The Speeches

I cannot
speak about this morning
I could not
speak this morning.

Black with bliss and
alone is early day.
Sky slides to light
after that I cannot talk.

Promises are spatial
words partial, outbid,
like unsexed spittle.
Words dare not bend.

Could I be more surprised
if the faces of my children
had changed at end of night--
I cannot talk.

I cannot.
Some words have wings
monstrous and clamorous,
wild as swans

that alight, fly awry
If I had no need for words
for all words to wait, watch
I would never want at all.
_

Party, Pythons

Partied really late last night. I got a cheek-ache from long stretches of laughing while playing "Dialogue." (Making fantastically fake dialogue to conversations too far away to hear. It's fairly rude, but Big A always does his in a British accent so it sounds posh.)

N drove us home--we should go back and retrieve the Mini from his house on "the only hill in Ohio" sometime today.

Although, there's not much of "today" left; I got out of bed at 2:30. Big A had taken the kids out to breakfast and then haircuts, leaving me free to finish reading my book in bed, take a shower, and yearn for my family. (Usually they're around so much, I never get to yearn.)

I haven't seen Big A since early this morning when we woke up with match-y nightmares. Big A's was about a python that had spawned a baby python on his alarm clock on the nightstand. Mine was about a big, rubbery, lipstick-y mouth called an "a-poco-lips." Get it? Get it? My subconscious makes jokes that are as stoopid as my awake jokes are!

_

Plan B: Use Wills

Did the grown up thing and signed our wills today. Then I was in a bad mood for the rest of the day. All our year-long vacillations on the appropriate/possible/perfect guardians for our kids in case both of us should die together were missing. I already feel the need to rewrite it.

For now we're sticking with Plan A, which is to not die until the kids are old enough. And given how I still need my parents all the time, that could be a long, long time.

In the meantime, Baby A's decided that dinner is Banana Stew and Apple Fries. Li'l A's look of panic (we've been letting Baby A's imagination dictate the form of dinner for a few weeks) will keep me in heart-healthy guffaws for a while and the hippy healthfulness of the menu should only help.
_

Lilt (675 S)

The sun is alone
again, today
but grown warm

Bruised clouds rupture
smiles splinter,
meekly multiply.

No secondhand details today
I owe children memories
of bees, honey, and music
_

Winter Weather Advisory (Part 7)

You call me down

you calm me down

you call me down

I fall down

The weight of nights

the height of days

earth is garden

all warmth migrates

Rain ripens:

material, nonsense.

I catch my breath,

I cut my eyes. Cry.

_

Song Soup

Dinnertime. I have half an hour to make the soup Baby A and I made up in the car this morning in the ten minutes between Mills Lawn Elementary, where we dropped off Li'l A, and Baby A's preschool.

This soup has beans (red and black) and veggies (I used frozen gumbo ingredients) and potato dumplings (I used pillowy gnocchi from a package) and is finished off with the grated manchego from earlier this week and a handful of leftover parsley and oregano (distressed, humiliated, and super stressed from my kids mishandling them).

Everything was going well until Li'l A said with a teasing, big-sibling smirk, that soup would taste better with Melody (Baby A's tattered stuffed mallard) in it. I was so shocked I dropped to my knees in front of Baby A who promptly clutched Melody to her chest and burst into loud and (overly) lavish tears.

To teach Li'l A a lesson, we give Melody a special hug and a treat. Then we snatch up Li'l A's favorite song (The Killers, Human*) out of the air as it plays on Pandora, ball it up, and drop it into the soup pot.

Dinner was delicious.

_

* I love Li'l A's interpretation of the lyrics "Are we human or are we dancer(s)?"--It's a song about Destiny, he told me. "Are we human or do we have to follow a routine like dancers?" (Let the record show that he is a "Bollywood Dancer" in the school production of Jungle Book, and is all too familiar with being expected to follow "the steps.")

(Which reminds me that when my Amma asked Kindergarten me if I knew "my steps" for the Christmas play at schooI, I promptly nodded, fetched my sketchbook and drew her a set of stairs. Also, after that particularly spectacular misunderstanding, I fell asleep on stage and forgot to make my offering--I was a "flowergirl"--to the blessed baby Jesus.)

