Scout

In order to further test my sanity, we're considering on a waitlist for a puppy.  S/he will be named "Scout." (More n. than v. That is to say, more To Kill a Mockingbird than scouting.)

We're already playacting all the silly stuff that Scout will do and panting down the phone pretending to be Scout. No prizes for guessing who the silly beings truly are.

Zadie Smith reverberates in my brain:

It should be noted that an equally dangerous joy, for many people, is the dog or the cat, relationships with animals being in some sense intensified by guaranteed finitude. You hope to leave this world before your child. You are quite certain your dog will leave before you do. Joy is such a human madness.

_

Tender Obsession

(Tame Impala: Feels Like We Only Go Backwards)
_

Fullness

The day begins
hard, snow-palsied
I contain multitudes
on a to-do list

I get to the office
crank the door
and call my mother
talking to myself

Like the oceans
At 8:30
Regretfulness.
Full of regret.

_

Eulogy

Conscience of the streets
assembled newsheets
stacked against sky

this morning's miracle
blazing tree, burning bush
a touch of frost, a trick of sun.

Before that I stand at the table
some things in my hand
somehow in Chicago

the children call me to them
give me hugs, cheer me up
I apologize to Shirley Chambers

Sorry. So sorry. Sorry.

_

Commit

Like pilgrims
supine, weeping

clothes are planted
like stations

And also like
excuses and bruises

The saddest story
ends again and again

_

Get This (Don't Get That)

It bugs me when people claim that vaccines are controversial or a conspiracy--so it was particularly pleasant to listen to Garrison Keillor sonorously intone Adam Possner's poem as I was taking the kids to school. My favorite moment was when I was trying to explain what Possner meant by the "non-stick headstone" to the 13-year-old, and he was all, "It's Ok, mom--I get it." I gave him a noogie instead of the kiss I wanted to give him.

Myth Dispelled

by Adam Possner

The flu vaccine cannot
give you the flu, I tell him.
It's dead virus, there's
nothing alive about it.
It can't make you sick.
That's a myth.
But if we bury it in
the grassy knoll
of your shoulder,
an inch under the stratum
corneum, as sanctioned by
your signature
in a white-coated ceremony
presided over by
my medical assistant
and then mark the grave
with a temporary
non-stick headstone,
the trivalent spirit
of that vaccine
has a 70 to 90 percent
chance of warding off
the Evil One,
and that's the God's
honest truth.

Power

Squirmy Nu and her dad jockeying for position on the couch:



A: Stay still. You have to listen to me, don't you know I'm the boss?

Nu: YOU stay still. Don't you know that I'm the princess?

_

So... This is Embarrassing

A isn't supposed to drive because of his shattered wrist, and he's out of work while we figure out if he'll recover, but he had to sit in on med student admission interviews nevertheless, so I was driving him to Saginaw. We almost made it to the hospital (after being pulled over once for speeding--but no ticket) when he noticed that I was trying hard to catch my breath but wasn't able to and I noticed that I was getting light headed, nauseous, and headachy in the process.

So A hopped into the driver's seat and we got to the hospital where the interviews were--except A and the kids ended up accompanying me to the E.R. Where it was discovered (just as I had insisted all along), that there was absolutely nothing wrong with me. I got handed an official diagnosis of acute anxiety and prescription for Xanax--making me the most embarrassingly 1950's cliche of a doctor's wife ever.

Yet--it was scary. And comes at a time when we can least afford additional medical bills. And once I started crying--progressing quite rapidly to sobbing and then wailing--it was impossible to stop even as I was ashamed of myself and trying to stop so the kids needn't see me so completely lose control.

It's been a tough six months or so--two new jobs, all four of us at new schools, and moving to a different state where the skies are frequently grey, not to mention all the other doofus antics we've been up to. But more than the every day stressors, I can't explain how consumed I've been by the Newtown shootings and the New Delhi rape. Every time the kids aren't around, this is what I end up talking to A or friends about. And I took this international by calling my sister at work and my mom first thing in the morning to worry even about things as quotidian as taking my kids to school. And I know it's unhealthy--in the sense that it isn't good for me. But not being able to stop thinking about eleven bullets in a five-year-old's body or wondering how someone can be raped so violently that it requires that their small intestines be surgically removed is probably mentally unhygienic as well.

And that's just where I am.

