Poem in your pocket day

I am not a poet, though I've always wished I was. This month, being poetry month, I've actually written a few. But they tell me today is Poem in your Pocket day. And that means print one and carry it with you.

I know Keats is a little overdone, and love poems may seem trite. But this is the one I thought of first when I heard about PIYP day, and so I felt the need to honor that.

When You are Old

When you are old and gray and full of sleep
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true;
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face.

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead,
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

William Butler Yeats

and a draft.

Lilacs
Their scent perfumes my memory,
Purple, pink and white,
Full beards of the branches
Droop heavy

They bloom only a week or two
So abundant
Armfuls cut from the stems
Leave plenty

I crush the star shaped blossoms
Like damp tears against my cheek
They leave me longing
For home.

a quote from my jr. league days

"Never spend your life's work doing something that ultimately does not count."

Tomorrow,I will remember this.

just because i want this poem in my blog

Cuando yo muera quiero tus manos en mis ojos;

When I die, I want your hands on my eyes;
I want the light and wheat of your beloved hands
to pass their freshness over me once more:
I want to feel the softness that changed my destiny.

I want you to live while I wait for you, asleep.
I want your ears to still hear the wind, I want you
to sniff the sea's aroma that we loved together,
to continue to walk on the sand we walk on.

I want what I love to continue to live,
and you whom I love and sang above everything else
to continue to flourish full-flowered:

so that you can reach everything my love directs you to,
so that my shadow can travel along in your hair,
so that everything can learn the reason for my song.

Pablo Neruda

Dolphin's Delight?

or, what would you name a house on the island?

Finally signed a contract on the beach house to be. It has been a long road, and tested all my common business sense. This was the 5th property we've bid on since January, and were within 20K of the last one on Wednesday. We were set to increase our offer to a level that *should* have been accepted, but for some reason, i just couldn't get excited, and asked the realtor to show me what else there was. She had only two properties we'd not seen, one that literally came on the market Thursday morning, one over the weekend.

Maybe it was instinct, but I asked to see them. The new listing was first, and though out of the price range we were hoping to stay in, it was perfect. Not really perfect.. perfect for us. The kicker was the third story office with windows all around, and a view so clear we can see the island curve. Add to that the building specs which met Florida code, (much better than Texas) and the price per square foot at nearly $40 below the least expensive one we found...

Spouse was out of the country, but flew in exhausted Friday morning. The day was beautiful though and we drove with the top down. As we turned west at the seawall and followed the Gulf to the realtor's office, we watched the water. Out a few hundred feet from shore, a pod of dolphins frolicked in the waves. I've seen dolphins a lot, but only a few times from the land. They always make me feel happy.

We were at the house by 9:30, and made a full price offer by 11. He says it was the stars in my eyes, but I know he loves it too. Now to sweet talk the loan officer...

Closing April 26. ;)

profile subjectes

Read some advice about Twitter tonight that suggests that one should be focused and actually post about the things she is focused on. But I'm a scavenger, always scouring others words for the one that makes me stop and reflect. Wouldn't it be funny to be always retweeting someone's quips because I like the words? Embarrassing.

I got to listen to Mary Karr read from Lit last week. I enjoyed her presentation a lot... and part of it was her Texan-isms, about which I wrote when I first moved to Texas... more of the plethora of essays and stories that are in my personal slush pile, unpublished and un posted with yet another breakdown of websites. The one she added to my collection of colorful phrases: "Signing doctor to your signature when you can't write prescriptions is like being a General in the Salvation Army." She recommended that writers watch for metaphor like this in everyday speech, and with northern jealousy, I realized how much more color there is in the south, in so many respects.

My profile says, mom, lawyer, writer and virtual world personality. See above re expansion on writing thoughts.

Law, well. I still believe that my clients confidences include not telling anyone they have a lawyer, especially if it's me. Not getting much from me on this, perhaps I should take that reference down. But .. I work alone most of the time, and most of the time I don't even come across lawyers in opposition. But I LIKE lawyers. Might come from having gone to law school when the men exponentially outnumbered the women... but I still find lawyers to be great friends. So I'll leave it in. And break rules. Heh.

