tuckova

how does your garden grow

So I had over two weeks of feeling like the saddest bag of mostly salt water ever, convinced that I was entirely alone behind a wall of sorrow, or alternately convinced that I was within a web of equally inarticulately tormented people and the whole world was going to hell. I felt like a mouse running uphill on metal, scrabbling and desperate and hopeless. I was somewhat less than delightful to be around, I expect. Then I remembered that feeling that way is really, really boring, and I slept for about 14 hours and then I forced myself through some steps on a "to do" list and then I felt better; it was just in time for my birthday and I'm sure we're all very grateful that I managed to ring in a decade with a modicum of self-respect. Now I'm feeling quite nearly chipper, all things considered, and they have been.

So, hm. We went to the cottage. Some photos are here. I pulled up about 200 dandelions because I don't want the neighbors to entirely hate us but otherwise we're letting the garden go a little wild to see what all will grow, instead of trying to cut it into some shape when we don't know what shape it might already want to be. First of all, it keeps us from being robbed like the neighbors on both sides of us. Secondly, we may have some beauty already there that we've overlooked. Like: we just realized we have tulips. Everything is a metaphor for something.

cup your hands

This cup with its damage. Knocked down, swept off the table; it was probably an accident. I don't remember the noise it made when it fell, when it shattered, though I know how it sounded because I hear it in the silence when I can't sleep. The frowny mouth open in its "oh no" shock and the cup falls, bounces, and then kkkksssssh.

 

The only cup I had, the only vessel, coffee and tea and juice oh my love. Damaged and irreplaceable. I set the pieces out and numbered, accounted. Step one, step two, and glue and glue. Pieces of the handle never to be seen again but I glued what I could and held it together. The glue dried. It held water. I wrap my hands around it now and it feels like more of a gift for having nearly lost it, hold it tight, precious.

 

You who want to talk about how it broke and when; you who want to talk about why I used the glue I did; you who wonder why I didn't throw it out; you who think I could learn pottery and make a new cup; you who, yoo-hoo. You call me and I can hear you but I am disinclined to listen, with my hands around my cup, its lacework of cracks are a map of my history now, and the steam rises from the tea in a beautiful cloud through which I imagine I can see the future.

one problem

One problem with thinking about doing something is that even if later you decide that you're not going to do it, even if later you decide it would be a bad thing or even a Very Bad thing, even if you're totally convinced that you ought not do that thing, the problem is: you already thought about it. You put it on the table at some point and there it is on the table forever and always and even if some part of your brain knows it's total poison that part of your brain has to constantly be informing your hands that just because it's on the table doesn't make it potato chips and you cannot either eat just one so just don't even start. Don't even. But you put it on the table once. But it's still a really bad idea. No, really it is.

mostly true

I was nice to him because he was with you, liked him because you liked him. When you broke up I lost you both.
***
While you were feeding quarters to the jukebox so you could dance with her like you used to, she asked if she could sleep at my place, just for a week or so.
***
Watching him wave and make monkey faces as the train pulled away, and then listening for two hours about how handsome he was, how much you loved him. Eating a sandwich and listening, listening, listening.
***
When you went to get the drinks, he said I was a witch for what I did to him. He said when he touched your hair he pretended it was mine.
***
I was talking about how much I hate your wife, the things you say she does to you. When I looked up your daughter was sitting across from me.
***
When you left the room. The things I heard. The things I learned. I am tired of being another woman.

school in nature and books

Pretty much every year the elementary grades spend one week of school out "in the nature"-- it's camp, basically. Squire's first grade teacher didn't take them because she was afraid they'd all drown in the lake or get eaten by bears (that one did wonder for the fears of a number of students, I am sure, since she saw no situation without seeing a positively Gothic ending). But anyway, Squire's enjoyed the camps he's been to: he comes home with a dozen adventure stories, rich with the smell of campfires and unwashed boy.

He decided he didn't want to go this year because they're combining the two fifth grades and he doesn't like the other fifth graders and he particularly dislikes their teacher. He decided so firmly that he didn't even bring the forms home, so the first I heard of it was at the parent/teacher meeting when everybody was talking like they knew all about it. Awhoops: CAUGHT.

So anyway. The last week has been kind of a battle of him trying to put his foot down and me insisting that he doesn't have a leg to stand on. It is school. If he doesn't go there, I still have to send him to school every day to be babysat by the fourth grade teacher, and he still has to do the work. So. I've told him if he has a compelling reason, a logical articulated reason, then I will consider his REQUEST to not go, but he cannot REFUSE to go on the basis of "don't feel like it". We've gone rounds.