_

The Book Kids of Mumbai

This made me nostalgic although it is about Mumbai and not Chennai, and although it is about pirated books and not books on resale, and although it is about children on the street rather than quite literate adults. It reminded me of my friends and fellow English grad students Kamal and Christine with whom I spent many hours competitively buying second-hand books from the pavement book sellers of Pycroft Street. And I'm thinking also of the many street sellers (I wonder if the guy at Luz corner still sells) who would take a pescribed book list and rattle off all the titles they did or didn't have.

As the lights turn red at the Haji Ali traffic intersection in Mumbai, the boy slouching against the railings quickly straightens up. Yakub Sheikh is just 12 years old, but he knows he has only 45 seconds to make some money. Holding aloft his wares, he dashes toward a black BMW and in his cracking preteen voice addresses the woman inside: “ ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’?”.... (Don’t tell E. L. James, but the woman in the BMW bought the entire “Fifty Shades” trilogy for the equivalent of $10.) 


_

Bright Futures

I love how brightly dressed the women members of the 113th U.S. Congress are! 

Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

And the unprecedented, we-the-people diversity is simply lovely.

From the NYT: As the 113th Congress opens, the Senate and the House are starting to look a little bit more like the people they represent.  The new Congress includes a record number of women (101 across both chambers, counting three nonvoting members), as well as various firsts for the numbers of Latinos and Asians as well as Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans. 

_ 

I'm Lost

Today the kids went back to school; it was hard.

It started out being hard because they'd gotten used to 10 a.m. starts and hour-long breakfasts and today was about waking up at 6:30 and getting out of the door by 7:30.

And then I walked Nu to her kindergarten locker and kept saying goodbye and not leaving. I started getting shaky and teary and then it dawned on me that this was their first day back at school since the Newtown massacre. I'd kept the kids from school for three days after that Friday, and then it was Winter break. It "helped" that A had just shattered his wrist and we were ferrying him to assorted surgeries.

Intellectually I knew that this was exceedingly maudlin and irrational and that my kids enjoy (and need!) school. And it was extremely embarrassing. But I'd look around at the crowd of goofy kindergartners milling about at waist-level and the harried, smiling teachers trying to appreciate the kids running up to them en masse to tell her all about their new sweater/hat/toy/lunchbox and kind of lose my sense of proportion.

Finally I ended up calling A who talked me down--first gently, then mockingly--and got me home.


****
In other news, we just started watching Lost. We're only about a decade or so late to that party.

_

New Year

Carry the ashes and ice
that is this body

This token
Beckons? Beacons?

I don't know



Yet here you are

January 1

explosive
all the radiance and charm

of a fat baby



Make me return
to the scrolling of life

from this snow-cast hide
to the Forsythia hinge

to the spiral hymn of sun


_

End of the Year

I sing for dawn:
caught by a single seed
future fluttering

I steal the window:

unstitching golden reflection,

gleaming disaster

I find arithmetic:

the burning sum of days

igniting welcome

_

Decorating Dad

Although he may deserve a medal, all he's getting for now is some Sharpie graffiti.

_

Home

Our space is braided
by the warm vibrato of your chest
the small companions of our
great journey

Then too I am summoned
by the gravity of afterlife
the clouds razored by mortal moons
defibrillating

I can trace spans of sky
knowing sun and moon recognize
everything in an embarrassment
of ambition

Except that I burrow and spelunk
in tides and pools of anger
in a cave where I keep letting
strangers in


_

Amanat

The anonymous young woman was nicknamed Amanat (Treasure) by the press; her savage gang-rape  set off unprecedented protest marches and riots around India. She died today.

The story--all of it I can't even--is at the link. A few of the heart-wrenching, scream-inducing prompts are below:

On December 16, the student watched The Life of Pi at a South Delhi mall with a male friend who offered to escort her home. They boarded a private bus - the sort used so often by commuters in a city where public transport is inadequate and unreliable.

The six drunk men on board began harassing the student. They beat her friend with an iron rod. When she tried to stop them, they turned on her, hitting her with the rod before taking turns to rape her. The bus kept circling a 31-kilometre stretch in South Delhi, for hours as it rolled unstopped through a series of police checkpoints.

In messages that she scribbled for her family while on life support systems, Amanat reportedly asked if the six men who had damaged her so badly that her intestines had to be removed had been caught and punished.

The 23-year-old had persuaded her parents to sell their small piece of land in Uttar Pradesh so she could move to Delhi to study medicine. Since then, they said recently, their meals are very often rotis with namak (bread with salt).

