Groceries.

Over the season’s last plums, mounds of asian pears and pebble-skinned avocados, I overheard him speaking to a grocery clerk.

Could you help me find cashews? My wife does this so much better than I do.

He was an older man, tall despite stooped shoulders. He wore a straw garden hat. Khakis with sneakers. A kind smile.

The small grocery store was more crowded than usual and the gentleman looked overwhelmed. He steps were slow and cautious. His timid energy contradicted the cheerful tunes blaring on the speaker system (she wore an itsy bitsy teeny weeny), the customers rushing to maneuver carts around each other, the precariously stacked piles of food.

We crossed paths several times as we each made our way through the store. He asked forgiveness from anyone in his vicinity for getting in their way. He shook a plastic produce bag, struggling to get it open. His veined hands trembled. I wanted to know how this story–Elderly Man Navigates the Grocery Store–would end. Thoughts of him and his wife swirled in with my mental grocery list. Where was his wife? Greek yogurt. Had she died? Whole wheat or french bread? Was she sick at home? Shoot, forgot the carrots for mushroom barley soup. Was she no longer mobile? We’re almost out of string cheese. Did his wife sit by the swimming pool in a yellow polka dot bikini a long time ago?  Jumbo brown eggs versus cage-free white. Does she continue to sunbathe in his mind?

Every person, a story. Every moment, a story.

I wanted to tell him that sometimes it helps to lick a finger and separate the thin leaves of sticky plastic produce bags. I wanted to put my hand on his. I wanted to tell him: you’re doing a great job. You’re beautiful, you in your straw hat at the market, and everything will be okay. But I did not tell him anything.

Let me tell you: you’re doing a great job. You’re beautiful and everything will be okay.

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Today’s poem is for moments (and lives) that pass by us unnoticed.

Splitting an Order by Ted Kooser

I like to watch an old man cutting a sandwich in half…

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And one more. A surprise because aging is always comes as a surprise, louder and more insistent than kazoos at a surprise party.

Jane by George Bilgere

Jane, the old woman across the street…

Joie de vivre.

When I left the movie theater on Sunday, I felt like a flute of champagne: fizzed, giddy, and ready to spill. I’d been given a few unexpected hours to myself– my in-laws were in town and S took his parents and the angel to see our local, underwhelming sights (mall, beach). I was glad for those hours because it was an opportunity to get Stuff done: errands, a scroll-length grocery list, laundry, and a closet patiently waiting for over a year to be cleaned.

I drove to the library and returned a few books. Item number 1, check. Then I had a sudden crazy thought: I don’t want to spend my day doing errands. I don’t want to spend my day trying to keep life neat, orderly, and manageable for us so I can say at the end of the day look how much I got done…my place at our table is justified. I wanted to throw the list out the window and go to the movies. And that’s exactly what I did.

The movie I selected was Midnight in Paris and I relished every second. A struggling writer! In Paris! Exhibiting antisocial tendencies! Hemingway, the Fitzgeralds, Gertrude Stein, T.S. Elliott all in one movie? Yes. Forgive my momentary lapse into Siskel and Ebertland, but it was a rollicking, frolicking, delightful few hours. So cheerful was the mood in the theater that when the woman sitting a few seats away from me creeped by to get to the restroom, she touched my knee as she passed and we shared a conspiratorial grin. Gertrude Stein, played by Kathy Bates, reminds us that the job of an artist is to help people forget their mortality. If this is true, then Woody Allen is back in my good graces because less than ten minutes into the film, I’d completely forgotten my tremor and angst. Thank you, Woody, for a job well done; for the giggles, chuckles, and grins. Thanks for the writing advice, the argument against nostalgia, and Owen Wilson’s nose.

Until yesterday, I’d never tossed a carefully written To-Do list out the window (well, actually, I tucked it in my purse for later). I had never brushed the crumbs of responsibility off my hands with such recklessness. I had never, in all my life, gone to see a movie in the theater by myself. The grocery store will wait! I cried, pounding the steering wheel with a gleeful fist. It felt good to be wild, but I was also a bit disturbed by how timid my idea of carefree abandon has become: popcorn and diet coke at a matinee.

