tuckova

November on Her Way to Winter

-by Deborah (Gottlieb) Garrison

Here we go again,
up the narrow stair
of fall, and I'm full of nerve,

have to have you, I'm looking for you
everywhere.  It's true
I like men too much, and when

I see one in the street
I used to know -- starting to be
bald, in a raincoat eight years old,

worry a lit fish swimming across
his face -- I could nearly wrap myself
around him, I'm all too ready....

But I'm sorry! It was for you
I meant to do these things, for you
to unbutton my blouse without a care--

Not so difficult, now the sun is tart,
the river the very color of cold,
November on her way to winter.

(I like this poem so much, and I had it posted once before on the old site, but I think it's worth looking at again.)

oh, Sylvia

Sometime in my early teens for a mercifully brief period of time I had the absolute delusion that my ability to take somewhat decent care of my sister totally qualified me as a babysitter and I went to work. I babysat regularly for the people across the street, who were California Jewish and that was pretty interesting, all that art and strange half-held ritual. There was another woman whose children I don't remember beyond the smell of their bedroom, sleep and urine, but I remember she called me Sarah Bernhardt. I liked it after the kids would go to sleep, wandering the rooms of the house, reading the spines of the books or flipping through the record collections, imagining I lived there.

One time I watched two children whose mother was, I think, recently divorced. She was going to a party. This was the saddest house I remember being in, not a home at all. There was a hole in the living room wall and someone had penciled above it "Sarah did this when she was mad." Sarah being the mother. Things went along okay until bedtime, when the boy completely snapped and decided he was going to kill me and his sister with a baseball bat. Let me tell you, you do not want a 15 year old in charge in this situation, because we are perfectly capable of making enough drama on our own and do not need help from genuine dramaticians. I tried to take the bat away a few times, got cracked on the arm pretty hard, and gave up. Using I guess hurricane logic, I locked myself and the sister in the bathroom and she fell asleep against me while he banged against the door with the bat. Naturally the mother had left no phone number where she could be reached. Eventually the boy fell asleep on the floor. I tucked the girl in bed and proceeded to think of ways to stay awake. There was a book with a black cover, with a hand seeming to rip through paper, holding or dropping a flower, which looked like it might do the trick. And it did; I stayed up all night reading.

The mother didn't come home til the next morning. The man who had driven her home drove me home, which was my first ride in an semi, which was interesting. I have absolutely no memory of what happened with the children that morning, but I'm pretty sure that that night was the end of my babysitting career. And that is the story of how I read "The Bell Jar".

not quite

You're just saying what it looks like to you, you're just riffing, making jokes, trading barbed wire tongue gossip. This one is an idiot trapped in a loveless marriage for fear of dying alone; that one is hopeless with the idea that love can make over the face of the beloved into something more useful than a mask; the other believes that belief is enough to transform the world. This one thinks that what it says is interesting while clearly everyone is wiping away their yawns; that one isn't even clever enough to understand the function of a thesaurus, much less a dictionary; the other hasn't learned the function of words to start with. You could rail against the world all night if left unchecked.

What's behind this of course is the illusion that while we're looking at this, that, and the other, people might fail to notice what was in fact clear way more than a paragraph ago: that you are less than what you mock; that what you are is nothing more than vinegar and salt, spooned onto others for entertainment value. You do not nourish. The poorer flavors you describe rise above sea level to majestic impression despite your sour evaluation, and you are left to float alone, as salt does. And vinegar and salt are insufficiently satisfying, which you mention as though it had nothing to do with you and your damaged taste.

we know your house so very well

We found a sleeping hedgehog at the cottage. It was not hibernating, just napping under some leaves. We wanted to plant some things in that particular place, so we moved the hedgehog who totally didn't fool us playing dead.

Narcissus bulbs are not a kind of lighting that makes you look particularly good.

Also, there is a difference between bulbs and tubers, which it will be possible to explain once I understand that you are not saying bulbous tumors.

So, happy anniversary Berlin. The Berlin Wall came down the same month that I moved to Japan, and I remember that as usual I made the whole trip much more fraught than it already was, having my wallet stolen and my passport, and let's see, trying to replace it at the embassy in San Francisco, which had just gone through a little bit of an earthquake. Good times. On the airplane, shiny new passport firmly in hand, I read about the Berlin Wall, and about the Velvet Revolution, and having just "discovered" Milan Kundera I had the odd conviction that my plane was going in the wrong direction. It took me another five years to get here, but the trip probably started then.

And happy birthday to Sesame Street. I do not remember a world without Sesame Street, though I understand they didn't start broadcasting until I was old enough to get some of it. Did you know that Jim Henson was the coconut cream piiiiiies guy? I do not remember or care where I was when I heard that Michael Jackson died, but when I heard that Jim Henson died I was sitting at the round table in the lobby of the language school where I was teaching in Kitakyushu, and I put my head on the cold formica table, ostensibly to keep it together, but then I wept and wept anyway. He taught me when I was little, he entertained me when I was older, and that he would not be around to quirkily illustrate my adulthood seemed really unfair. And I cried for the people who had worked with him, and for his children, because if he had influenced me so, what must he have been to them?

Yeah, I got nothing. Little bitlets. Leaves in gorgeous reds and yellows, making the world look like a Carcassonne board for a minute, beautiful, and then soggily carpeting the sidewalks after the too persistent and early rain. We are good; we are well.

hand me down my walking cane

I love editing, but it seems increasingly true to me that the things that make me really good at my job can make actual life with myself kinda hard for me sometimes. And I presume for other people, too, though I don't know. My friends seem to like me okay. Perhaps I choose friends who like hanging out with a person who can turn coal into diamonds; what do I know.

