mercuryfern

Update

A voicemail was waiting for me when I got off work:  My father-in–law is hospitalized with pneumonia. 

Last night, my husband told me his dad started drinking again a month ago.  "As long as I'm drinking whisky I'm fine.   It's beer that gets me in trouble.  I'm staying the hell away from beer, don't you worry.  Whisky, though, whisky's no problem."

Thomas and I both think he's decided he'd rather die of cirrhosis than emphysema.  Can't say I blame him.   Well, yes I can, he's leaving four children and nine grandkids.  His wife, while admittedly my least favorite person on the planet, probably deserves not to watch her husband drink himself to death.  Deserves is not the word I'm looking for.  Sounds too much like something she might say.  What does any of us deserve, really?   Not to be typecast as an irredeemable asshole by our own spouse so she can enhance her wholesomer than thou self image, I might argue.  While we are talking about who deserves what, allow me to propose that having every dish one cooks for one's in laws ignored if not outright mocked is not treatment consistent with what I have reason to believe is my very low level of karmic debt.  The absence of glittery holiday sweatshirts in a wardrobe is not to be mistaken for a deficiency of hygiene or morals.

As I was saying, I think we all can agree that, drowning in a dry room, your lungs filling with whatever it is they fill with over the course of years months days while you fight harder for every breath, this is an awful way to go.  Maybe it’s only because the degenerate drunk in the family is my favorite relation by a long shot, but I’m inclined to sympathize with the desire to cop out of that fate.  And the accompanying hectoring.

Rick took the whole extended family to an indoor waterpark last weekend.  Over beers in the jungle themed bar, my husband and his two full sisters gave Jodi, their newly discovered half sibling, the lowdown on childhood in Chez Rick.  She cried.  Julie, the legitimate daughter only six months Jodi's junior, might have been a little mean, the way women in this family are, sometimes only out of habit, to other women.  Julie is vicious even to her eleven year old son's girlfriend of the same age.  You've gotta figure a bonus sibling from just bairly before Rick was married to Patti is gonna get hazed something fierce.  It doesn't help that Rick is his best self to this blank slate of an offspring.  He apologizes when he swears in front of Jodi, calls her nearly every night for no reason other than to chat.

I wasn't in attendance at the waterpark shindig, though Thomas tells me Julie’s husband wished out loud that I was there.  They do like me, in their own way.  I might not be Christian enough, I might not be trustworthy with children, but I have my charms, I am missed. 

Strange to say, I miss them, too.  I don’t like them most of the time, but I do love them, even Julie, even Patti.   It should be a comforting realization, but as is often the case, the epiphany comes too late.  My existential crises has taken it’s toll.  Barring the involvement of deities or groveling the likes of which I have heretofore been incapable, Thomas and I are getting divorced.  He’s leaving me, of all things.  If you’ve been following along, and noticed my absence of late, that’s why.  I’ve only got so much stomach for introspection just now.

Strangers

When I visited my sister the weekend before last, she pointed out a woman and child sitting at the front of the bus into town.

“Those two ride the morning bus with me everyday.   I love to make up stories about them.  The mom is always studying, I think she adopted the child and is trying to learn to speak her language.  See, look, I must be right, the book even has characters on it. I bet she’s studying Chinese.”

The two of then likely would have stood out even if my sister had not informed me of the secret life they live in her head.  This being a university town, every bus rider was between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two but the child, the woman, and technically, myself, though I can pass.  The child, an Asian girl of perhaps seven, looked out the window in obviously self made and very fabulous Halloween costume which may have transformed her into anything from a princess to a sparkly supernatural being, and the woman, thin and wiry, hair streaked with grey, bent over her textbook, seemingly oblivious to the kid at her side.

I make up stories about the strangers I see regularly, too. My sister and I haven't lived to together since she was nine.  Now, as young adults, our shared eccentricities are precious gifts each time I stumble on one.  To suddenly discover this amazing young person who came to many of the same conclusions as I, but from a vastly different path, almost makes up for being absent from her youth. 

At the public library where I do most of my writing, there is an elderly man, maybe in his seventies or eighties, who comes everyday to spend hours on the Internet.  He is dressed up, the way people from that generation insist on being whenever they appear in public: clothes impeccable and dignified without being fancy, shoes shined, shirt pressed.  He brings a briefcase and a newspaper. Times when I have had occasion to eyeball his screen, it appears he is managing a financial portfolio, maybe day trading.  Sometimes he reads the newspaper while sitting in the uncomfortable wooden chair, not touching the keyboard or seeming to glance at the screen for long stretches.