I need to shake things up a bit, to unfurl that tightly coiled devotion to domestic order. I need to pour the thick finger-licking sauce of insouciance on the structure of my days. Maybe I’ll leave the beds unmade one of these days, even if the thought of disheveled beds is simultaneously unsettling and thrilling. Maybe I’ll swizzle-stick the evening by serving dinner at the wild and wacky hour of 8 p.m. I know; this is crazy talk and I should restrain myself before the situation gets out of control. But it might be too late to stop the tornado…I sense a laundry strike, red hair, and a tattoo coming on.

 Which act of daring/abandon/irresponsibility have you recently committed? Which small act of liberation will set you free this summer?

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Bukowski is a model citizen when learning how to track mudprints through tidy and proper days.

Today’s Poem: (click link to read entirely)

My Doom Smiles at Me by Charles Bukowski

there’s no other way:

8 or 10 poems a

night.

in the sink

behind me are dishes…

Listen.

The following may or may not be fiction…

At nine in the morning, the housewife opened the door to the piano tuner.  She was annoyed by his too-loud hello and his eager smile. He was a paunchy man in his forties with small, muddy eyes and hands that didn’t look like they belonged on a piano. He wore rumpled khakis and a faded collared shirt that looked one sneeze away from popping a button. Forgettable. She was no vision of beauty either and she knew it. She felt beige and ugly in worn jeans and messy hair. Who needs to look good for making beds and scrubbing toilets, she often wondered.

The piano tuner settled down to his work quickly. She felt uncomfortable with workmen or strangers in the house when she was alone, so she was happy to leave him to his work and get busy with her own chores to the occasional twang of a pulled chord as background noise. Less than half an hour later, he started to quiet down and plucked only a few more keys. Suddenly, he began to play. Really play.

He played one piece after another, articulating complicated and demanding notes.  The house filled with music; now gentle, now forceful. Each note felt charged with abandon and seemed to come from a deep, secret cave in the body. Afraid to drop the stack of hot dishes she was pulling from the still-steaming dishwasher, the housewife put the dishes down on the counter and stood listening at the center of the small kitchen. Everything else seemed to fall away like sheets hung to dry taken by the wind: the oil splattered on the backsplash, the stamp of heat on her fingertips, the embarrassing vinegar question that played in her head like a conveyor belt (this is it?), and time itself. How long did he play? He seemed to have fallen into the music and was now losing himself, going deeper and deeper with the flame of each note lighting his way. A religious woman would have fallen to her knees to thank God for this unexpected, unimaginable gift. Instead, she closed her eyes and wondered, Who does this happen to? Who?

When the piano tuner finished playing, the housewife lingered in the new silence for another moment and entered the living room. The piano tuner carefully closed the piano cover, took his payment, and gathered his tools quickly and politely. His eager smile was no longer annoying. The housewife closed the door behind him and continued with her chores, silently folding clothes, changing sheets, and scouring the tub. But the drab day felt sweeter, like finding a wild strawberry in the weeds; surprising and so bright.

Is it only pain that brings us to our knees? Have you ever been stunned silent by something beautiful and unexpected?

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Today’s Poem: (click on link to read entire poem)

Romantics by Lisel Mueller

Johannes Brahms and

               Clara Schumann

The modern biographers worry

“how far it went”, their tender friendship…

I am woman, hear me roar.

(Or, Stories of a conflicted feminist.)

My daughter is on spring break, so the hands of my clock revolve around her. It makes me happy; long stretches of time to be together and choose our day. These days feel special, like a rare treat of cotton candy. But I do feel a twinge for neglecting my other baby: writing.

Right now, I’m having difficulty carving out a little nut of time for writing.

Last night, S and I carried large pieces of furniture. We worked together as a team but I think I had greater success with the pushing, pulling, and directing than with the heavy lifting.

Two times this month I burned dinner because I was distracted with my writing.

My time is available to me after I have met their needs.

There needs to be a hot dinner on the table every evening.

Today, the laundry hamper is overflowing like hot lava.

Today, laundry wins and there will be no writing.

Girls and women eventually learn this truth. Have a man and a child? Laundry always wins.