There are so many tragedies here. One of the most frustrating may be that there are so many enlightened people in this story--the young woman living her life, her caring male friend, her parents who went through financial hardship and sacrifice to give her an education. It hurts that some completely unrelated goons can insert themselves into this narrative--precisely at the point successful change--and turn it into one of unimaginable suffering and tragedy.

_

Woes and Lows 2012

Family:

• At breaking his collar bone. Breaking my heart by being such a sweetheart about it.
• Big A breaking his wrist in about ten different places and needing multiple surgeries. Blowing my mind by trying to do every single thing himself.
• Me catching my hands in a slammed door--it hurts to make a fist or curl my hand around stuff like the steering wheel.
• Nu wanting to be in the "dumb, doofus dog club" by breaking a bone too. P.S. : WTH?!

Home:

• Coming home to discover that someone had taken a BB gun to our dining room windows.
• Waking up to discover that the basement drain had flooded an assortment of decay into the house.
• Waking every morning to intense gratitude and surprise that we weren't assaulted while we slept.
• Wanting to leave nightmare rental central, but having our extremely reasonable offer on a house dissed, basically.

World:

• The gun shootings in Aurora.
• The gun shootings in Wisconsin.
• The gun shootings in Newtown. 
• Not being able to go to movies anymore. 
• Not having been able to send kids to the last three days of school before Christmas break.

_

What

He's 13; she's 5. 

Sometimes I can still manage to find matching gifts that delight them.

_

A Child

I've always loved the solid Anglican certainty of T.S.Eliot's The Journey of the Magi at Christmastime. The ministrations of belief, the miracle of birth, the ardor of every pilgrimage...

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down 
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

_

Andal

(After Andal)


The small, breeze-colored day

the design and dance of water

thoughts are jasmine 

and mint

In the pounce of moonlight

what to think 

Yearning summons 

from a distance of days 

The ways of the evening

settle and fly like birds

Krishna, Krishna

Where are you?

I miss... I wish 

to hear your words again 

to feel the kiss of the flute

warmed by your breath


-

Mourning

The dead begin 

to forget us 

call, answer

don't let go

stay under sky's 

umbrella

beat entreaty

speak like echoes

in the new 

and unknown

the strange pucker 

and kiss of stars

_

Sorry

1. Charlotte Bacon, 6 
2. Daniel Barden, 7 
3. Olivia Engel, 6 
4. Josephine Gay, 7 
5. Ana M. Marquez-Greene, 6 
6. Dylan Hockley, 6 
7. Madeleine F. Hsu, 6
8. Catherine V. Hubbard, 6 
9. Chase Kowalski, 7 
10. Jesse Lewis, 6 
11. James Mattioli, 6 
12. Grace McDonnell, 7 
13. Emilie Parker, 6 
14. Jack Pinto, 6 
15. Noah Pozner, 6 
16. Caroline Previdi, 6 
17. Jessica Rekos, 6 
18. Avielle Richman, 6 
19. Benjamin Wheeler, 6 
20. Allison N. Wyatt, 6
21. Rachel Davino, 29
22. Dawn Hochsprung, 47, principal 
23. Anne Marie Murphy, 52, special education teacher 
24. Lauren Rousseau, 30, teacher
25. Mary Sherlach, 56, school psychologist 
26. Victoria Soto, 27, first grade teacher

Together...

I love this.

Happy Diwali Light!


__

Meanwhile, over at ye olde claw machine...

The "pick me" line is inevitable. But mostly,  I'm finding the rendering of the Prez strange and problematic...

_

39 Candles

Happy Birthday, Big Dog!

_

Happy Hero

Both kids have been fairly spidey obsessed. This is is the five-year-old Nu's SECOND Spiderhero-themed birthday. (At had FIVE; oy, yes.)

Nu and her superhero friend.

That silly Spidey--he crashed into the bottom of the cake again!

_

All Right

So this is kindergarten humor:

Mama!

(Holding heirloom tomato aloft)

I'm putting out a tomato-warning. 

A TOMATO  warning! 

(giggles)

Doesn't it sound like tornado-warning? 

Mama?

 __

Taking a Fall (for science)

While I was over at a visa interview in Grand Rapids, At was "the nucleus" in his science period skit. His science teacher wanted to show how At the nucleus moved, so he pushed him off the demonstration table... and...

At ended up with a broken collar bone. True story. No, we're not suing anyone.

He's in a lot of pain, but he's such a sweetheart and tries to mask it. 

(Related: This kid is ridiculously cute.)