The other day, I came in to sit at the typer all morning before a late shift, and his usual spot sat empty.  Around my second hour of email checking and blog perusing, a bit of worry began to nag at the corners of my mind.  I waited as long as I possibly could, wasting time, hoping he would show before I needed to get to work.  There came a moment when I had to choose between assuaging my curious concern, and fulfilling my duties as an employee.  With a heavy heart I chose the last, put on my coat and headed out the door. 

We crossed paths there.  Eyes fixed ahead and oblivious, as always, to other sentient beings, he did not see the relief wash over my face.

Work

The good news alluded to elsewhere: beginning last Tuesday, I am employed, full time.   As an added bonus, my job does not make me fear for my emotional health.   Who knew I could be so excited about making coffee for a vaguely cultish high end chain, the very face of yuppified globalization?   Fifteen year old me would be ashamed.

I have this problem which sometimes ends up being an advantage:  I am unable to emotionally divest myself from anything.   When I've worked retail before, I was forever infuriated by my supervisor's short sighted, lackadaisical attitude about the importance of meeting our customers' craft supply needs with sufficient gusto.   So, it will be nice to work for a company which takes the idea of quality seriously, both in terms of the product it delivers and it's dealings with customers and "partners", as we employees are known. 

Menial tasks are some of the most satisfying paid labor I have ever done.  I worked at a factory for a year and adored it, came home every night physically drained, sure, but singing and bubbly.  Friends my age, especially the clever ones who have recently graduated from college, are struggling now to figure out their employment situation.  Not that I'm not struggling, god knows I can't stay in one place for very long, but I've been happy doing lots of different types of work, is it arrogant to think I know something they don't? 

I wrote a sentence of which I was particularly proud some weeks back:  Circumstances have exhausted their power to degrade me.  We are expected to construct an identity from our employment, and when you have been told your whole life how smart you are, when you know you are smart, when you have the degree, even, you want a job title that impresses people as much as the sentence: I went to college at fifteen.  My first thought on being involuntarily institutionalized all those years ago was, "Well, now I'll never be President."   I made peace then with the idea that all my credit in the straight world was squandered, and I haven't gotten addicted to respect since.  It's not low self esteem so much as a peace inside me I wish I could bottle and distribute.  You really don't need those people to approve, it really doesn't matter whether acquaintances are impressed.  A job, your interactions with strangers, your parent's support or lack thereof, authority figure's opinions: none of these has the power to give or take away dignity.  You have it in your spine or you don't.

It's the most wonderful time of the year.

Monday is the last day of sukkot.  Our household of two secular Jews and one goy has been shokling it up all week.  This is the second time my gracious hosts are celebrating the Feast of Tabernacles, and I concur with them that it is the best holiday the world has ever seen.

Last weekend we built a (stunning, if you will permit me to brag) sukkah at the edge of the woods, covered in leaves, ornamental squashes hung above the table like a chandelier, apples snuggled nicely underneath in a copper bowl.  At night we eat our meals inside it by candlelight.  We say prayers the words to which fall ever less clumsily from my tongue.  Each of us shakes the four species in every direction at some point during the meal, with increasing comfort, with increasing seriousness.  The reading Abby has been doing suggests inviting a different patriarch to the meal every night, discussing their ideas over dinner after having pondered their lives over the course of the day.  We, being both rebellious and pretentious, have invited Esther, Emma Goldman, David Ben Gurion and our grandmothers so far.  Next year we plan to conduct more research, really polish this part of the celebration, maybe print up some recommended reading.  My friends and I linger outdoors, letting the discussion take us where it will while the stars and moon peek through the leaves above.  We are commanded to enjoy ourselves.

I loved going to church when I was little.  Our Lutheran congregation worshiped in a venerable old building, chock full of gilded curlicues.  I liked how dressed up everybody got, the seriousness and formality.  Normal children found it stifling, but I felt special and magical, saying the same nonsense words with a few hundred strangers every week.

I miss church quite a bit, though as I have explained elsewhere, I miss god not one iota.  We went our separate ways amiably enough.  Intellectually, I can get behind the concept of the god described by Quakers.  Most of what the UU’s say makes sense as well.  To the extent that a church is a group of people building community together, I could be comfortable in either of those denominations.

Except that their rituals do nothing for me.

The few Catholic services I’ve attended have all resonated well.  As a teenager, I was pretty seriously into goddess worship.  Incense and candles, that’s what I’m looking for in a religious service.

