on a break (Winter Break)

It was so rude of Big A to cheerily text me "one more year" on New Year's day and then explain that in 2025 Nu would be off to college. I swear he has been dreaming about child-free living (precisely what I dread) for a long time now.

But we're on Winter Break at work and Nu had all-day plans with friends, so Big A and I took off by ourselves. We walked to the Breslin Center to watch the MSU women's basketball team post a 93-57 win over Rutgers, detoured to the horticultural gardens to see the orchid show, and then ended up at our favorite Sushi place before walking home to Huck and Max with our leftovers. I have to admit it was pretty nice and I can see us doing some version of this for a few decades after the kids are independent. 

Pic: I gave Big A matching Spartan hats at Christmas and promised to go to a game with him (he loves basketball). He got us tickets for a women's game because he knew I'd want to support the women's team. 

other lives

I've been immersing myself in a ton of fiction lately--anything to take my mind off the news. It has been pretty eclectic. I started the week with a reread of Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49--I have a faint memory of reading it for an undergrad American Litt. class. I wonder if I skimmed it, and how many of the references I got back then. It's stuck in my memory as a book with several weird sexual situations. 

I've since moved on to what I took to be a romance set in Havana (free on my Kindle). I thought I'd be irritated with its anti-revolutionary stance since the first chapter was about some Batista cronies fleeing, but it actually goes back and forth in time and among various classes quite well. 

Next up is going to be Curtis Sittenfeld's Romantic Comedy, which I found at the thrift store for a dollar and forty-nine cents when I went looking for old vases. I've always enjoyed Sittenfeld but recently she mentioned someone I know in her acknowledgments and that has cemented her standing in my reading lists forever.

I'm also watching shows I used to watch in the 90s (Frasier, Felicity); they're kind of calming and help me fall asleep. 

Pic: I was looking forward to taking pictures of the moon this evening, but it's suddenly quite cloudy.

Here's a picture of a squirrel looking straight at me instead. 

I am not alone

I live for the broad roofs

of wide skies lately
I'm thinking of making up 

my own cosmology

a sister sun, a mother moon
I'll urge on a webbing,

make belonging a whole world 
build like an animal

trusting one, another, and another 

where all of us are lost
--and it's okay and it's expected 

as everywhere is safe

kindness a patina to shine on  

the knots of this world

this goddamned beautiful world 

winding down slowly

surely, but still with so many

of those we love here...

still here, so I release to air

the ones who 

have been handfuls of sawdust

and ash

to live on as kin and stardust

everywhere 

_______________________________

Pic: Sunset today over the Maple on my way home. 

bleak week

I'm having a tough time this week. It's not that I can't go on... I am. But I keep feeling like I can't... On the surface, things look normal, but it feels like my sense of reality is being eroded--like the sandy shore slipping from under my feet in a dream yesterday. 

What's it all for if I can see the horror every day and am absolutely incapable of saving a single child? The amputations and caesareans without anesthesia, the firing at U.N. food distribution camps, the six-year-old calling emergency services trapped in a car full of her dead family... This is truly the stuff of horror.  And yet.... yet again... The U.S. has vetoed a ceasefire in Gaza for the third time. A ceasefire! 

BOL's cat who saw them through undergrad and grad school died and I want to be there to support them the way they supported me when Scout was dying... But also, it brought me back to that month of slowly losing Scout... the dread of every day. I'm surprised that it will be a whole year without my darling in just about two months.

Pic: E.D. Wilson's poem "My Phone is Full of Cute Cats and Dead Children."

The Sun: a poem and a pic

Mary Oliver: The Sun
Have you ever seen
anything
in your life
more wonderful
than the way the sun,
every evening,
relaxed and easy,
floats toward the horizon
and into the clouds or the hills,
or the rumpled sea,
and is gone–
and how it slides again
out of the blackness,
every morning,
on the other side of the world,
like a red flower...

Full poem here: http://www.phys.unm.edu/~tw/fas/yits/archive/oliver_thesun.html 

Pic: Sunset on my way home. Despite everything, the beauty of our world is just so breathtaking...

updates

Good:  Big A's test results came back--nothing terrifying to report.
But:     The original symptoms persist. 

*

Good:  My stretch of overwork and late work evenings is mostly over.
But:     This week I scheduled two more late work evenings for March.

*
Good:   Participating in a teach-in panel on Gaza with the college YDSA in mid-March.

But:      Worrying about bothsideism from fellow-panelists.

*
[Pic] 

Good:    Big A, Huck, Max, and me on a post-dinner walk with a fabulous sunset ahead of us.
 But:     Don't look too closely at Big A's left hand. Ha.

some backstory... and a Boss Day

Some backstory to yesterday's poem.

Our grandmothers were first cousins, so Sunil was a distant cousin--although that doesn't matter much in the  Indian context (something that's unclear in the poem, and I should work on it). Our grandmothers were as close as sisters--closer, as they had no sisters and lived in a big joint-family mansion where they had private tutors--so they were together all the time. They were really close--they always talked about how they breastfed each other's babies so their babies would feel like siblings and think of them (their aunts) as mothers too.  

It didn't work out exactly like that. My mother would go to her aunt when she fought with her mom, but later there was some family drama (our grandmothers fell out in their sixties) and mystery (things people won't talk about). Stuff that came out as what Nicole rightly called "mixed things." Nance found the ending surprising--something else I'm working on. I was trying to express how it felt to have someone in my peer group die... like the beginning of the end. As I mentioned in a comment to StephLove, Sunil died of a heart attack, so that feels as though our bodies are going. 

Pic: It's the puppies' Boss Day! Huck and Max got new lick pads and love them. 

(It's not their actual Boss Day, but it was too bewildering for Scout and Huck when we celebrated them individually, so we picked the 18th of the month to celebrate a puppy Boss Day. Max's "smile" cracks me up.)