la femme follette

postmortem

We had plans to see The Dark Knight over the weekend, but our sitter had an emergency and we waited until last night.  I will not spoil anything by saying wow. 

Three years ago when we went to see old IMAX Batman Begins, it was my Father's Day offering in my usual game to win Foxiest Wife Evah.  I expected nothing.  It was to be another comic-book movie I would simply endure in good humor.  About 40 minutes into the film, I was leaning forward, elbows on knees, left forearm limp, chin on heel of right hand, pinky fingernail in slightly-open mouth.  This has long-long been the posture I reflexively assume in the face of something like attention-consuming rapture. 

By contrast, last night at the movies, I was just flattened as if by a train.  I barely moved a muscle for the whole 2.5 hours.  Wow.  The lagniappe was for me the grand feature of the glamorous exteriors of my hometown.  In fact, I started to get a little worked up during the major chase scene down LaSalle -- for a film that was not nominally set in Chicago, it was not shy about showcasing much of its brilliance -- and was mightily distracted by the full-frontal nudity of the Board of Trade building. 

Some time later, when an aerial shot revealed a clear day above the river and its file of downtown bridges, I burst into real tears.  I do not think Mari was surprised, but I could not believe.  But I then again I can.  I get homesick for living in a place so balls-out gorgeous as Chicago, though my aesthetically-based homesickness was salved mightily by old Algren last Christmas.  Certainly weary of my endless disparagement of this or that northeast corridor city for the dubious dishonor of not even having pretty streetlights or at least bridge footings -- "Femme, you are from Chicago.  That is like being from Paris."  I will allow that and have since eased up on the aesthetic intolerance just a tiny bit.

It gets caught in my throat how beautiful it is there.  Certainly I never realized until I was almost-30 that most of the world has not grown up with an assortment of Gothic and Art Deco buildings on their skyline and in a profusion such that they are workaday taken for granted.  But I was always drawn to the visuals, looking at them, knowing them. Having the landscape as the same for other people from other places with favorite trees or sandy coves or stretches of beach.  So much of my unaccounted-for time as a girl was spent being lured, being willing, for favorite buildings with favorite features and times and places to be with them, like orienteering an architectural forest.  Flying buttresses and glorious gargoyles and the prettiest elevator doors in the world.       

Aside from the location shots, the movie was pretty much just ... wow.  I got pretty distracted in the outset by the Watchmen preview and then was not really expecting much, my usual fear-of-commitment, cold-feet movie issues, plus the whole Heath Ledger thing to me was jangling.  I was telling the Israeli last week that I thought there would be something v unsatisfying, something on which I could not put my finger, about Ledger's last turn being The Joker.  That I would feel better if Brokeback Mountain had been his last.  The Israeli offered as a solution the same thing my husband had, that maybe surely because it was Ang Lee, etc, acclaimed, accolades, the end. 

I told him that was not it.  I cast around in my mind for a bit to try and find myself on the matter, but could not.  We talked about what we expected from the film, the comics, etc, and left it at that.  But last night, I figured it out:  Brokeback Mountain would have been a complete, closed circuit.  He would have been lauded forevermore, memorial accolades from the Academy, the Library of Congress, the Roy Rogers Foundation, Log Cabin Republicans, yaya, whatever.  Fine & good.  But also this:  had Brokeback Mountain been his last, no one would be crying their eyes out or even sighing into their pint of ale over the abrupted gay cowboy franchise  ("There will never be a better, more-textured, gayer closeted cowboy than Heath!") But The Joker, wow, man; he hath been performed definitively.  There is no going back.  We will have to hold this in our hearts, which is a weird thing to say about a comic-book movie and so I am unsatisfied by this, as I suspected I would be.   

Because we were out past 1 a.m., we are at half-power.  It is not too hot, so I took advantage of the torpor to make some jam, which seems industrious but is mostly only poking with a spoon.

  

I cannot get the Dead's "Sugaree" out of my head.

Fillette wanted to pick blackberries last week at the farm, which, um, do not taste good.  We worked so hard for our 3 quarts of raspberries that we vacillated between finding them too precious to just eat and also resenting them for being so much in labor.  So, jam is a good thing to have.  I canned the jam for the first time ever.  Usually, I just make it and put it into tiny plastic-lidded containers and freeze it, taking it out as I need it. 