The thing that I love about Judaism is this perfect balance of emotionally nourishing ritual and a rigorous intellectual tradition.  You are allowed, even encouraged, to question the basic tenants of the faith.  Doing so does not preclude you from shokling the lulav and etrog, from wishing with all of your heart for the plants of the world to grow well this year.  You can say the prayers and partake of the meal while a nagging doubt dances around the ideas without having to despise yourself as a hypocrite.  The ceremonies are for the people who do them, not for the god who may or may not be watching.  Even I, with no claim on this history or community, can feel myself becoming profoundly bonded to a line of worshippers stretching back through known time, to all life on this planet, to the people whose faces I see every day.

Madness Running

I don’t do moderation.  Knowing this, I generally err on the side of under- rather than overindulgence.  Many people who share my brand of insanity struggle with substance abuse problems.  This has not been the case for me.  My experiments with recreational stupor were early and short lived.  Until recently I didn’t drink alcohol at all, ever.  I’ve been a vegetarian of varying levels of strictness for ten years. You could argue that I take abstinence to unhealthy extremes; perhaps in my long ago past this has been true.  I eat eggs and cheese now.  I no longer let myself skip meals.  In the last year I have begun to enjoy sipping a beer or two over the course of a night.

My affinity for obsession has advantages.  I excel at much of what I attempt.  Not that my achievements come consistently; no, it’s a torrent of writing, a fever of ideas and execution, and then nothing, nothing at all for days, weeks or months while I wonder if it all was ever real in the first place, while the people who depend on my initially demonstrated competence lose faith and expel me permanently from their esteem.

Recently, my intensity has been channeled into exercise.  Probably narcissism is not entirely absent from the equation, but mostly I do it because keeping a decent amount of adrenaline coursing through my veins is a good way to maintain my emotional ballast.  This summer I spent 150 weekly miles on the designated bike path at a pace that left me limping and queazy when I dismounted.  Unlike many other sports, running, for instance, on a bike you’ve got a piece of equipment between you and the task at hand, and as such, you really can buy speed.  I don’t ride anything fancy, but it thrills me to unsubtly pass the many people who do, to defy the money equation with my straight bars and cheap derailuer, my own private class warfare victory. 

This autumn, I go to the gym instead; everyday, for at least an hour.

Yesterday, I quit a job after only one day, a record even for my demanding self.  One thirty in the afternoon found me doubting my worth for all the old reasons and a few new ones, too.  I got on a machine and went for an hour.  Then I sped up and gave it everything I had for another ten, twenty, thirty minutes.  No matter how I tried to exhaust myself, there was still more to pull up from under my many failures, like a scarf of near infinite length from a cheap magician’s hat.  I kept expecting to find myself spent, holding an unattached corner, but instead the yellow just gave way to red then green and blue.  However low I fall, I hit bottom with the rock of my willpower as companion, and there it was again, giving birth in my unmoving motion to a small euphoria that grew until it was about to dwarf guilt and shame.  Before it could, though, before I reached that moment where everything is so clear, at three o'clock I stopped to cook dinner, to try and make amends.  I will be better to the people who care about me.

I guess the other thing about channeling my energy into tasks which are perhaps not particularly prestigious is that I want desperately to excel at something.  I squander talent and opportunity with stunning efficiency.  When I can exicute a simple task with dignity, I remember what it was like to feel that golden touch emanating in more useful directions.  How can it be wrong to want to be reminded of what it feels like to accomplish?

She came home while I was mixing up the batter for the frittata, veggies in the pan, parsnips sliced and roasting in the oven.  I was so exited about my ninety minutes.  I am not a runner, after all. 

“An hour and a half?  That is not okay.  That is not reasonable.”

“I think it’s fine.  People who run marathons or whatever go way longer than that.”

“Fern, it’s a kind of eating disorder to exsersize all the time.  90 minutes, I’m sorry, no, that is not reasonable at all.”

Later last night, I was doing something on the computer, and I had occasion to exclaim under my breath, “argh, I said submit, motherfucker.”

“Fern, you are manic, settle down.”

“No, I’m not.  I’m annoyed.  Not everything I do is a pathology.”

“Yes it is.”

Why I Love Abigail, or, Nothing is More Hilarious Than Mental Illness

My camera has been broken now for a couple of weeks.  There is nothing I can do about it, the warranty is in a storage unit in Ohio.  I can’t afford to replace the stupid thing for a few months at least.  Meanwhile, the most luscious light I have seen in ages comes pouring through the leaves, setting all this green aglow.  The trees take a deep breath and prepare to change into their formalwear.  Back from window shopping with Abby, I fell into a deep funk, precipitated mostly by realizing the camera I want to buy doesn’t exist, but then my sadness bled into other ideas.  If I can make a record of the beauty that has been, I can take it with me, I can get my bearing.  When I can’t take pictures, everything good seems to be slipping through my fingers.  The sun sets off the wood grain on that log just so for only a half an hour today, I watch it dance across and then slip off.  Tomorrow the sun will have sunk a bit lower, everything will be different, it is gone.  Explaining this to Abby, I began to cry.