_

Franzen's Freedom

Over here, we've been reading Jonathan Franzen's latest, Freedom. It's the first novel Big A's read before me (ever). I gave it to him over the new year and have been patiently waiting (because it's the polite thing to do) for him to finish it, because it was, after all, his present. And already, given that it was Jonathan Franzen, there were not a few moments of marital teasing about the self-servingness of this present. Big A even asked if I got him the book merely because there was a bird on the cover, because I do like things with birds on them (kinda like this), although I hadn't (honestly!) noticed this particular one.

It was hard reading the book after Big A. For one thing, I had to stop myself from asking him about the end all the time (and haven't mostly because he works a bunch of nights this week). And also (and this is so embarrassing), I kept getting jealous of all the people in the book. I kept wondering if he found them interesting. Since we met, it's fair to say Big A hasn't spent this much time with people who aren't me, learning really emotional and intimate details about them. In a way, I'm glad he tends to non-fiction for the most part.

And there were all sorts of people who had names of people we knew; this included the names of my step-mom-in-law and Baby A's middle name. And then everyone in the book turned out to be unlikeable. And everything kept getting solved by death. Even the person with Baby A's middle name wiped out in a car accident. And the women were all clingy and weirdly submissive. They really had to be good little Griseldas about waiting, suffering, and repenting.

But Franzen does write efficiently, photographically, in that choosy New Yorker-ish time-and-space specific way. And wonderful too, the flash of recognition coming from a sprawl of words stretching self-indulgently and contemporaneously all the way into Obama-America.

Big Freeze

Today is the kind of day that's wrong and abhorred. Icy cold.  And raining. The nerve of Ohio. At least I didn’t have to carry toddlers and hurry kids into school. (I use the plural although I have only one of each.)

Why is my university working on President’s Day? No idea. It took twenty minutes to separate from my pajama-ed loves and say goodbye this morning.

An extra two minutes to wonder if I could claim President’s Day was a kind of a religious observance for me. Big A helpfully pointed out that I’m not even American.

They’re making Star Wars pancakes. Bums.

_

A tiny slip of a thing

Over brunch this morning with the inlaws, Big A let slip that his dad and step mom talked to him about my weight and “disordered eating.” This isn’t the first time they’ve done that. For the record, I am fine. I hover around the underweight end of the B.M.I. scale, but I’m South Asian, with inadequate/tiny bone structure, so I’m plenty fleshy, and it works out.

While my inlaws looked mortified, I lunged for Big A. I meant to be playful, but I ended up body slamming him too hard. Accident!

But hey, if you’re going to infantilize me, maybe you ought to be prepared to deal with the immature consequences too.

 

Franco-phile

Apropos of not much, I’m getting really fond of James Franco because I hear he’s an English Litt. person. OMG. Why did no one tell me this before!? 

It’s gotten to a point where I’m imputing tongue-in-cheek intentions to many of his less-than-stellar roles. I learned on Terry Gross that he’s on General Hospital?! 

And if you go to the Fresh Air website here, you can read a short story from his upcoming collection Palo Alto. I think it's good, but at this point, there's no telling if that's a professional opinion or a personal one.

-

NuNu

Downstairs

talk turns into tunes

songs ache

words are taken

"Happy Holidays!

Happy Holidays!

I’m so happy!

Happy Holidays!"

(It‘s still February.)

Upstairs, she breathes

me kisses and begs

for “Mental Mints.”

To be the best Mama in the world,

you must be willing to share Altoids.

_

Mothers

Sometimes,

every woman is my mother,

every one of you is my child.

None of the usual explanations

make sense.

Every thing ends.

You grow out of my chest

I live in your womb.

I lie in your blood.

Only stones separate

from rice

at the parting of fingers

The years pass over us.

We are hay

(who were once flowers)

_

Every Thing (another valentine)

Mornings are dishes, dishes,
then decisions.

But one filled-up tank of gas,
these circles of things we say

then the Maharajahs themselves
could not be this happy.