Someone asked me, "you don't have to can to make jam?"  And, "no" is the answer, though I was surprised to learn that also, just a few years ago, and felt as if I were the last ignorant fool to know.  Jam can be cooked and will be stable in the freezer for a few months or if it will be used quickly, as in if you have little children for whom you only buy plain yogurt, it keeps in the fridge for at least a week.  I was all disbelieving and low-expectations and certain I was just putting it in jars for show to keep it in the fridge, and then I heard the little *pop* of the lids sealing and was so excited!  I canned!  We will never eat it!  We will save it for the apocalypse and simply admire it until then! 

matthew. thirteen. fifty-two.

I was feeling very unmoored for a number of reasons, there was a confluence of factors, and some time with the Israeli was absolutely in order.  I had not realized how very much until I was in his very capable (and metaphorical) hands.  The length of time that we have known each other, the ebb and flow of our intensity over the score, it always feels less important than the relevance of the time in our lives at which we met. 

We were so delicately young but also grownup; nothing bad had ever happened to us.  There had not yet been stonemasons in to build the façade for my heart.  We were in love with other people and delighted to have met each other and our lives felt full.  Since then so much has happened, but our relationship continues based for each in the elemental constancy of the other.  So much like a faith, very little to do with familiarity; Paul wrote about this knowing fully, being fully known.   

I returned home feeling very much snapped back onto the short leash of my essence. Beyond tranquil and also fascinated by a number of things in my life that exist in defiance of what I should have known better.  I feel like I have all the time in the world and also, so loved and so lucky.  To be a girl so alone in the world but for whom provisions were made in spite of logic, in defiance of analysis or expectation, the odds.  It feels mysterious and is humbling.

It has been quite warm, in fact it has been halter-top hot,  and I have spent a lot of time in the garden, sweating and tying things out of the way of other things.

 

Our nightshade jungle.  There was a Rosa Bianca eggplant last week: small and taut; creamy and streaked with lavender.

Potatoes are up.

Sweet potatoes are in love with the heat wave.  Also, being eaten by something obviously less voracious than that shiny motherfucker the Japanese beetle.   

 
The garden state is not so much getting it on in its raspberry gardens.  The four of us are pretty tenacious fruit harvesters and we called it quits at three quarts.  The stone fruits this year, though, are amazing.   

battery

+ zinnias 18 stems for $8 at farmers' market
+ children finally ensconced in bosom of 9-6 day at camp.
+ saw Iron Man in matinee w Mari.  Have set sights on Bermuda next.
+ am nearly finished brooding for the present
+  big cinema week for les amoureux Follettes: babysitting lined up for IMAX Dark Knight this weekend.
- discovered have become quelle petite to rock favorite blouse & skirt tomorrow on catchup date w v oldest pal Israeli
+ date w v-oldest pal Israeli tomorrow
+ led by desperate-chic to unearth even-fabulouser outfit from pile of erstwhile hottie favorites.
- shoes in residence not v flattering to E-FO, but will suffice
+ finally installed thingy to hold children's bicycles and get them out of living room
- must now confront "living room situation"
+ already confronting "bedroom closet situation"
- pile of "giveaway" clothes pathetically small, considering size of  supply inventory due to enormous love for clothes
+ certainly means I am authentic & purchase Italian couture w both eyes open
- 113-year-old house v low on closet space
- have not slept more than 4 hours per night since last Thursday.
+ advil p.m.
+ have another old pal working in my town for much of the week
- cannot find replacement tube of nars congo red anywhere
+++ viva glam vi

anaphora

Six years ago, today or yesterday or something, little baby Fillette and I went to a funeral.  It was all horrible, so horrible.  First, just the story of the death, then, so much enmity between the living and the dead, the ones who just as easily could be dead, the half-dead, the resurrected and recovered.  So much tension between the marking and the greiving. Fillette was quite small, small enough to come and be toted as an appendage, and I remember that people were so interested in her, I whispered to her, "It's ok, honey.  Babies make people feel good..  They remind us of life."  

