Rising Sophomore

What Would Trollope Do?

Slow Summer

Culture Shock

Everybody Gets Malaria

Legal in London

Modern Love

The Epiphany Letter

A Ridiculous Amount of Turtles

Acknowledgments

How She Haunts Me

Curt Lund and Laura Bidgood - What Happened? Productions
Slow Jobs: Servicing America for $12 an Hour
U of M Rarig Center, Arena Stage
330 21st Avenue S. Minneapolis, MN

Nancy Donoval
Every Pastie* Tells A Story
Playwrights’ Center
2301 Franklin Ave E Minneapolis, MN 55406