_

Old Things (2)

I picked up from my old house the black corduroy trench I’d left behind. S didn’t have to save it for me, since the house papers are long signed and it has no real monetary value. But I'm glad it was saved. That I have it. It’s always made me feel sophisticated. Miss Selfridges. Ten years ago it cost me less than 20 GBP. I know because I never spent more than that on one piece of clothing.

And although it still quite warm now, it reminded me of wearing it back to my rooms on my way back from the Žižek talk the evening the snow started unexpectedly flower-like and light.

And how you called me on my new cell phone. I must have given you the number because refusal would have been ruder than necessary. Because you asked although you shouldn’t have.

You said—“Are you out in that thin black coat of yours.”

And I tried to act as though it were ok for you to call me on a cell phone. And you acted as though there were nothing unusual in telling me that you were worried about me calling me to check on me on my walk home in the snow.

You said—“How was your talk?”

And I pick from Žižek’s talk the one thing I thought you needed to hear. “Žižek says that if you tell someone you love them then the dominant emotion implicit in that statement is selfishness because you want to hear it back.”

You make fun of Žižek. I bristle. You imply that Rushdie is a philanderer. I am non committal.

We ring off.

_

Old Things (1)

Today I found the song you played me on repeat from across the aisle while trying to make eye contact. You may have played it a hundred times? Played it louder than necessary. Played it back to back with another song I don’t remember at all. Something with Salman Khan in it? Some other song extolling the virtues of romantic love and taking a chance.

Anyway, I found “Mannil” on an old CD copied for me by a dear friend who’d billed it as “SPB Marina Beach Song” because even seven years ago I’d forgotten how the song was sung, but only remembered only that it was filmed on the beach. But although I’d forgotten the song itself, something about the frisson of seeming desirable to you must have stayed with me.

And today, listening to that song from another lifetime, I enjoyed it as I never have before. Remember you, footnote, person whose name I never knew. I’d look you up on facebook if I knew your name.

_

Where in the world is NuNu at 3 a.m. on Friday?

Complaint: inability to breathe, chest pains (from what began as a cold contracted from older sibling).
Stuff received: inhaled steroids, oral steroids, antibiotics.
Patient's mood: manic.
Parents' mood: panicked. (Where did the weekend go?)

_

Amma

Called Amma to find out that she'd been sick and feverish for two days.

Sick since she got home from Benares; since she bathed in the Ganges with its famed sin-eliminating waters and decomposing corpses downstream.

She said she only meant to take a token dip but ended up doing nine. She said she swallowed some of the water.

In the last month two childhood friends have told me that their mothers died--one six years ago and C did not make it back to the funeral, the other one month ago on account of which S wasn't celebrating her birthday this month. I loved these "Aunties"--I loved their food, their style, their staunch support of their daughters. I yearn for a chance to tell them this.

I wonder when I'll see my own Amma again.

The kids called Amma this morning to yell "Get well soon, Ammama."

It's only been two months since I was in India.


_

An Interesting Lesson Plan...

Last week, when the UT campus was evacuated after a bomb threat, English professor Snehal Shingavi followed the news as many of us did: on Twitter. Like thousands of students, faculty, and staff, Shingavi turned to social media for updates on the situation.

But he also did something unusual. In a tweet, he invited everyone to talk about it.

Not long after the University noted publicly that the man who called in the bomb threat had a “light Middle Eastern accent,” Shingavi issued an open invitation to attend his class on Islamophobia. “Did UT have to say ‘middle eastern accent’ as if that told anyone anything about the bomb threat?” he tweeted.

More here.

_

Cosmopolitan Vista

Not another Slumdog Millionaire. The San Francisco South Asian Film Festival is full of surprises.

The festival also showcases "Herman's House." Director Angad Bhalla is South Asian, but the film is about an African American prisoner imagining his dream house with the help of a Caucasian artist. Unusual subject for a South Asian? Not really, Bhalla says. "We rarely wonder why a white filmmaker makes a film about South Asia, or anywhere else, because we assume they have a valid opinion on the subject."

_

Happy Camper

(Not.)

I spent the hours
between 11:30 p.m.
and 4:30 a.m.

in a sleeping bag
in a tent
in the backyard

because the other doggies
were so excited/insistent.
Do I have to do it again ?

_

Where to start?