Elegy
Lala Follette

You died on strangers disowned lawns. Differentiating this from more dignified, more kind death, people gasp and wince when yours is heard. Your death sent a criminal ringing, an evil affair defective for commerce. You died and now the land sent forth history, sends me history, scrolls across our shoulders and bellies, backyards, it reads, "oh, to die, in death what it must take to lay dying."

Dying in a design determined before you died, in this publication of every probability of death. We each acknowledged the other like yakuza, wraparound nomads, children misused, grown for a sadness, completely and immediately developed and on our reinvention in a glade, in a flash we put some childish things from a children's past aside in order to weigh out one new life, then another. It is sad that you are a dead man, but you were alive on loan.

We died long years ago, as children, out of order, positioned to die, in death's places. The two killed, if differently, those children, their deaths, churning all in every range, the filth is washed outside finally, pouring across the roads like lava. A river of molten rage sees the child that would like to die, there is a small child who wishes to die; it was you, wanting a loose-tooth suicide. A small life concerned with dying broadly and so you want it young and it is as you died, children who died. Absent mothers icy, behind us the fathers, was it us who went on to love in this way?

They are a whole lesson, like death come again. Dead women will come again, dead children will beg us -- we are children barely alive -- to give them what we would not know we had. To know this, to wear this armor on a mudslide, if your lives you stole from them were returned, if your life has fallen to part of you, gone is the new who that can know more.

Easy. Embrace a bottle, attacks like the lover that I knew, criminals with lawns, there was no bridge and it seemed to be simple. The first words push out pain itself; you died:  you were not ashamed of your relief. We in many burned green for your retrieval. With my child I have gone to a monument, we spoke of you being out of order, your dead women, the sense in which you are a dead man, as you died you were their death. This kind of how you died, you, if dead and your body far away from us, no requisition of your flesh, evacuated from this house by a woman taunting with resurrection.

They could not win us, not train us, and where you died, which, after a life that the person lives, what this means, what one obtains or is implied with people like you, o,  like me, who know wanderers, actuators, dead women. So few words trained you in such a way that all have spoken about how much and how little words have made them with you. I knew where to listen, above the rafters, living this afterlife, life that said what we had was to lose, to be random, to live and to die out of order.

One was spoken, I am speaking, another will speak, and there is a litany, a chorus singing and speaking of what we had to lose in us had died already. Like Lazarus this second life, this second death means we speak every different calm language, cold language, the language of death. My own child napping in my arms, my throat no strongbox of tender assurance, she breathed complete life, new life, fresh life, and also death. Not dead children, I will carry her to a new life, I have transcended who and what I left behind, therefore ashamed and I have only your words, have nothing to say.

Kowalksi reminded me recently of an entire summer I spent doing shots of Wild Turkey, chasing them with rocks margaritas, on the patio of a pretty fun tavern he now has as a client.  I got a stomachache and a headache together, immediately, remembering that summer, ostensibly with him, pouring across the roads like lava.  Poor Kowalksi, just sitting there, like Pompeii.  There are not enough socks in the world.  I am certain not one person would recognize me now, but I miss everyone so much. 

still, life

I bought patty pan squash today at the farmers' market and then was sad to see it going.  I love the shapes and colors of patty pan.  I grew it as an ornamental one year, but that was dumb, and vine borers got them anyhow.

The reason Kowalski called the other day was to sweetly ask after my health and I remembered that I forgot to follow up with a great many people about this development.  Basically, I was a medical mystery for weeks and weeks, then months and months, and in the end it all came down to two diagnoses which are not mutually exclusive, both vague and very subjective in their diagnostic parameters, wildly variant in their clinical presentations.  Also incurable.  One is progressive and can be unregenerate, but also, can be nothing at all, due to the obvious flaws in its unscientific diagnostic process.  There is also a third diagnosis (from a third specialty) that is benign-ish, but not the point.  It was a collateral discovery in all the endless lab work.