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Today’s Poem: (click link to read entire poem)

by Tess Gallagher

I Stop Writing the Poem

to fold the clothes. No matter who lives

or who dies, I’m still a woman…

Lemon scented nightmares.

I hate housework. You make the beds, you wash the dishes and six months later you have to start all over again. -Joan Rivers

A few nights ago,  I fell asleep with one hand on S’s newly defined chest (thanks P90X) and the other hand clutching the pillow with a giant fistful of aggression.

Maybe it was all the images and radiation coming out of Japan.

Maybe it was watching Piece of Work with S for the past two nights. Dirty mouths, dirty jokes, and dirty aging. Joan Rivers is hysterical. Literally. She makes us laugh to tears, and she has a manic need bordering on hysteria to remain in the spotlight, loved by her audiences until her dying breath. It’s excruciating and fascinating to watch Rivers fold and unfold like worn paper, and the images are as disturbing as her plastic surgery.

Maybe it’s the feeling I always have of standing outside of the inner circle. Given two wheels, I’m always the third; the spare tire on an 18 wheeler. I can’t figure out my perpetual sense of otherness, my nose always pressed to the window of a warm bakery of belonging.

Maybe it was a friend telling me that I’m spreading the panic and fear a little too thickly around here lately. I took in the feedback but it went straight to my heart. Because I’m not just panicky and afraid, I’m also sensitive. A winning trifecta.

These were the images and feelings that tucked me into bed that night, and I had nightmares all night long. Violent, turbulent nightmares that inspired the cliched toss, turn, and wrestle with the sheet. Upon waking, I was dazed and shaken. I think the dog was shaken by my tremorous night too, because when I let her out in the morning, she gave me a worried look. But what do I know, I’m sensitive,  so I’m probably just reading too much into it. It’s just as likely she wanted me to hurry up with her damn breakfast of champions.

I can only recall a single nightmare, which featured a violent, physical fight with another woman. She looked like a combination of a female currently in my life, and a lady truck driver with thick, tanned forearms, offensive lipstick, and gold jewelry. Perhaps my inner female Charles Bukowski coming out to play. Let’s call her Charlee.

The images remain vivid: my house is strung with criss-crossed clotheslines like spiderwebs, clothespins clipping perfectly matched socks, hanging like Chinese lanterns. I’m angry because Charlee has brought someone to live in my house- a chick with dark curly hair who’s hiding in my bedroom and yells “surprise” when I go upstairs. She gives off a friendly foreign exhange student vibe, but I’m livid that now I’ll have one more responsibility to take care of. Charlee and I start shrieking at each other–I’m talking pulsing vein in the neck yelling- and we end up on the stairs pulling hair, kicking, and pushing. Typical girl fight.

The volume continues to rise and Charlee starts cursing at me: “You marathon runner! Marathon runner!”. This is the worst she comes up with, and instead of quizzically cocking my head to the side as I would in rational daylight, her words infuriate me. So I respond by calling her a, well, it’s like the word “can’t” but with a u instead of an a. No apostrophe. “You cant! You cant! You cant!“.

Anyone know a good analyst?  So much material in that one little dream, loamy and writhing with earthworms. It won’t cost me $150 on the couch to figure out that Charlee’s epithet of choice is a stinging reminder and a painful mocking of things I’ve wanted to do, but couldn’t and can’t, because of CF. Cant- there’s that dirty little word again.

I wonder how Joan Rivers would analyze this dream. In her 900 years of living, she’s gained some wisdom, and might have a suggestion or two to share. Learn how to punch, is the first thing she’d say. She’d suggest taking a break from laundry, or better yet, tell me to hire a maid.  There’s no such thing as too much Xanax, she’d confide, urging me to secure a prescription immediately. And then she’d divulge her best housekeeping gem, a secret she’s used for years. The most effective way to scrub the nightmares to the bone, sweep the monsters into morning sun, and offer warm, honeyed milk to the wild, worry jumbled nights, is to use all those little shits to make others smile, laugh, release a tear or two, and forget their own nightmares, even if only momentarily. Works like a charm, much more useful than potpourri stashed in the underwear drawer.

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It’s like this.

Today’s Poem: (click on link to read entire poem)

Early Sunday Morning by Edward Hirsch

I used to mock my father and his chums…