But that isn't the point of this post. I want to apologize for being an absent presence in the blogging world. I haven't been up to visiting or commenting on blogs. Updating this one has become increasingly time-consuming. Because of the software I use, every time I have a new post I must export the entire blog and then upload it onto a server, a process that take about half an hour or more. It isn't simple or quick. Writing the posts takes a long time, too, sometimes five or six hours. I have limited writing time and have to start pursuing freelance work. There are a few reasons for this, including the fact that my husband is about to take the equivalent of an 8% salary cut through 21 furlough days in the next year. (Ahhh, California!) I would also like to chip away at longer stories and to deepen my writing which just isn't possible in the blog format.

I'll be a more present online presence soon, one way or another. In the meantime, please don't take it personally that I haven't been by. I'm trying to be present in my own life, figuring out a way to get beyond the longing to immerse myself in deep narrative. To move beyond the longing, I have to leap in or give up. I have no intention of giving up.

Image: Rainbow in Berkeley, June 2009.

Sidney enjoying the yard, late June 2009.

He showed up at a coworker's back door on New Year's Day 1995, a half-grown kitten who needed to get out of the Columbus, Ohio chill. The kitty was charming, climbed up on her husband's back while he worked in the garage, greeted the couple with a high-pitched mew whenever they entered the room. But they couldn't keep him, so my boyfriend and I took the cat in, named him Sidney. We had a six-month-old sheltie named Loudon and he and Sidney quickly became buddies.

By January 1996, my boyfriend and I had gotten married and purchased a Queen Anne-style house in a downtown Columbus neighborhood. We'd taken in another foundling kitten, Zoe. By mid-1998, we were living in separate states, scheduled for divorce. I got the cats, he kept the dog.

Yesterday afternoon, after a long illness and slow decline, Sidney collapsed by the water bowl in the kitchen. My husband, son and I rushed him to the vet to be gently nudged into death. It was sad and it still is sad and I don't think I can write much about it.

We will miss our sweet kitten.

Sidney and Loudon, January 1995


Sidney looking at snow ... or at a ghostly cat? January 1995.


Sidney stretch, 2001?

If it wasn't frozen, processed, or heavily laced with sugar, my grandmother didn't cook it. I have her old recipe box, which includes many selections from the "Kitchen of Duncan Hines," as well as things like Pow-Wow Sandwiches, English Liver Bake, and salad molds, recipes that are products of the sixties and seventies. My grandfather made the box, designed it to hang between the refrigerator and the stove in the kitchen at Hollywood Beach. We use it to hold keys now. One of the first things I do when I move to a new place is to hang it by the front door, a reminder of a past so long gone that it feels like fiction. I may look through the recipes, but I never feel an urge to actually make any of them.

When the corn and tomatoes are at their peak, however, and I steam a dozen ears to eat for dinner alongside a salad of freshly-picked tomatoes, I feel a tug on the line that connects me to those long-ago meals. Corn on the cob with butter sits at the intersection of food, love, and memory for me. It has the power to bring me back to a time before I was born, to Hollywood Beach in the late fifties and early sixties when my mother and aunt were still children, before my grandfather was injured in an industrial fire. On late July and early August evenings when my grandfather was working late at the plant, Mom-mom could be persuaded to abandon the freezer and let the canned food gather dust in the cupboard. She would prepare farmstand corn and sliced tomatoes for dinner, maybe add some sliced bread on the side. Perhaps she was feeling as lazy as Ludlam's dog, unwilling to turn on the oven or chop loads of vegetables, happy with simplicity.

It's the only meal she made that my mother and I still talk about. When I was a kid, my cousin and I were given weekend corn shucking duty, sent outside with paper bags to do the messy work of removing the husks and cornsilk. We would sit on the white-washed metal lawn chairs out front under a canopy of maple leaves, kick our heels against the grass. After passing the naked corn to my aunt through the side door, we would wait for the moment at the table when we could smear the cooked kernels with squeezable Parkay. I was fascinated by the prongs, shaped like tiny ears of corn, that Mom-mom stuck into either end of the cob, and studied them between bites, felt the neat rows of miniature kernels like braille against my fingertips. We ate until we are too full for anything else but a thin slice of tomato.