So, after having seen all these specialists, hearing about my options, about which thing to sign onto, Mari and I took a week or so of considering it all (not least of which what kind of scam is Big Pharm running in all this), after which  I just said, "Fuck this.  I am not going out like that."  We went on vacation, I am back in the gym, I am taking my vitamins.  I have (have always had) an excellent acupuncturist.  For the moment, I am on a raw diet, as with the last three summers.  Fuck a bunch of being sick.

I learned a lot because of this, chiefly that I do not take care of myself in the same way I take care of others (and I know that as a mother I am so not alone in this).  I definitely do not rest enough (and that it is possible to take a freaking break already).  I was reminded that people really love me and us and and want to do (and will do) what they can to help.  I found out who it is that can be cool, who cannot handle the truth, who wants to play Ryan O'Neal in Love Story, who will raise hell with me, and who just wants me to sit in their metaphorical lap so they can smell my metaphorical hair. Also, who can manage in the face of news and who it is that just vanishes.    

Lisa B-K reminded me that people like the lists.  (I am one.)  When Kowalski got his answers and gave his staunch support to my sassy rebuff of the health-care system, he asked me to give to him the list of songs I came up with for him to consider for the children's session the Kowalski Brothers are recording this summer.  He wanted to pan a few, but I insisted, reminding him that "Froggie Went A-Courtin'" was my idea and it turned out so sexy when they did it.  Who knew?

I just typed & deleted several too-much-disclosure paragraphs about Kowalski & me and music & us, a more-guarded presentation of which can be found here.  Now I am too tired to type a list. 

I went to the shopping district while the children were at camp Friday, and I wanted to have this Lela Lee tote so much.  I did not, because I knew Fillette would want to carry it and it would become complex and exhausting,  So I took this photograph to satisfy myself. 

   

nucleus. numeration. nutriment.

The children just finished a summertime science workshop on genetics.  Fillette was the most confused, having worked out some traits in her class.  Mama, can I see you roll your tongue?  I told her I could not.  She very haltingly blurted out a contradiction to this.  (She and Mari are always doing things like making faces and showing tongues; I presume she was already certain he could not.)  I assured her I could not.  She was stymied by this and did not know what to say.  Also, manufacturing quite a hostile countenance.  I was still trying to read the thing I was reading when she came along with her interruptions, so was slow to figure out that her instructor probably generalized for the class.  "No, no, honey," I assured her.  "You are recessive.  So is your brother."  He is left-handed.  She knew not how to respond to this.  Join the club, love. 

Mari is not always exactly joking when he suggests they cannot be his children, except for that they so, so clearly are.  Honestly, if they had not grown in my belly, I would be suspicious sometimes myself.  She is in the next room right now, declaiming García Lorca poems.  Who else's child would she be?  Plus, thing is, when one has the 10-pound babies, there is very little risk of switching at birth.

Speaking of our jocular disregard for the cultural primacy put upon one's spouse, Kowalski called today.  I was caught a little by surprise, since a. felting, b. midday he is usually otherwise occupied, c. only calls my cell phone when we are having a row, which we are not.  It was a nice surprise, and everything was fine until he reported his re-committing to a project and asked for my assistance.  I had a hazy, stream-of-consciousness narration of having once actually put together a list in service to him, per his request ... but then he said he was all done with the project and then I lost it somewhere ... maybe I threw it away ... 

He reminded me (as if I had forgotten) that he is fickle and distractable, whereupon I exaggerated a throwaway comment in service to humor, and then there we were, arm-wrestling over which of us exactly was the Responsible Party for the ultimate demise of us, in the final analysis.  It was a halfhearted re-match, like Rocky XIX or so, -- I because of the Charo Affliction; he because of the original reason for his call.  In pretty short order I let it go out loud and his last gambit was a taunting, though good-natured, complete rendition of "Maybelline,"  an exponential improvement over what I usually get, which is a yodeling, growling kind of performance of "So Wrong," which slays me every time and I will never let on.  (though I just have, o, internet) I am not knitting any more socks, I swear.  I have repented enough.  Him! 

Then I went to pick up the CSA box. 