I'm debating my scavenger role in life as well, as we contemplate buying a condo on the beach in Galveston. I can't decide if it is a negative, particularly in light of the tragedy in Haiti... doesn't it make more sense to send more aid? Or positive... Galveston needs investments to recover.

But this is a longtime dream, to fight saltwater spray on windows that I can open and leave that way if i choose. Couple the sad real estate market with the last hurricane and you find a depressed buyers market for a resource that there will not be more of. We would keep it for the time when we are ready to sever ties with suburban real estate, and not yet ready to sever ties with the children we've launched into this part of the world.

And I've got a terrible case of land lust. I've quenched it the last couple of years with virtual land in Second Life, but this is not a lust that knows satisfaction.

harbored

All day I work at my computer or sometimes other places in my house and mentally collect bits of things I think might be something I could write about. And then I don't write until so very late that remembering anything is hard. Today would have been the same, but I only slept about three hours last night and ended up falling asleep for a while and now my state of consciousness is a bit upset. So here I am.

I remember I wanted to write about Grace Hopper. You may not know who Grace Hopper is, in the front of your brain, but if I tell you it is better to ask forgiveness than permission, you will know who she is. Or debugging computers. Or my favorite of late,"a ship in a harbor is safe, but that is not what a ship is built for."

Sometimes I feel like a ship. Or the harbor. I think if I wanted to focus on that phrase I could write a whole essay about being a harbor. This week for example, my husband is in Cuba. Nice, yes. And I'm home. Agoraphobic a little bit, and sort of challenging myself to see if I can get through the week without leaving the house. Hunker down with my writing, my work, and let my sons run what errands need to be run.... there is a kind of magnetism to the idea. Showering and bras, optional. (Not really, sadly, both would drive me insane to go without.)

But my daughter wants to meet up and write on Wednesday. I've signed up for a law class on Friday. And the week I had laid out in my head to be so productive and ... quiet... seems to be slipping away.

But it's only a week. I'm reading Nick Hornby's Juliet, Naked, and the characters in the book are faced with 15 or 20 years of life which they feel has slipped away from them. I am glad I don't feel like them, but then I'm only half way through the book, so I don't know if I will keep that sentiment. Here is a description I bookmarked, thinking when I did so that I wanted to collect quotes describing the sea. It is delightful to find one that is original: "The sea was hurling itself at the beach over and over again, like a nasty and particularly stupid pit bull..." Charming, yes?

My son is upstairs playing a mournful melody on his guitar. He learned to play classical guitar in college... something I encouraged right along with bribing him to take literature courses. (I do believe in Liberal Arts.) We've bought so many musical instruments for the four of them over the years, it is nice to hear one. Though the melody makes me feel sad... until his phone rings and I hear him laughing.

Laughter of my children is like a buoy in the harbor.

Farewell Geocities and Ode to the Corporate Wife.

It was ten years ago that I realized that "real" writers had websites, and I knew nothing about them. So I took a class, learned basic html, volunteered to edit for three different ezines, one of which I actually learned from, (and is still in existence) and decided to put my own writing site together. I was deep into writing sunrises then... I think there are 6 years of them in the files and I was committed to posting them. I never posted them the day I wrote them though. I wrote one day, then came back the next day and edited. Between times I'd write the journal entry or essay or story that the sunrise seemed to suggest, so the postings were always a day behind, a little cleaner and a little less random. At least in my mind.

The site was named the same as this blog, and lived on Geocities. Geocities, as a free site anyway, died this week. I pulled all the pages.. now I have two complete folders of web pages, one for my law site, one for the writing, that I really should take the time to upload. But i'm too busy playing around with twitter, facebook, plurk, and these new blogs to actually do something that I SHOULD be doing. I have finally requested the release of the domain name from Martindale for my legal site though, so ... progress?

Speaking of Loose Ends....A friend, in chatting innocently the other day, touched a nerve that I didn't realize was still raw. I hope I didn't let on how unsettled it made me when he referred to my Corporate Wife status. I was a little surprised he honed in on that... I seem to spend less time on that particular aspect of my life now than I ever have. I had also forgotten about the book I was going to write ten years ago, parodying the whole lifestyle. Can't decide if i just got lazy, busy, or swallowed the kool aid.