You probably have summer food memories of your own, can bring back an evening lit by fireflies, your lips stained purple by blueberry cake. Your parents didn't care how late you stayed up and you got to light a sparkler even though the fourth of July had been over for days. Or maybe you remember your mother, already unsteady on her feet, placing a platter of swaying Jello on the picnic table. You swirled the first bite against your gums, pushed it between your teeth before swallowing and then refused to eat any more. After dinner you and your brother played tag in the dark while the grown-ups drank bourbon on ice and talked in voices too low for you to understand. When you slipped in a pile of dog shit, they laughed until you started to cry.

Image: Recipe from my grandmother's collection.

Last night my small book group met to discuss Michael Ondaatje's novel Divisadero. It's a flawed book, or at the very least a book that requires both careful reading and a lack of attachment to resolution. I was the only one who really enjoyed it. Yes, the characters are damaged and abandoned, solitary types with hidden motivations. But they are my people, sketched out in Ondaatje's poetic language. I can't be the only one who knows how to fill in the blanks.

What I can't get from careful observation, from cracking open other peoples' linen closets, I get from books. Stories show me the possibilities in life. Sometimes I know the characters, fellow strangers in a strange land. There is solace in the world of quiet ones, solitary bookish people trapped in the amber of personality and circumstance. Freedom is possible. Maybe it is as simple as self-acceptance and if there is hope for them, there is hope for me. Or maybe there is no hope and I should just get on with it.

“All my life I have loved traveling at night, with a companion, each of us discussing and sharing the known and familiar behavior of the other. It’s like a villanelle, this inclination of going back to events in our past, the way the villanelle’s form refused to move forward in linear development, circling instead at those familiar moments of emotion. Only the rereading counts, Nabokov said. So the strange form of that belfry, turning onto itself again and again, felt familiar to me. For we live with those retrievals from childhood that coalesce and echo throughout our lives the way shattered pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope reappear in new forms and are songlike in their refrains and rhymes, making up a single monologue. We live permanently in the recurrence of our own stories, whatever story we tell.” -- Michael Ondaatje, Divisadero, p. 136.

For about eight months now, I've been taking a course at The Writing Salon called the Round Robin. Once a week the instructor, Jane Underwood, sends a class email with that week's writing prompts and partner assignments. Every day, for no more than twelve minutes, my partner and I each write on that day's prompt, sending the resulting "writes" to each other by email. Occasionally, the prompt is a photograph. Usually it is a phrase (yesterday's was "I feel exasperation tensing my face"), sometimes just a word.

The point is to just do it, to see what happens when we let our words flow without forethought or editing. Each partner responds to the other's work, pointing out the things that they like, encouraging the good. The process is exhilarating and a little scary. I read the prompt, gnash my teeth, and then start typing, not knowing where I'll end up.

And where I end up often surprises me. Mainly I divert my thoughts from real life, bored with the worn roads of me, well-traveled and devoid of wildlife. The words don't tumble, exactly, they waltz, softshoe onto the page, join me at a leisurely pace. I start with one sentence, join it with another, and before you know it, I have a story. A vignette.

Like this one, so different from what I write here.

Writing prompt: The test

It’s nothing. Just a blank sheet of paper, 8.5 x 11 inches. The doctor passes it to me. I stare at one of the desk legs, slit my eyes until the carpet and wood blend together, a fuzzy field of sand and tree.

Did she mention what I am supposed to do with the paper? Is that the whole point of this test, to see how I react? Origami isn’t my thing, doc. I can’t even fold a paper airplane. And I am not up to folding a cootie catcher. The idea makes me smile, though, a cootie catcher with various diagnoses hidden underneath the flaps, with pictures of clowns and crazies decorating the outside. Pick a number, say the riddle, figure out the problem.

The sheet of paper sits there, like a command: Do something. So I do. I grab it and growl, start ripping, take what I’ve ripped and rip through that as well, doubling, tripling the thickness of the paper until I can’t rip anymore. By now I’m stomping around her desk, going in circles. I take what remains of the paper and toss it into the air, cackling as the confetti drops around us.

I sigh, sit down. “I feel so much better. Thanks, Dr. Krapinski.”

She offers me a cigarette.

Image from here by way of I Am the Cheese.
More on cootie catchers.