tuckova

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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.

Practical Math

For Easter we dyed a whole carton of eggs which white eggs are not always easy to find here but we found a whole carton of them and dyed them with fantastic colors and then ate one just to see of course and took the rest to the cottage and Saturday night the Easter Bunny who had had perhaps a bit too much of the stuff with the human face hid the eggs all around the inside of the cottage, had to hide them inside because there was a snowstorm outside, and left a note telling Squire he had to find all eleven (because 12 made - 1 eaten = 11 left; Easter Bunny does math real good!) before he could get any of the chocolate; Sunday morning he was hunting and hunting and only found nine, which is amazing, because the cottage is like 9x9 feet and nearly no furniture. How hard can it be to find 2 eggs? The Easter Bunny in mufti was counting on her fingers frantically: one in the coat pocket, one in the tool box, one in the... no, we found all those! So we all got dressed and the fire was tended to and glasses were donned and the eggs were hunted ... but to no avail. Then Friar pointed out that a carton of eggs only has 10 in it here. HAD SQUIRE FOUND ALL THE EGGS? SHOW YOUR WORK.

Saying Goodbye to Antony

It's interesting how the focus has been on him for so long. How he came to you, how he won you, how he was changed by you, how he felt when you left. Not left: abandoned. I'm quoting. You kissed him awake and he listened to you leave. And that's all that gets talked about, and while that's certainly a good story, a classic, one for the poets, it's not entirely fair, is it.

Like take how they never talk about how he came to you; it's like he just was suddenly there. Like he arrived from nowhere. Like it's not possible that you wanted him to come to you, called him: none of it was your idea. This ties in to the "conquering" idea which has always vexed you; that and the "winning" -- you are not some prize, dammit.

And it's always like he arrived with nothing but his pain and his past with which to barter. You had your own pain, a point nobody likes to consider. The truth is: you both had things that you needed so badly you'd decided you'd never get them. You both were well-covered in tarnish to hide the imperfections: his dented pride, your gouged heart. And because you both knew the truth about yourselves, it was easy to see the truth about each other. They make like you healed him and you like to think that's true but you didn't walk away empty-handed by a long shot. Spit and cloth and ashes from letters you burned long ago, and he handed your heart back to you; not repaired because it can't be fixed, but no longer something you had to close your fist around to hide.

Or they talk about him hearing you go. One presumes there were stairs to be descended. He listened to the music of your footsteps as you left. Well: what was he supposed to do? He's not stupid after all, and sobbing after you is the one thing that would have sent you off sooner. Without wishing to discount how hard it might have been to stand there, clenching a jaw muscle or two, being stoic, it is a lot harder to go downstairs knowing you're doing the right thing but also still having your eyes full of tears. And you couldn't look back because then he would have seen you cry; it cuts both ways and it's not like it was easy.

It's hard to let go completely, and probably you never will: It feels like letting go would mean denying it meant anything, and it did, it did, it did. The goal is to be honest about it, not encapsulate it in a caricature, and yet button it down somewhere so it doesn't look at you all the time with its what if? eyes. What if you had stayed? What if staying had been what was meant to be, instead of leaving?

We talk about the past like we knew where it was headed just because we know where it ended. We say something wasn't meant to be, because that's how it isn't, now. If you had stayed with him, he would not have stayed in love with you. He was prepared for you to leave because whatever he said, he wanted you to go. Anyway, that's what you tell yourself.

most beautiful when unbroken

I am (nearly) forty years old and I still rarely make eggs without getting a teeny bit of shell in there somewhere. My friend says cooking, for her, is like editing for me: a compulsion. And here I am leaving grocer's apostrophes of eggshell all over. Hopeless. This morning for breakfast I had zucchini and eggs and potatoes; the crisp edges of properly fried zucchini mask the eggshell, though I think miraculously this morning I made an omelet without breaking any more egg than was absolutely necessary. I was singing while I stirred in the potato: "Any weird you can cook, I can eat weirder, I can eat any food weirder than you!" and I'm sure Ethyl Merman rolled over in her grave, but maybe she was dancing along.

Yesterday, I think it was yesterday, I made rice. "A scant cup. A scant cup. A cup that is scant. That cup's scant. That cup can't." WHY. Some people talk all the time to prevent their brains from starting that pesky business of thinking but it's like I'm treading water in my brain sometimes to stop myself from floating.

Since I don't walk Squire to school anymore, I am no longer terrorizing the neighborhood with my early morning outbursts, standing in the middle of the sidewalk laughing because I remember something outrageously funny or chatting myself up in my phony French accent. I'm sure everybody's much happier. Nobody needs to see my particular brand of crazy before eight a.m. On Mondays when I go to the high school, the old ladies on the tram all love me 'cause I give them my seat when the pig men don't, and then they (the ladies) always want to talk to me, with their gold teeth and purple tints and whack makeup. They know they've spotted one of their own in the making. Last week one of them was nodding at me the whole way home, in other words giving me much more positive feedback than your average high school senior, and I wanted to give her my cheery smile but frankly it was all too awful in my head and I just couldn't. When she got off the tram she patted my hand and I realized I was crying. Oh, my old ladies, the mascara is roping down my cheeks and I am closer than I think.

Last week was entirely too long. If the weekend hadn't come when it had, I think drastic action would have been taken. I have high hopes for this week, though. Not least because the Teletubbie House of Pain video makes me confident there must be some real good in the world.

subject line from "White Dwarfs", a perfect poem by Michael Ondaatje.

oh words, you are so delicious

I must enjoin you stay on this course! Cleave fast; it is sanctioned.

boom boom boom boom

The boomerang is one of the coolest toys ever. Part of the reason that the boomerang is a cool toy is that it wasn't originally a toy but a tool.  Not a tool like that guy you dated in college but a real tool, I mean one that was good for something. A boomerang went out and killed your dinner, which I have just confirmed is true because I looked it up. The European ones apparently weren't meant to come back to you which is sort of not all that surprising but that's not what I'm talking about.

So boomerangs are cool, they're sort of exotic and foreign but not entirely unfamiliar. They go and out do things for you. They can bring home the bacon and they also, apparently, play music if you know how to hold them right. They're not exactly doing those things FOR YOU because they're not servants, you know. They do what they do because it's their nature. You send them out and they do what they were made to do and I guess you could say that basketballs were made to go through hoops but if you don't think a boomerang is cooler than a basketball then I don't even know why we're talking. A boomerang is a kerjillion times cooler than any ball that you bounce, throw, or pass, and it's even cooler than a weapon that's just a weapon because a knife only wants to cut stuff including your fingers if you aren't careful but a boomerang can hang out in the field with you on a lazy windless day going out and back, like a hawk without jesses.

I want to use words like elegant and sleek but in a way these fall flat. Of course you can get some cheap plastic thing but we are people of taste and plastic offends us so let's talk about real boomerangs, old school. They are so beautiful to touch, to run your finger along that edge and know that this curve here, where all you want to do is touch it, run your finger along how smooth it is and this thing that you can barely stand to stop touching is the very thing that will make it come back to you. I mean, if you throw it right.

And of course boomerangs come back if you throw them right, if you're not a big disgrace to the Aborigine race. The boomerang wants to come back to you. It wants to rest in your hand again, to feel that it's gone forth and done what it was meant to do and now your lovely long fingers are running along that curve again and that was so good, that freedom going forth and that arc of longing and that return home.

But maybe you are too afraid the boomerang won't come back. Maybe you're not ready for boomerangs. Maybe you should start with yo-yos, you know. Something with strings attached.