Don't get me wrong; I am not unsympathetic to disliking people. I myself dislike wide swaths of humanity. It's just, I ground my dislike in actions and outcomes. I dislike people who drive through crosswalks without checking for pedestrians because they hit me. I dislike people who are sloppy because other people have to clean up after them. I dislike teachers who talk about everything in terms of fear and danger because they frighten children into paralysis. So if he can say he dislikes this other teacher because of some action that has affected him in some way, I am behind him. But I suspect that the reason he doesn't like her is because she is the teacher of the rival class, which is the elementary school equivalent of being the coach of the opposing team: they make good lightning rods.

Since the classes will be combined next year, the sooner the two groups of students get over this rivalry and start learning to exist in each other's spheres (and respect each other's teachers) the better. I wish I knew more sports cause I bet there's a handy metaphor in their lexicon somewhere. Here: Imagine an apt sports metaphor for me, and I'll meet you in the next paragraph.

Anyway, so today he came home and said he'd decided to go because however bad the other kids would be, it wouldn't be as tedious as my constant harping on logic and reason, and the kids from his class would probably be enough fun to balance it out, and resisting it was taking the opportunity for fun out of it. He is smart, no?

So.

In other news, we're reading "To Kill a Mockingbird" which is just a great book to begin with and is enhanced now because I'm really enjoying Squire's interpretations of it as we go. Understand: this is a child who has not lived in the States, so on the one hand he's reading it as a foreigner would: it describes a past world that is not the world he knows or even an ancestor of a daily world he knows. On the other hand, he goes to school with a bunch of Roma kids, so he does understand what racism looks like (and xenophobia too of course) and the amount of sense it makes and what it's like to batter your head against it. And then plus there's sentences that are so simple and delightful, and the secondary characters (especially Calpurnia and Miss Maudie, who I would like to have run my house and garden respectively)-- they're like snapshots of a person you know or you'd like to know better, and it's a pleasure to read a book like this, that makes my head hum.

listening to Regina Spector

hey remember that time when I left flowers on his doorstep
hey remember that time when I skipped over every crack
hey remember that time when I only slept 3 hours a day
hey remember that time when

No, nobody remembers that time, so I can reframe it any way I want. It's not like "no witnesses" was my policy; more like my default position. I mean, here's the thing: if you start re-inventing yourself at age 12 and manage to do it consistently every 5 years or so, by the time you're 40 it's like nothing matters anymore because nobody remembers anything. It's like reverse vampires: you grow old and everybody else is young and you have more and more memories and more wrinkles to match and everybody around you is young and idealistic and you feel like you except nobody knows the stories. Remember how you linked arms and sang Gilligan's Island to drown out stupidity. Hey remember that time when they almost got off the island. Nobody remembers that anymore. Nobody remembers that you once wrote letters, nobody remembers what postage stamps look like, nobody remembers how you put your scent on the paper, as a clue.

And nobody remembers who you were except every few years one of them writes to apologize for not treating you better when they were only treating you how you deserved, oh misery are you so sad tonight. Nobody remembers but they remember bad, by which I don't mean badly; remember how it felt when you thought things mattered, oh those were the days. My friend.

Remember when you liked people without wondering if you'd miss them when they died. Remember when you met people for a minute. Remember when watching shit unfold was mysterious, when you couldn't see where the story was going before it started. Remember when you thought it would go on forever.

No, but see, what I said was...

So I decided to start writing to businesses that annoy and please me, instead of just being annoyed and pleased all on my own. I was unaware that instead of resolving the issue, it would ratchet up the level of annoyance.

Dear ProFlowers customer service,
I appreciate updates about specials and seasonal offers and I would prefer not to cancel the e-mail update option. However, I object to the use of my first name in these promotions. You aren't talking to me, but to a mass mailing list, and in no case are we friendly enough that you should use my first name; similarly, I don't like the automatic first-name referral to the person for whom I've purchased flowers. It isn't impressive that you have the technology to plug in the names of users that have accessed your services before: it's distressing that you think that inserting a name makes a more effective pitch when you can't be bothered to address the target with respect. It doesn't seem like it would be that much more difficult to use first and last names for both the purchaser and the recipient.

I appreciate the ability to order via the internet and I appreciate the quality of your product. I do wish I didn't wince at the e-mails; it creates an unpleasant association in my mind for what is otherwise a reliable service and a fine product.