Determined to find out why that phrase unsettled me in the circumstance, particularly because I sprinkle it into my own conversations with some frequency, I did what any self respecting lazy over achiever does. I googled "corporate wife."

As I suspected, the literature on the topic is dated. The articles I found, mostly dealing with the uber rich breed, didn't reach past 2003, with the most in depth one done in 2000.

Hmm, I mused with myself... I wonder if my research from back then is still on my computer?

Hurray for Spotlight, and Mac :) Another seach of my hard drive and I found that "corporate wife" has been consistently in my subconscious, making its way into two nearly complete short stories, both of which I like (though one of which I clearly was having hormonal spikes as it turned the corner from emotional to erotic in ten pages or less!), one "novelette" and is a recurring theme for the women in my almost finished novel. When I planned the original book, I had NOT intended to include the usual crap... ."have your husband approve what you wear" (really?) but instead some of the more human aspects, which ...well... are funny. Or were to me, in my disrespectful attitude toward everything remotely discriminatory.

Has my attitude hurt my spouses career? Looking at where he is and where he came from, I am pretty sure the answer to that is no. I'm also pretty sure I'm well known among the industry as being outspoken (rude? nah. Sassy, maybe.) and more fun to sit by at a dinner than the usual pretty wife. And I'm lucky, in that we didn't either one ever set out on this road, and have written our own rules along the way. We get by with a healthy dose of "whatever works" tempered by "say yes whenever you can."

And I started thinking about the friend who jarred this memory, and about how he is doing a bit of the gig himself, and about my daughters, and think maybe I should update those files, send out those books, and write one more. I have research from ten years ago... how much fun this will be to go back to my chosen interview candidates and update.

If you think you have something to add... you know how to reach me.

Gaps

"Could fulfillment ever be felt as deeply as loss? Romantically she decided that love must surely reside in the gap between desire and fulfillment, in the lack, not the contentment. Love was the ache, the anticipation, the retreat, everything around it but the emotion itself. "

From The Inheritance of Loss, Kiran Desai

i should blame stewart

But I suppose that wouldn't do. He did after all, post a pretty sunrise/sunset before he closed me out of his blog. tsk tsk.

But one of my favorite quotes... okay, one of the thosand quotes i have stuck here and there on postit notes, stickies in mac vernacular, is this one:

When you blame others, you give up your power to change. -Douglas Noel Adams
So Stewart is off the hook, as are the rest of the writing group, and the pompous neighbor who had the audacity to die without letting me know.... imagine that! And so are my brothers and my sister and the cyberlaw boys and and and.

Writing became another chore I was fitting in, and the minute it became something to cross off a list was the minute it no longer felt like art, but craft. Now i'm sure there are elements in all writing of both, but the important point is what it FELT like. And when i no longer felt that i was creating, it became just another boring exercise.

So why now?

Because i find myself speaking in poetic quotes, things i've heard and said aloud so i would remember them. I am meeting new people behind the veil of sleep, characters fully considered, fully alive, tempting me like a man who wants me, but doesn't want me to know it.Poems in magazines in drs' offices, repeating like new budding branches. I am again drifting to literary fiction, putting aside the non fiction, the popular novels, even the classics that have kept my attention for the last year. Clean, clear writing, mesmerizing characters, plot i have to think to follow.

it's what i want to be when i grow up.

Do you think it is time yet?

poor brad

Where did you go, the person in my mind, the one who can muster up anything from a murder to an orgasm and let me feel the terror, taste the blood, come screaming down the other side? Where buried in the chasms… that's the word I misspelled to lose the Indiana State Spelling Bee…. where are you hiding? Did you take all the words and leave? Did you gather my friends one by one and form a perfect V in the sky as you flew south?

Wait. I am south. Did you go back home?