From Sonia Faleiro's article in the NYT For India's Children, Philanthropy Isn't Enough:

What’s most galling about this corrupt behavior is the fact that the current government is making an unprecedented effort to confront poverty. In 2011, according to a World Bank report, India spent over 2 percent of its gross domestic product on poverty alleviation. Over the past 11 years, India’s government has sought to provide free midday school meals, a guarantee of 100 days of employment annually to the rural poor and free primary education. But endemic corruption, from the very top down to the ground level, prevents them from being implemented effectively. A lack of transparency and a leakage of subsidies to the nonpoor means that poverty isn’t falling nearly as fast as it should be.

The free hot meal is the reason Meena goes to school. But her teachers routinely skip school, three days a week. When teachers don’t come, the school stays shut, and there’s no meal. A well-funded, well-intentioned program created to educate and feed poor children fails on both counts: Meena not only learns nothing, she also goes hungry.

_

Time Out (But Cute!)

_

Shiny New Middle School

Dancer. 

Once, twice

Your place is inside someone.
the closing of their heart
a landscape scaled to story

what if you knew everything
About why my sister looks like
my sister, the slap of silence;

the beating that is the phone ringing
The lament of memory in all
the half-remembered childhoods

what if those habits are only errands
dead from scorn; like butter asking
to be left out, sleepy in the sunlight

_

Dropping Nu off at school this morning,
I saw a woman in the opposite lane
I guess she'd just dropped her kids off?

Her face was scrunched up, red, angry.
She was sobbing. She wore a scarf
on her head that sat flat like she had no hair.

I instantly know what her story is
Imagine I know how she feels
about dropping her kids off at school

About the rest of us undeserving fools
who don't bother thinking about
school drop offs next year

Although we probably should.
I want to be told what to do for her
Big A says, it's not about you.

_

To Saginaw, to Saginaw

First cross-country meet of the season. You can tell At by his radioactive green shoes. And the red inhaler he pulls out as he runs his ten-minute mile. So proud of that kid.

It took us an hour to get to Saginaw. I still feel guilty that Big A needs to drive that far and back every  single work day...

_

Today is an animal

Today is an animal
borrowed and sad
done by ten
but going still--
like dead chicken
bamboo shoot

Sun weaned although
It might kill us still
so large and new this
gray maze of morning
sawing through residue
the fixed broadcast eye

_

Ready for College

Nu with kids and college kids

_

Grow

Farmers' Market Stylings

_

Sunshine

_

Thursday's Tales

First full day of kindergarten.

Nu survived and thrived. Then the perfect first day got muddied by not getting on the school bus home--her apologetic teacher said she'd been overwhelmed and had messed up.

We all took a deep breath, dried the tears (mine), cleaned up (the kids) and went house-hunting. Slim pickings, unfortunately. The house in the picture below isn't happening, although I love the grounds and the view it has out in the country...

_

Home-bound

The guarding of the child
like a shadow
dilated smoke

The rest of this afternoon
an absence of centuries
a love scent

The growing clarity

pierced animation

astringent

All the words in the world

waiting, forcing

a fly to fly

_

Guffaw

It took me a moment (or several) to get why this picture of Karl Marx that Bill Clay titled "The only known picture of Marx and Obama" was so funny to my friends.  It makes me snort.

Clint Eastwood reference here.

_

They both start with the letter "R"

I've never paid much attention to the don't-go-out-at-night-by-yourself line. There was always an interesting story as a journo intern or somewhere fun to be or a late night at the library or a necessary grocery run that was too good or important to pass up. I know I'd go bonkers if my kids tried to do the things I've done.

I do take the necessary precautions like all women everywhere. And although there have been a few occasions when I've prickled with fear, I have never spent time worrying about rape. 

So it makes absolutely NO sense that at this particular point in my life, when I'm no longer as gullible or nubile as I once was, to suddenly begin to have fears about rape. True that we're renting in an area that feels a little unsafe. True that I'm sleeping on the first floor for maybe the first time in my life. But it still makes no sense.

Big A wonders if it's because of all the creepy men in women's vagina's lately.

____

Before I forget

While I wait for Nu to turn five next month and start Kindergarten this week, I want to write down stuff as she used to say earlier--just this year.

About how she'd get her Rs and Ms tangled and Ms. Rebecca would become the inscrutable "Ms. Mebecca."

How for years, she used T's for all her Ks. And of how we used to tease her by asking her to say "King Kong" so we could giggle when she went "Ting-Tong" like some squishy doorbell.

I'm forgetting things... I want to start doing this vintage postcard calendar journal with the kids.