--Anne Tuckova

Dear Anne,
Thank you for contacting ProFlowers. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience our mailings have caused you.
Thank you for your suggestion. I will forward this immediately to the appropriate department for further review.  We appreciate your feedback as it helps us to provide better service and more options for our customers.
Again, we are sorry for this inconvenience.

Sunday, Saturday, Friday, Today

A friend of a friend of mine is a gardener/landscaper/nature freak type person, and she came out to the cottage on Sunday to take the lay of the land and tell us what we could plant with our black thumbs that wouldn't die. I have had green thumbs that were a result of dyeing, but that's not the same. Still nobody finds that joke as funny as I do. ANYWAY. She gave some advice, we listened and were grateful. When she was leaving she mentioned the street where she works, which is the street where a different friend's husband works. "Oh," I say, "his son is my son's circus teacher!" And she says, "So you're the Anne that took M on the road trip across the States!" Yes, my friends, I live in a village.

At the cottage I was so unbelievably tired so early that I thought all the newly awakened insects were bearing malaria, and cast them glances of great aspersion, though they sluzzingly insisted they were harmless. I went to bed at an unheard-of 9:30 p.m.. When I woke at 5 it seemed suspiciously light, though Squire hushed me back to bed while he stoked the fire and made coffee. After the coffee I realized that when spring springs forward, it not only awakens the bugs but also advances the clocks. Which we had neglected to change at the cottage, and which do not change themselves. So. I'm not saying a 10:30 bedtime on a Saturday night and a 6 a.m. wake-up the following morning doesn't mean I am an old, old woman: it just means I'm not quite ready to take my teeth out before bed.

Oh, and before we went to the cottage I picked a total fight with Friar. He is a difficult person to pick fights with but I gave it my level best. I kept him up 'til about 2 a.m. Friday blazing my tirade and then started fresh on Saturday morning like I'd just had my eyelids slit and was ready to go all in. Childhood pain was invoked and also a moderate dollop of pure, grown-up nastiness. I fight in an even tone, I rarely veer off the topic, and I give my opponents time to finish their sentences, but my hand is never off my sword. Sorry, but I think weapons metaphors might work better than boxing, about which I know one movie's worth. Fortunately for Friar, he is an expert parrier, having studied his Agrippa, and so by the time we were walking through the woods to the cottage we were all laughing and well. And in my case, getting ready for sleeping sickness.

And what else? Only six more weeks at the high school; I went today to tell them ever so politely "never again". If I ever learn that when I say "never" the first time I mean it, I'll probably be able to solve all the world's problems with all the brain space I have left over to learn new stuff.

taste of blood

I see someone I thought I knew (however vaguely -- still: thought I knew) doing something so entirely counter to what I would do in those circumstances that though what I want is to know if I don't understand the circumstances, though what I want is to know how that could be the decision, though what I want is ever and always to be informed, to understand, to know better, I am afraid that this difference in approach is a drastic difference in morals, and that knowing that would mean I never knew them, however vaguely. And so I bite my tongue and watch and wait and later maybe when nobody's looking I'm not there anymore because I probably was never really there to begin with, since it wasn't where I thought it was, anyway.

421 to 279

If you are the sort of person to whom a totally hot brilliant woman could say, "Hey do you want to come on an all-expenses-paid trip to Greece for which the main goals would be: play games, drink booze, look at pretty stuff, and sleep late," and you would say, "No," then you are the sort of person to whom yours truly is married. Who are you people and what the aitch-ee-double hockey sticks is up with you? I don't get it. Sometimes it is hard to be a boomerang.

Hey so I helped certain wise people color hair this weekend. Does anybody else find the whole "dying/dyeing" thing funny? I mean particularly after Easter and with the whole "the eggs are dying" thing? Just me? Well alrighty then. Apparently I think I am immortal, and therefore I have Wicked Witch of the West fingers. It is stupid and I know it is stupid but it wasn't a fatal mistake, and I spent the weekend saying things like "I'll get you my pretty!" which was totally funny to everybody and not just me, every. single. time.

I forgot to tell you about a hundred things. I'm sorry about that. One of the most important has to do with coming to terms with my limitations and how acknowledging that I can't do something is the most soul-wrenching fact to voice, but once it's over it's the most liberating thing ever, because it means I don't have to worry every day about getting caught being as weak. When you play Scrabble it's normal to want to save your tiles for a seven-letter triple word score, but unless you're a master it's easier to give that up. Then you get to play with the tiles you have, and then you win. It's a whole thing.