I dreamed I had sex with Brad Pitt last night. Very bad sex. His penis was tiny, like that of an anatomically correct boy doll, and I think he was as disappointed in me as I was him. After, he didn't run or act shallow, I didn't cover my naked skin, I guess we figured the jig was up (is that the phrase? Why does it sound awkward and what does it mean? I could google it, but if I did I'd be swallowed by the internet and never come back again, so the jig will simply have to be up.) We talked about his condo resort development, named in my dream head Redfield, which I know is a photoshop plug in…. and as I looked out at the mountains from the old farm house (the resort was all booked up of course, I asked him, which one do you own, and he said, with awe in his own voice, all of it. I like thinking of famous rich confident people in terms of their most base parts...like Brad as a young boy who just can't quite believe he is where he is. (Disclaimer, I don't know Brad Pitt, only like about half his movies and really never fantasize about movie stars… I think this dream had more to do with things not being as they appear, don't you?)(Unless you really want to believe that rich famous beautiful men have tiny cocks that look like plastic)

Today, I will take pictures of jasmine, magnolia and azaleas. I'm working on a project and I want all the flowers of the tropics in my files to finish it.

Today I will buy tickets to Madrid. I am meeting my daughter there in April. We will fly into Madrid, then train to Cordoba, and then see Granada, Seville and the coast. I am thinking I will rent a car and we will drive to Lisbon then. Ten days. I do not think I will take my computer. I want to travel light.

The first trip time I took my daughters to Europe was the summer we moved from Michigan to Iowa, the summer I actually started writing, really. It had been a whirlwind career year for my spouse, and a good one for me as well… I broke all my personal income records that year. But we'd been on several Corporate trips, all over the world. For this trip, I sent my boys, 4 and 9, to stay with my mother, and packed the girls up with me (middle school and high school).

It was a trip with all sorts of typical family mishaps… passports late in arriving, missed connections, lost luggage, etc, but by the time we had toured Paris and headed to Toulouse for my spouses meeting, we were relaxed. While he did business, we chose to go to the coast… I was given a rental car. I was actually quite proud of being able to drive in France, and the girls were thrilled with the independence the car gave us. We were even doing well with the foreign road signs, until we got to the tollbooth. The fare was something like ten francs (yes. Well before Euros) and I tried to give the toll taker the coin in my bag with the 10 on it

She refused it. I looked again, yes, it said 10, as did her sign, and tried again. She blew her bangs up in the disgusted way the French have and huffed "not a franc not a franc" over and over. My alert daughter finally figured out that I was trying to pay in Mexican Pesos.

We all love that story, but recognize it has limited appeal and sounds very snobby. So we only tell it in the family. If you are reading this now, does it make you family?

So yes, now it's Euros, and I think I can drive. But do I want to? I do love trains. We'll see. First I have to book the flight.

And before I can go, spring break will be here. I believe I am the only person in the world who does not like all the holidays. I miss routine, I miss work.

Wow, bad sex with Brad, and negative on holidays. I think my inner psyche is shouting "not a franc."

on living and dying fast

i went as soon as my husband was home from his travels, and could watch our son. I was lucky, i got to spend a good day with my sister, where she was awake, mostly, and alert, and she knew me.

I didn't know what to do. Terminal illness, when treatment has concluded, doesn't take a lot of time. My other sister, my one remaining sister, and my stepfather had the routine perfected. And the pride of the patient, which always came between us, wouldn't allow me a lot of hands on time.

But i couldn't just walk away, and just as i knew in my guts on Friday it was time to get up there, i woke up Saturday morning knowing exactly what i had to do. It was like i was channeling my mother. They needed someone to cook.

To be fair, my oldest sister was the best cook, the one who had the most years and most attention from mom. I was always destined for a career, so it surprises me still when i know how to do things without looking up directions. Osmosis.

It is also Thanksgiving week. Being in my mother's house, despite the circumstances, meant it was wrong not to have things around for guests to nibble on, for distraught family members to take nourishment from.

So I went to the grocery store, and i cooked. I bought thigns for sandwiches, soup, casseroles, and pie Yes. Pie.

I believe that those things, the soup and the pie, chocolate, made from scratch, were the last things on this earth my sister tasted.

My flight home took six hours. When i left her this morning, she was resting peacefully, breathing well, but sound asleep. I stroked her hair and said, I'll see you later.

I knew as i said the words, the same ones i said to my mother the last time i saw her, that i wouldn't.