Like squirrels giddy as leaves in a breeze
(So far: We = Pharaohs = squirrels = leaves)

So tracked, there is no fairytale,
just an adventure spun for kids like us

(like ours)

lying thick on shores of lullabies
versed in waves and sighs ellipses.

_

Multipurposing Mozart

My favorite moment was when Li’l A poked around in the program and told me that “Wolf-Gang” would be a terrifying name for a crime syndicate.

And yes, the concert was beautiful. Libby Larsen’s “Parachute Dancers” was menacing fun, and the Mozart (39) was both playful and plaintive. It made me a little teary from happiness that these accidental assemblies of notes exist to revisit.

And yes, dressed up in a blazer and on Tylenol for his neck sprain, Li'l A was the perfect philharmonic companion—the street musician we always pay our respects to (cash, natch) gave him a lift of the eyebrow and called him "Daddy-O" to the amusement of all the older patrons waiting to get into the Schuster Center.

But no, I didn't have an answer for why we paid two dollars to the man outside and hundreds for Neal Gittleman's crew inside. Is it because the musicians inside have to share?

_

Babu Ahtah (Don't Wake Daddy!)

The first time my mom visited me in the U.S. and saw a board game called Don't Wake Daddy at the store, she squealed in disbelieving delight. Her dad who worked late as a telegraph master (Telegrams, remember them? When people counted words before Twitter?) slept late on the weekends. And if she or her four other equally rowdy siblings woke their father, there were threats and thrashings.

Inevitably almost, their reality spawned a game they liked to call Babu Ahtah (the Dad game), which consisted of one of them playing the dad and the others trying to play without waking him, but ended with the "dad" waking up and beating them all up to loud, playacting yelps.

And unfailingly (and somewhat hilariously) meta is the way my mom says that most of these games were so noisy that their dad--their real dad--would wake up to thrash them. Really thrash them.

Li'l A loves to hear that story, now that he's not so freaked out by that little detail about kids getting beaten as he used to be when he first heard it. And I think about my mom and her sibs all of whom in that particular time and and in that particular milieu expected to get beaten for bad behavior. And I choke on the extra love that comes from thinking of my amma as a vulnerable child and knowing how, when she became a young mom, that sad cycle of abuse was broken. 

_

Wake up call

A long time ago, I had a dream.

Li'l A is a toddler crawling through one of those giant mall play tubes. He doesn't walk yet, and he seems to be having a good time. I used to call him "Aachu" back then--a mispronunciation of his name and also a mispronunciation of the Telugu word for love "Aasa." Kind of like how "Holla" is neither "holler" nor "hola"--but actively alludes to both. But, I digress.

It starts to storm, getting both late and dark at the same time; I start to call Aachu, but he doesn't show and I'm immediately scared and frantic. Then in that weird third-person narrativity of dreams, I can see him inside the tube and realize that he's crawling away from the sound of my voice as fast as he can. And not merely to be naughty or prolong playtime but because my voice terrifies him. This was at a time when his GERD-y refusals to eat and my Indian mom instincts to overfeed as much as/whenever possible were at the point of worst conflict.

I cannot begin to describe how sad and disappointing it was to see his fear. And I cannot begin to quantify how much I backed away from my pig-headedness about eating right away.

I think I remembered my dream because I heard Amy Chua (the infamous tiger mom) on the radio this morning and she described how her daughter would yell that she hated her. I'll admit to being the mom who expects all of Li'l A's grades to be As, to asking what happened to the missing two points on a quiz that garnered 98/100.

But I wouldn't be able to deal with my kids not loving me.

_

Dressing in the Dark

One day--like most days--I literally got dressed in the dark; pulling on a pair of black tights that were more like disco tights in their shine value. Yi! Their inappropriateness for standing in front of a class of undergraduates!

The kids overheard me grumbling about it to my MIL and now they love to cock their heads at an assessing angle and ask me if I got dressed in the dark when I come downstairs. The little critics.

But after nearly ten years in this country, I just discovered trouser socks, and my cute shoes are back in winter rotation. Yay! And now I can add that to my list of immigrant discoveries about dressing appropriately for the weather.

