Unslaked
S ometimes I own a book for a year or two or five before it becomes not just important but urgent enough I read it that it jumps whatever queue I have for intended reading and comes into my hands. Raven particularly liked the chart I made for myself with a queue for fiction, a queue for music books, one for other non-fiction, one for books of literary criticism or on the subject of writing — figuring that was how many I could responsibly maintain at a given time. Though of course the books we read aloud together to the little boys have a queue of their own in my mind, and poetry — doesn’t make lists. It comes spontaneously to hand for one poem or for a whole book of poetry, filling a need, answering a line crying out in my head, like a song lyric...
Read MoreOrdinary Time
A nd it occurs to me that after so many years of journals and blog entries I have created for myself a particular sort of almanac: this is February and there is a thawing and melting in my brain, that starts with the merest hint of dripping and a brave spear of green with the temerity to poke up through the snow, and proceeds as it has since the invention of seasons while reinventing itself completely anew, a cycle that leaves words and feelings tumbling in wild and unrestrained cataracts. I walk into the house grateful for quiet and solitude after walking my son to school because there is no one to ask my attention before I grab a pencil and scrawl the words that have rushed my brain, the demand for immediate jotting, words in pairs, wild puns and homonyms (when...
Read MoreBare
I like the litter of the little plastic ampules emptied of purple ink, scattered about on my desk, and even the scraps and bits of paper on which I have pressed the nub trying to establish a smooth line, a flow of ink. It is fussy and perhaps a little backwards. Energy would be better spent trying for greater legibility. “The worst handwriting for a girl I’ve ever seen” said my seventh grade math teacher: perversely this became a source of pride. I would be heartbroken to learn that every year was a girl chosen to be bestowed with the honor. I envy friends with beautiful handwriting, of course — though one can now have a friendship without ever becoming acquainted with the friend’s hand. Which seems so odd to me. Handwriting as...
Read MoreMercenary
I descended the stairs from my bedroom this morning and the light was on in the little boys’ room so I peered in, and there they were each in their own bed, and though it was Saturday, so they had permission to get up and use the electronica and screens of their choosing, they were each lying in bed READING and quiet and we had gotten to sleep in, as had the older brothers, old enough now that they choose to sleep in and it was significant and ordinary and I wished I could send a snapshot to a tired self any where from four to fourteen years ago when it seemed like I would never feel rested again. Of course I commented on it and they bounced out of bed. But Rainer wanted to go up and use the computer, and when I came in from the studio and morning pages...
Read MoreAnniversaries
I sat the other day looking at the stacks of journals I have filled; there are 28 of the particular binding and dimensions I grew attached to and would buy, stockpiling them like the nuttiest sort of squirrel, every time I had to go to Target for diapers, for toothpaste, for laundry detergent. One secret thing in the shopping cart that suggested I wasn’t just a housewife. It’s my favorite aisle of the store, the one where I spot the women who browse notebooks attentively, with a slight dreaminess as they contemplate rule and binding. I can no longer find these notebooks, have been unable to for more than a year, and I write in the last of them a little regretfully. I finally this month found a possible replacement and bought up seven of them, they have...
Read MoreMore violin
T his morning I kept a promise and strapped my violin case to my back, walked down the hill to the school where the middle two boys are and went in to the office where a substitute secretary went fumbling through desk drawers to find me a visitor’s pass so that I was official. It is astounding how every school seems to have its own culture of protocols, at my younger son’s school I have to create an account on a visitor’s computer on which I sign in; here the community is so small that everyone pretty much recognizes everyone, but there are concessions to security, a kidnapping from a Portland school last spring, I don’t complain. And then I went out to the portable classroom where my son’s class is, open the door to a jumble of seven...
Read MoreThe Girl With the Metronome Heart
A lot of metronome practice this week, as if I could find comfort in the steady, even beat, the tempo where the piece is within my grasp and the challenge is to make the beat so real it is a container into which everything else must fit exactly. It used to seem monotonous, metronome practice. The mechanicalness of it, the fingers like machinery moving not by will but by exactitude. Art, I decided, would be its opposite, to bend the beat and refuse its tyranny, to hesitate, trembling, here and submit to a fury of emotion racing through those sixteenths. To refuse to color within the lines because it was all about expression. Precision and control now seem prior to, somehow, I guess, or themselves a part of expression. * This number-changing season, which even I...
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