Plus, it came with a whole, not-live chicken, and six ears of corn.  I am up to my ears in peaches.  Also, when loading the car's CD magazine this morning, I spaced and grabbed Pete Seeger when I wanted Bob Seger and I was a. wildly disoriented and then b. a little sad. 

juggernaut

I have been dealing with a lot of fruit lately, with the four-plus gallons of blueberries we picked and the 10 pounds of peaches and then all the cherries. 

 

We just bought the cherries already picked.  So many.  Different kinds, too.  I made a cherry crisp kind of a thing last week and then wanted to play around with a New Something today.  I spent some time pitting these (without a pitting thingy) and then realized that they were a. sour and b. we had no sweetener.  Then I remembered our oven is kind of fritzy right now.  So, I just ate them. 

It reminded me of a really colossal snowstorm we got when I was a girl -- really still a girl, a teenager, nothing yet of this Kowalski or opening a bottle of scotch & throwing out the bottlecap or latex dresses or any of that latter-day nonsense.  My roommate & I sat around on the living-room floor with a large jar of maraschino cherries between us, watching Los Olvidados --  the Buñuel film w all the chickens  -- and practicing tying the stems with our tongues.  The determined oral dexterity & girlish perseveration this accomplishment represented may have been the first tiny step onto the path on which I would find myself just a couple of years later.   

I finally got the potatoes in.  Also, tied up the tomatoes, which are sprawling everywhere, in spite of their proper restraint in the outset.  Proper restraint.  Ha.   

I have a lot on my mind.  Like, a lot.  I am wandering around dreaming about drinking gimlets, not really paying attention to anything, and listening to Bring on the Night over and over, which though I have not listened to it since my 17th year, it was once on heavy rotation and yet, it suddenly seems like something else entirely decades later. 

O, I am in a mood of too many feelings --   Felting/is this feeling of so many feelings, rushing to crowd/each other, piling up on the weave of our hearts -- and I feel slightly unhinged and wacky, but intense and filled with flourish, but also easily distracted.  I feel exactly as Charo on The Love Boat.  

I have plans for a day very soon with the Israeli to which I am looking forward with something like great delight.  I just know it will be like the most excellent & aimless snow day.  Like snow-blindness.  Like sub-zero nights when the concrete rings and breathing takes the breath away and everything is so clear.  Clear.

bean sprouts. duck.

The beans are up.

I don't have high hopes for the bean experiment, though I certainly planted enough -- 2 10-foot rows and pots of them all around.

There are nasturtiums in there for my son and I are sometimes at what is called cross-purposes.

 

I shot this on vacation, while we were with pretty Meli & her family at the Booker T Washington National Monument. 

I keep showing this to Mari, exclaiming, "I have captured the soul of this duck!  I am like the Annie Leibovitz -- no, no, the Richard Avedon of duck photography!"  And then I laugh and laugh, and then say, "No, really!"  He says it is a pretty good duck photo, but I know it is something more. 

Camp started Monday, with its adjustment to what someone I used to know called the Lunchmaking Snackpacking Grind.  They are having an overload of summer fun this week, however, and there is a lot of transitioning and driving around.  I am kind of worn out from it all.  Next week will be a breeze and the rest of the season will be all camp all day and there are some exciting day trips and long lunches and spa treatments scheduled.  Summer!  

very funny, bitch

This spring has been a little stressful; I have alluded to it.  Half of the strain has been my health and running concurrently has been something else.  Something involving my children.  A person must be out of their minds to get between any woman and her children. 

When Garçon was born, there was a lot of neonatal distress, O₂with a bag & mask, etc, etc, blahblah.  The NICU chick came over to me and was telling me a lot of words I was not really comprehending and there was a lot going on: I was having a repair done, he was being monitored, and as he and I had almost just died (though Mari and I had no idea at the time), there were a lot of people in the room.  I said to the NICU chick, kind of implacably, "OK.  Well, just give him to me for a sec before you go."  She told me that he was fine, but they needed to take him away, etc, etc, and I said to her, "Maybe you didn't hear me.  I said for you to give me my baby."  It was kind of bizarre and hilarious at the time, and Mari told it as part of the birth story, this sudden maternal protection, but there it was and it is what it is and I, like most women I know, will fuck your shit all the way up if you try to tell me how it is going to be with my children.

