Waiting rooms

There are many poems, stories, and movie scenes set in waiting rooms. The waiting room in America, like the queue in England, is, it seems, the perfect metaphor for contemporary life. And, as a friend recently told me, since we are no longer comfortable with idleness, waiting rooms signify the state of limbo and the pain of our discomfort with ourselves. So, I am in a waiting room now, computer in my lap, ipod buds in my ears, cell phone at my side. One man is flipping through a magazine and another man reads his bible. I was told I have three hours to wait. What do I do with three hours without a car? How do I "occupy" myself?

It occurs to me that no matter how trite, the metaphor sticks. That while I attempt to live here and now, I am always waiting for the next step: the car to be fixed, graduation, the next job, the next house, the next child, retirement, vacation, and, of course, death. All I really have is the waiting rooms. And the pain of it is my own unease. I don't like the gray ceramic tiles, the silly television show, the not-so-plush chairs.

Maybe, though, it has nothing at all to do with my surroundings. Maybe I don't like other people to know that I must wait. Maybe I should walk across the street to a little restaurant and pretend that I'm not waiting. Why do I care what these people think? I'm not sure that I do. I think really, if I'm honest, I'll say that I don't like limbo -- I don't like being "unproductive."

While I have spent much of the last year scrutinizing my husband's need to hold onto his job, I have not really looked closely at the same desire in myself. While my needs are not as attached to money as his are, my drive is just as strong: the same old protestant work ethic rages in me.

So, I have two hours and forty five minutes left to experiment with myself, and I'm going to sign off now. Maybe I'll learn something.

Like a lawn mower

Well, I'm still trying to finish finals, but I've been reading books like a lawn mower cutting grass. In the past two weeks I've read:

Push by Sapphire
The Red Tent by Anita Diamant
Daisy Miller by Henry James
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Persuasion by Jane Austen
Night by Elie Wiesel
and I'm now reading A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

I plan to go back to Austen, I just have to get more of her books.

The Red Tent is a wonderful retelling of Joseph (biblical) story from his sister Dinah's point of view. The final 50 pages are not as strong as the first 275.

Push is really good -- story of an abused African-American girl and her survival.

I'm not sure what to say about Daisy Miller. James is fascinating.

Austen is like cotton candy. But isn't cotton candy good??

Night is hard, but necessary reading.

So far, A Thousand Splendid Suns is as good (Better?) than The Kite Runner. I hope he can sustain it. I'm 100 pages in.

Will keep you updated.

Jane Austen

When one finds the summer quickly approaching, she might break into a old stash of books that had generally been regarded as "soap operas." There, in seeking only pleasure, she might find that books that were once found disagreeable, are now given to be so delightful as to take her rational mind away from every drudgery of life and bring her into a romantic, happy state.

Pleasure in reading, it has been said, can never be underestimated. In fact, it might be enough to spend even as much as eight or ten hours in a single day following line after line. It is the sharpness of wit and character that leads me to book after book, becoming certain that even before the exam period is finished, I will have read the entire collection of Ms. Austen. How absurd. And yet, how magnificent, that one, such as myself, who is inclined to the dark and the morose, might find that the tidiness of happy endings might appeal to me, after all of these years.

Poetry for Springtime

Prose Poem for Alabama and Mary Etta and the 2008 Huntingdon Poetry Writing Class

I grew up, like she did, like you did, climbing trees wrapped in flowering vines. We share an Alabama childhood and a love of battle worn vegetation. Before waffle-bottom shoes, my sneakers would slip and slide down trunks and vines like a puck on ice, shaving away layers of skin from the tree and my legs. She moved to Florida and I to Texas, places where trees don’t have arms to hold us when flights crash. I’ll never forget my initial return home, the awe of first breath laden with those forgotten smells. Now years of wisteria-bloom buildup turns sour, and the odor haunts my footsteps through every child-filled neighborhood. Vines may seem to meander, but real Southerners know better: every season tightens the grip, strangling the oaks in favor of false grape bunches, and releases a shower of pollen-filled petals that float on wind currents like snow flakes. My stomach overturns an urge to pick one to take home. Bees swarm; their furious furry bodies dripping with rainwater and yellow dust. Underneath the suffocating shade, a dead squirrel buzzes with iridescent green flies. Sex and death: one melting into the other. I think of my class here, for a moment; they will revolt against this sentiment. They will say, There must be more to life than bees and maggots. Damn, though, if I can see beyond it or even the difference. Both hum like distant airplane engines taking off somewhere on asphalt, far away from red clay roads, moving crucial life-giving liquids from one place to another. Both are here, as I walk this paved street: stooped vines touch the same road that smashed the fuzzy squirrel. I’m too early for Magnolias, thick and sweet like butter and cane, and it’s too early for honeysuckle, delicate single drops of nectar. I settle for elephant-sized bright-pink azaleas and wisteria climbing to the top of massive power poles. Substitutions become commonplace. She died less than one week ago, and I was not there. I let the flowers bring the scent of her dead body to me. I kiss it goodbye. We cannot remember the dead fondly when we see them in the hide of flattened bony critters that only made it half way across the pavement. The dead must be honored with the fertilizing of seed, the feeding of a coming child. To drive the other away, the absolute zero of death, we fuck by candlelight. In homespun vases, flowers erupt. We either fight to get there or fight to forget it.