She lived fast. She didn't finish high school, though she got a GED later. She married 4 times, though twice to the same man. She had three children. She leaves a grandson.

She started smoking cigarrettes across the street from the jr high when she was 12, because it was cool, and because her sister who was such a "good girl" wouldn't like it.

She had a bad cough that she saw the doctor for in June. By then the cancer was stage 4.

She was 48 years old.

She died before my plane landed in Houston.

She once said, when asked about current events, that she didn't care about that stuff. If it didn't touch her world directly, then it didn't really matter. Life is relative, you know.

I thought that way about her for many years. But I was wrong.

i was wrong.

Rest in peace, little sister.

Still trying

So i've been telling the folks at Ipowerweb, who host my website, that it hasn't been working, since March. Actually, as I review past entries, i see it's been since may. Still, i can't edit, can't upload and even though i think that i don't really care if anyone reads these little blurbs, it seems i do... if i didn't care, i'd continue to write entries and save to draft.

I'd switch to blogger save, but then anyone who clicked my domain link would not see. So frustrating. My annual fee is up for renewal in a few days.. i suppose that means they will handle it.

or not.

anyone know a good hosting service?

just more late night words

Busy week, full and stressful, just the way i like them. But I've neglected the non profit, must get the 501 c3 app filed soon, and the novel lies in dusty stacks all around the office.

I got a copy of the latest anthology in which my work appears in the mail, and even my critical editor child gave the book and the contents good marks. And i got paid.. which makes it even more of a banner week. I know, a good promoter would link her to the amazon site to order, would shamelessly pim the project, but i'm not doing that here. Maybe on the website if i ever get the isp to respond to the publishing issues. The contract is up the end of this month, so if nothing else, i'll switch then. There are just sooo many files.

A few months ago i created another blog for my second life character. i will link you here to it, but not it to you... too much crossover I think. But so far in my almost one year of SL, I've gone through three careers. And I always come back to words for solace.

Depression has been at clinical levels for about a month now. I've promised myself that if i can't break the patterns this week, i'll go in for the medication. Or take the one that i've left sealed in my bathroom vanity since 2004.

but that's another story, and these posts aren't showing up, so i'll leave this to edit another day.

yet another test

trying again... going to switch isp's

august

Reading my friend Fred always makes me want to write as well as he does. He's just journaling. I remember just journaling, but for almost 8 months now, I've abstained. In some ways, it got to feeling like those Christmas letters I quite sending about five years ago… like what I was doing was putting my life out there like I was bragging or something. Not sure why, especially when most of the people who read me lead far more interesting lives, but I guess it's the way I was brought up. You share bad things; you keep good things quiet so that the people around you who aren't feeling so good don't feel worse. It was an upbringing where the negative was always stressed, the positive taken in stride. I don't much care for that.

Right now I am sitting outside the cottage in Michigan, the view of the blue lake available over my shoulder, across the empty lot and through some trees. Not the perfect view of a bluff side cottage, but the safe view of one far enough back for mortgages. When we bought the place, banks wouldn't lend lakeside. The risk of their collateral ending up as trinkets on the beach was just too high.

The air is warm with an edge of crisp morning chill. The newscasters say it is the hottest week in Michigan so far this year. Coming from the sauna of Texas, I feel like I am breathing for the first time in a year. Maybe that is why I am finally writing.

I have bare feet. Grains of sand cling to them and make me a bit uncomfortable, like I am dirty. I am not. Except for the grains of sand.

There is a different value system at a lake cottage in Michigan and a suburb in Houston. Grains of sand on bare feet are valued here, but there, I feel under dressed if my toes aren't perfectly polished and encased in new or nearly new shoes. Part of it is beach mentality I know. Part of it is just not caring about details. Or maybe recognizing which details matter. I don't know.

Today is my last day here this year. I think that has more to do with the writing today than anything else. It took eight months away, and two weeks at the lake to want to do this, and I am afraid the next break will not have an ending.

