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
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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.

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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.

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* 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.)

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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.

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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.

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