“My god, honey, I never really noticed your bipolarity so much before.  I would like to point out, for instance, that you are freaking out right now about The Idea Of Time.”

It’s all in the delivery, friends.  I nearly wet myself laughing.  My psyche is bizarre, it needs to be mocked.

“Fern, can I cook you something?  Fajitas?  Forbidden Chocolate Explosion topped with fennel seeds and Chocolate Lucky Charms without the marshmallows?  Anything, seriously, I’m all yours.”

“No, I can’t eat, food is gross.”  Wait wait wait, I’ve heard that before.  Nice try.  You haven't eaten all day, damnit, let her make you something.   “Ah, some hot chocolate would be nice.”

“I’m on it.

“Oh, check this out, we even have cream.  Oh, baby, get ready for some homemade whipped cream.  It’s weird that you are so sad now, when you were so happy this morning, I mean, you skipped into the shoe store, remember?”

“Uh huh.”

“And you were, like, trying on all those silly shoes, dancing around in stripper boots, getting me to try those red things on, you were exuberant, you glowed, I mean, this happened so fast.”

“I know, I am who I want to be when I'm manic.  It’s worth it, on balance, to cry about The Idea Of Time every now and again, if that's the cost of being on top of the world occasionally. I feel like I’ve made that choice, I’m okay with it.  Frankly, I feel sorry for people who aren’t me.”

“Huh.  I can see that.  Although, I’ve got to say, I, for one, am grateful for the passage of time.  Seriously, if the sun never moved, I would cry.”

“True.”

“And you know, you can think about it as an infinite stream of moments passing by, but it's also an infinite stream of moments coming towards you.”

“Yeah, I know, but look at what the light is doing right now.  I should be taking pictures of that.  Early fall is the best time of year for photography. The sun is so low, making wonderful contrasty shadows everywhere, but everything is still verdant and it all just shines, just screams out to be immortalized.  By the time I have a camera again-  Wow, this is so rich.”

“I whipped the hell out of the cream.”

Perfect

Some days, too much joy wells up in you, and it seems so impossible but inevitable that everything you’ve ever seen, everything you see or don’t see now, is quivering with secrets to give you.  All the places you’ve been makes sense.  There is nothing for it but to skip and run, singing tunelessly under your breath all the while.  You could not stop bouncing if you wanted to.  Who would?  You don’t. 

It is the best afternoon to drive long miles over mountains lush with trees about to turn, a dancing fool even with your ass in the seat.  You are paying less attention to the road than is generally suggested, but you are invincible, after all.  It is contagious, you will do something insane tonight.  Why not make a spectacle of yourself, show them how exquisite it can all be if they will just let it.

She is too wise for you, keeps you tethered in.  The pace she sets is subtle, so you refrain from embarrassing her.

Driving back is good.  The thin winding ribbons of road become anonymous in the dark, you could be anywhere.  You are everywhere.  The bike path was like this at night, your light so weak.  If you hit a deer it will kill you, no question.  Slow down.  You don’t slow down.  When the bugs come thick you pedal faster through their gritty fog, striving, baptized in phosphorescent blood.  You want the whole world, you want it now.

Arrive, talk, they say you are glowing, then everyone else goes to bed.  A few steps out the door and you are away among trees.  The moon is so white it burns through the canopy and cuts sharp leafy shapes on the floor.

It is not enough.  Your soul itches, unsatiated.

Walls

My camera is broken.

Could have predicted this, I guess, bought the floor model a year ago, god knows what retail abuse it suffered before I owned it.

It seems particularly bad timing, she and I were just getting used to each other.  Only now do I have access to a computer nice enough to make uploading what I take possible; lots of time on my hands, lots of beauty at my fingertips. This is the moment for defective equipment, of course.

It would have been Monday, walking in the woods, taking pictures of myself, of foresty scenes, when I remembered how the old camera used to sit in my hand, how a rectangle lived at the back of my eye, bracketing off pictures I needed to take, constantly.  I remembered too, how hard it was to take nature photos, how I preferred urban decay, human drama, how clean beauty consistently escaped me.   