And I ask myself, so what?

i'm having issues with uploading photos, and am now wondering if words are a problem too. If this works, i'll be back

playing with words

Recently I had a conversation with a songwriter that reminded me how easy it is to play with words and how much fun it can be. I think that many of us who consider ourselves "writers" fall into a trap of taking ourselves too seriously, trying to hard to be good and forgetting the value of telling a story, or expressing an emotion just the way we feel it.

Last week, for example, I had a few "moments" where I found myself saying, this, this is the essence of what I want to say, just remember this scene, write it down, feel it. Oh so artistic! But when I finally got back to my desk, booted up Word, (so dusty from non use!) I could only remember the place, and not the sensations. So much for writing when I get to it.

Today begins the challenge of "summer." The last day of school marks freedom for my son, but increased pressure on making time for work and writing for me. It has been this way every year since I moved my office home. Every summer I think about moving back out to the commercial district, but then I go to a meeting or conference and remember that I was at the beginning of a trend, not a follower, and that it is easier now than ever to work from a home office.

I promised myself that I would write something before my 10 o clock meeting, and it's time to leave for that now. This will place hold for that "moments" thoughts I had, and will make me get back to them. I'm going to seriously attempt daily blogging for a while, see if I can get back into a mode of discipline.

marching on

It is closer to morning on Wednesday than night on Tuesday, but I can't sleep. If my contacts didn't hurt so much, or my glasses would stay together, I'd just stay up tonight. Neither of those are the case.

I've been nagged. I have been on hiatus. hell no, i've been lazy. Playing games, playing house, playing play. Yet none of it makes me feel as though there is anything to show for the days that have passed, and i don't even have littel blog entries that i can point to for explanation. A kind of depression, a kind of head in the sand let it all go by kind of season. I've let myself detach in a way that is too much like what i always never wanted to be. The only connection to the person capable of that judment, that "what i always never wanted to be ness" comes when i can spit the words out of my way and just write.

I had a moment last week. I had a moment when the novel came alive and all the critiques i'd heard finally came together. I know now how to get all the characters in the same room together, which is the goal, they tell me, of a complex multi plotted novel. I didn't know it was suppoed to be so easy. That's why i go to workshops.

My goal in January was to write 20 flash pieces in that month, and I wrote only two. I had also a goal of having sections of the novel finished for each presentation time in workshop, and i did that. Not completely dead i suppose, but certainly in need of resuscitation.

I'll edit this tomorrow. If you read before then, all i have to say is that it is 4:09 am, and i've not slept.

Most truths are so naked that people feel sorry for them and cover them up,
at least a little bit. -Edward R. Murrow, journalist (1908-1965)

magnetic poetry

So she challenged me, with words. Not a duel so much as a "get out of your tax return right brain mode and play" kind of challenge.

here are the words:

grass,idea,rain,wood,upon,chant,fever,compose,smear,write,find

here was the result, leaving me happy to write prose.

I don't know
if it was the grass we smoked
or the fever of lust,
but when he scattered kisses
in a chant across my thighs
and let his weight down upon me,
his body hard wood,
I got the idea that I could write.

Though before
I could compose the words,
he left me
with a smear of what had once been
love.

barking at the sky

Whether it is because we are between Ellington Field and NASA, or close to the water or what, we get all sorts of interesting aircraft flying over the house. Fighter jets, hot air balloons, antique war planes--a regular air show if you want to sit out and watch it.

I'm sitting in my kitchen with my laptop, waiting for the new battery (ah) to run down so that it will stay as charged as possible for as long as possible. Then I have to plug everything in and deal with the work that waits for me. But i was reading for a few minutes with the back door opened, so the animals can come in and out and I can feel the real air. It is cloudy today, and cool, and the air is soft. Cool, here, of course means it's in the low 80s.

All of a sudden, Scout started barking. She always barks at the doorbell or when strangers approach, and we've had all sorts of odd break ins in the neighborhood lately...so I was a little concerned...this is the back of the house, no service people due, and she wasn't moving like there was someone at the gate.

I looked out, and realized she was barking at the sky.

A blimp, SANYO across its side, flying so close it made her feel insecure. I tried calming her, but she kept barking until it was out of sight.

Something about it makes me feel like I am doing just that, futile though it is. Just barking at the sky.


edit: make that a Lightship.