The rumble is on the baseball diamond, where we are going to have a knife fight tomorrow morning, and I get to wear these excellent shoes, which came just for me, just for this outing!  They are just as foxy as the boots I wore in the first match.  I hope I do not fall down.  That would wreck the whole thing we have going, with the shiny hair and expensive shoes and richly-tailored Italian menswear and the highly-regarded consultants on our side.  Also, the part where we are a. right and b. not morons.  We will see.      

F train, F word

Thirteen years ago, I was in Brooklyn, living in sin.  Not even regular sin.  Like sin in the Netherlands.  I was not chastened by the fact that  it looks exactly like Sesame Street.  In fact, thinking back, it was something of an incentive; I am irrepressible and perverse in exactly that way.  I left some months later in something like despair, ran right into the arms of Kowalski, then once perfectly-salved I happened to run into my future husband at a party while I was telling a wry story featuring my irrepressible perversity and then the whirlwind rest and here we are, surprised to find ourselves on a weekend jaunt in Brooklyn. 

I had not exactly resolved to never return, but I had certainly no intention.  Saturday, I had to so that I could meet up with the beautiful entourage accompanying Jen to Renegade Craft Fair.  There were good times and bad, a little sunburn, a distressed (and distressing) late-night email, and some really happy children.  I never saw the children, because I stayed at the fair for most of the afternoon, then when I got the call to meet Mari and the children, there were madcap subway hijinks. 

Mari and Mr Jen were with all of our kids on the Brooklyn shores of the East River, to which they had ostensibly gotten on the subway.  I had read the service change notices and thought I knew (knew I knew) that one could not get to where they purported to be in that way.  I chose to have faith in their obvious location and go.  Except that the A train was indeed running on the F track and so then I spent the next hour underneath Chinatown not giving a fuck and being very, very tired.  In the end, aboveground at Smith in the pouring rain, surely contracting Legionnaire's disease, I found out from Mari that Mr Jen had driven them all in a car.  Of course.  That is always the way with me:  when I decide to have faith, I should have questioned.  When I question, I should have just kept it quiet, etc.   

Algren, who was with me at the fair while I was taking this call and complaining about trains and opaque instructions, said he understood exactly how I felt, but I do not know.  While this was all going on, I just never felt as shouty as he gets.  I did, while underground, compose an email full of bad language to The Israeli's wife, with whom I had tentative plans for Sunday.  However, I admit that all this train-riding is a little underground crazymaking.  I do resolve to be sweeter to him or maybe split the difference and meet in Bowling Green, where there must be one restaurant. 

Speaking of Bowling Green:  The 5 was running on 7th Ave this weekend and the 2 up Lex.  I whispered to Mari, with my eyes wide, sitting on the 5 (the 5 train!) at 14th St,This is anathema.  I did not regale him with the whole situation with the East Side & Their Subway Situation, because it would bore him, surely.  It only affects me when I am getting a haircut, anyhow.  The thing was not only that we had to board a 5 and believe it was going to take us along the 2's route, but that we had to do so by getting off of a perfectly good 2 train (which was on its way to run all along the East Side, wtf) to get onto a Brooklyn-bound 5 and further believe it was going uptown. 

This is different from Garçon's very age-related & horrible resistance to this train or that one, which in the heat of Saturday made me certain I would slap him.  "Whaaa-at?"  he said to me, literally digging his heels into the platform before a Brooklyn-bound F train.  "This train says it is going to Coney Island??!?!"  I remanded him to the detail of his father and commandeered my usually angelic-child, who could not make it last this weekend, so turning on us this morning.  With Algren all last night at dinner lavishing her with his favorite & best attention, too.  She is naughty sometimes.

She is never this sulky in Manhattan.  Not when she can count the steps from The Israeli's house to the red-bean bun bakery to the Good Playground with the Library and All the Pigeons, wriggling along, dodging the septugenarians with his children while he and I make a taller-than-everyone, shiny-hair-and-good-shoes, raucous scene.    

I was feeling a little sulky about the whole borough, too.  Bleh. We made up at the fountain, she and I.  She was elated and cute and I tried not to look while she was getting all wet because I do not want her to hate it here just because terrible things happened.