This piece of land, though, is scarred from long years of changing human use: a smallpox graveyard, holes once basements, inexplicable rows of piled rocks.  Everywhere lay still straight former foundations and lichen covered curves with a past purpose more obscure, meandering these days along paths before disappearing sharply into the underbrush.  I find myself wondering most about these last, if they constrained sheep once, if they existed only to be built, a tangible task for someone then stuck in a now long silent mind.   Two centuries later, maybe three, countless Boy Scouts have passed with the obliviousness endemic to crowds, and I stand transfixed, fumbling, the light all wrong.

Adam tells me New England has enough stone walls to go to the moon and back.  The crumbling architecture on these 450 acres alone must reach somewhere impressive.  I'm impressed, anyway. 

I had visions of extracting the intersections of hope and defeat, of finding some new small perfection here, of showing you.

The first time I quit taking pictures, it was because my camera got stolen and I couldn’t afford to replace it.  The same thing seems likely to happen now.  My heart says the thing is irreparably damaged, without any real knowledge to indicate one way or another.  Poverty does that, wears down our voices, our visions, any little logistical complication becomes an insurmountable obstacle.

A Mind for Paper Cranes

Abby hates ideas. 

She didn’t always know this about herself, but has been figuring it out over the last year.  I am sympathetic to being wary of valuing theory over practice, but I do love me some theory.  Sometimes I dream of drowning happily in hypotheticals.  To be honest, though, when I’ve had the opportunity, the isolation chafes and I run screaming to some manual labor.

Her new self definition surprised me.  In college we took many of our classes together, usually two a semester. I loved discussion in classes with Abby best of all, because this girl combines irreverence and passion like no one I’ve ever known.  Talking to her, old pieces are hilarious, ridiculous, meaningful, but most of all, relevant.  Abby’s not just the first one to say the emperor has not clothes, but she does so with complete openness, with no malice whatsoever towards those of us inadvertently playing at the charade.

The three of us sat in their hot tub last night, stars and trees above, the wood stove keeping the half barrel nicely in the mid nineties.  We talked about our childhoods, strange how little I’ve told them.  I realized at the Hootenanny that Eli didn’t know I’d been institutionalized at 14, nor do any of my other fiends from that era.

The conversation turned to the Yiddish Volk from which Abby is lately returned, to Mensa, to books we have recently read.

“So, I picked up this book on homesteading, which is something Adam and I are pretty interested in, we read a fair number of these things.  This one, though, was, like, somebody’s thesis, I guess, and it was just a bunch of categories into which homesteaders could be put, and then expounding on those categories.  Y’know, the tell you what they are going to tell you, then they tell you, then they tell you what they told you.  I hate that shit.  I want to read about how exactly one particular family gets water or heats their house, or makes cheese or whatever, not a bunch of definitions some girl made up... 

“...My favorite books are cookbooks, origami books, and Yiddish English dictionaries.  Once you read a novel, you are done with it, you know?.. 

“...I always hated writing papers in college.  I could do it, I always got a’s and b’s because they were grammatically and structurally correct, but I never had any *ideas*...”

We went inside after a half hour or so; made a German pancakes from the CSA apples and one of the beloved cookbooks.

This morning, I went out for one of the walks I am failing to make a daily habit, and noticed a red and white crane sitting on the steps.  I’d planned to take pictures of a small pier jutting into a dried pond I’d found along an overgrown path last night, but I was entranced by this geometric litter.  My camera and I don’t quite get along yet, I miss the control I had over my manual silver gelatin baby. 

I spent what must have been close to an hour fiddling with the few options and the light and my position and the software and deleting everything to head back out again for more pictures; all the while thinking about the intersection of facts and ideas, how sometimes they intertwine pleasantly but other times are best consumed as separate dishes.

Sing it with me now, Johnathan Richman style: Whoa-OH, New England!

Massachusetts has got the small scale agriculture thing down.  My household will eat all of the above produce less than a mile from where it was grown.  Every week, we get a similar haul, including cut flowers and copious fresh herbs; all varying, of course, with the seasons.  The world comes close to falling apart sometimes, but if you can take an few minutes to pick cherry tomatoes and swiss chard with your neighbor, the pieces fit together. 

Adam thinks joining a CSA is one of the best things we can do to promote homeland security.  If our food is grown locally, a gasoline shortage cannot threaten us with starvation.  At the very least, I like knowing that my physical nourishment promotes strength in the community and gives health to the soil it came from.  Look at that table again and tell me it doesn’t reaffirm your faith in the redemptive power of beauty.

I can’t emphasize this enough:  get a membership at your local Community Supported Agriculture farm.  Do it now.