Stockings! Yay! Saying no to summer dresses when it's bright and sunny out (but still only about 35 degrees)! Boo! Finding out that I'd need to pick "tan" over "nude" leggings! Yay! Finding out tights snag and run. Boo! Keeping a black Sharpie in my desk drawer to deal with that crisis! Yay!

_

Drama Mama

Despite being the world's most terrible actress, I like to act sometimes.

Big A and Li'l A roll their eyes, my students delight in agreeing with me when I tell them my acting sucks. But Baby A--ah--she can't get enough.

My encore repertoire includes being the Jack in the box who surprises Buddy the Elf (played by Baby A) in the movie Elf, and the Woody who needs rescuing by Buzz Lightyear in Toy Story 2. Baby A goes climb, climb, climb and then yells "To himbee and beyond!" and rescues me.

Although much of the gender neutrality above may change. While I made dinner yesterday, she told me: "Now I'm Woody, Mama. He's a cowboy." As the words left her mouth, I could almost see her taste and parse that word. The expected amendment was delivered cheerily: "I'll be Jessie--she's a cowGIRL!"

:'<

_

Gone!

The public radio station, literally down the street, is having an fundraising auction and I wanted to donate

(a) a five-course Indian meal cooked (by me)

and

(b) a poem written (by me) on any thing or person the successful bidder specified.

The station manager suggested that I assign a monetary value that would make it easier for them to advertise the "goods."

The Indian meal was fairly simple to calculate--materials plus time compared to the going rate at a restaurant. I asked Big A for help with figuring out how much the poem would "cost." He thinks the going rate per poem is about a nickel and sometimes a glass of wine and/or applause.

He's probably right.

_

Happy Year of the Rabbit! (Do rabbits sleep a lot?)

Dinner out at the chinese restaurant we usually go to with the grandparents. This time it is a big bunch of neighbors and friends, and it is to celebrate the Year of the Rabbit. My favorite six-year-old tells the server, Gung Hay Fat Choy! He tells her that he's from Dayton, OH. Oh, I am torn.

Because we're cool and stuff and we want to go see more live music and stuff, we'd decided to go check out a band we'd heard about and stuff.

So we dropped off the kids at their grandparents and stuff.

Bored yet? Might as well be. We got home and decided to take a "nap." And didn't wake up until hours after the band went home.

_

Martian sends

My mind clutches a phrase, rubbing it raw in its sweaty fist. I'm awake now and realize that this nugget-- "ColdMartin Locksheen"--is merely an unappetizing and useless amalgam of NPR, Pandora, and Jezebel.com.

Odd the way this mind grabs the surprise appearance of Coldplay, a.k.a. Chris Martin, on the Phoenix station on Pandora, news of tech giant Lockheed Martin's U.S. Army contract, and Charlie (son of Martin) Sheen(anigans) to produce some Palin-esque puffery.

Although this is the closest I've come to deciphering how a poem happens--starting out with a phrase that surely expands through all the hours of rote existence.

_

Co-opt

After watching Exit through the Gift Shop with us, Li'l A turned into a rebel overnight. And now they're offering a class in "Urban Art" (helpfully subtitled "Graffitti") at his elementary school.

And he's taking it.

_

In the hea(r)t of the SnOw-M-G

We have no heat, but we have two Pillow Pets (TM). The bumblebee ("Bumby") and the ladybug ("Lady, I Love You"--yes, Baby A could name horses or ice cream flavors soon.)

Big A thinks we should get the unicorn. He leans across the table to claim in a stage-whisper that we could name it "Horny."

He's not in middle school. Swear.

_

Next Up: Video?

Big A and I talked all weekend long (remainders from my women's studies class) about how how words associated with privilege cannot be used as insults. i.e. women, people of color, poor people can be insulted on the basis of their group membership in a marginalized/minority group e.g.: bitch/W.O.G./cracker, but it is impossible to insult the dominant group on the basis of their group identity. With the notable exception--and I wonder how hoary this tradition is--of "dick." ("Prick" carries with it the implication of not being sufficiently allied with the dominant group--too tiny, not big enough.)

Looks like we're going to have to write that incipient book of feminist philosophy. Because we then decided that "Quit Dicking Around" would be an awesome title.

_