I mean: my mother sends me this adorable postcard from Turkey and tells me that turquoise comes from there, and I can't be all "That's nice!" or anything; no, I have to be totally ahem-ahem about it, because turquoise does not either come from Turkey and I see no reason to perpetuate mythology, particularly now that the internet is always open. I should point out that she's somewhat complicit in this ahem-ity, as (at least as I recall it) we were allowed to get up from the dinner table only for emergencies, and that "emergencies" extended to "consulting a reference work in the course of settling an argument". It may not have been that strict, but I remember running for the World Book more than once.

I come home from a night on the town and then send the people I just saw links to back up the facts I presented over the course of what was a perfectly lovely evening. See?! I'm yelling across the midnight internet. I was right!* I will first drink and then fact-check you under the table, is all I'm saying. On the plus side, nobody sends me "funny" email forwards anymore. Or political stuff either. If only for that reason, I don't think I'm going to change; I'm just observing that what is "giving up a cheap instant laugh for the prolonged thrill of learning and discovery" for me may come off as "a lot of furious knicker-twisting for no good reason" to people who think that it is fun to build a straw man and set it on fire.

I also send links to funny (thoroughly vetted) stuff, so you don't need to be scared to be my friend or anything. And I make good martinis, not least because I'm on a constant quest for the perfect one. Come over and help.

*ETA: If I was wrong? I will send you the links to show that I learned that you were right.

with his hands in the air

Each apartment in our building has its own little cellar space, about a 10x10 space with an infinite capacity for cobweb storage, and possibly also mouse habitation. Friday night we cleaned out the cellar. Well, sort of we did. We started cleaning it and then Squire shut the door with the keys inside, and so then we spent some time breaking down the door, and then we cleaned it some more, and then I realized I was sweeping a dirt floor, so we stopped. It was a whole-building thing, all of us down there in our grubbiest clothes, some wearing babushka headscarves (ala Russia, not ala Kate Bush) and groaning at the smell and the dust and the only-blame-yourself human habit of saving things we don't love until they are moldy and horrid. It was quite an evening. Some other cellar owners had piled their stuff right outside our door, so we couldn't actually take most of our stuff out of our room; we just stacked it neatly inside the door. The truck came today to pick it all up, and it was a moment of liberating excitement for me - soon, all this crap will be gone! - but then the truck got full before the movers got as far as our cellar. So we have neatly stacked piles of mouldering cardboard boxes and stuff now, yay.

I look very enticing with cobwebs in my hair, I have to say. And I think Friar REALLY enjoyed tearing the old wardrobe apart with basically a hammer and his bare hands (all our larger tools are at the cotthut). It turns out it wasn't the worst way to spend a Friday night, destruction and clearing away rubbish. I am comfortably sore today, the way you are when you strain your muscles doing Something Useful, like helping a friend move or waxing a floor or anything like that. It would have been better if we had actually had the stuff taken away, of course, but that part almost wasn't surprising. I haven't gotten that optimistic about life in the last week or anything. And I did the parts that I could do, which is perfectly fine.

how do you like what you have?

So, where were we? Oh, yes, my tragic sleeplessness. Well that seems to be over now YAY. It is funny how when I'm in a happy moment I am usually able to name it and enjoy it even though I am aware of its transitory soap bubble status, but when I'm unhappy it takes me a long time to figure out where it comes from, and in the meantime it's always what if it lasts forever this time? And then of course the moment it's over I'm like, oh yeah well of course. Of course I couldn't sleep; I was in a burning building.

Fortunately I have outstanding self-preservation and thus continue to go through the motions of removing myself from said burning building even when it all seems so hopeless, because some clever part of me knows that if I run, I will eventually be standing outside with all what's really important, what I have that I love, and we will have sooty faces maybe but we won't be dead or anything.

And you know, I don't mean possessions, but the people I love who really make it possible... no, that make it necessary to run. Because I am surrounded by expanding circles of awesomeness, and from the people I interact with daily to the people I only talk to a couple times a year, I am so extraordinarily lucky that I can only bear to think about it very rarely or my heart would explode. I live with an amazing pair of guys, I have friends that I see regularly, friends I see annually, and friends I've never met, and yet I know that each of these people has my back. There are couches around the world that I could distressed damsel-esquely collapse on, and those people who would hand me tissue and tell me jokes, and I know this is true not least because it is unquestionable that I would do the same for them. Gertrude Stein asked, "How do you like what you have?" and I have to say I like it really, really well. I have friends who will help me sift through my shit and laugh about it. I have people who know how to distract me from my own stabby moments by discussing stab binding. I have a sister I can call at 3 in the morning who will remind me that you cannot go wrong re-reading your favorite childhood books. And there I was, curled on the couch an hour later sniffling because Taran couldn't make pottery the way he wanted, and he had to move on... I felt nevertheless finally as right as... no, more right than rain.

I just mean to say: I know I am really lucky. I know I am so unbelievably blessed to have the life I have, to have so many people making that life rich and wonderful. I know that the moments of bliss, like the moments of despair, are just shifts in the wind, and that a good gust of laughter can blow away even the acrid smell of smoke from a building I didn't have to stay in, and the rest of the neighborhood is intact, because it's filled with good people. I'm counting you.

sleepless

And so it is like this: 4:30 in the morning and I have shoved at insomnia for an hour before admitting it won. Lying in the dark, trying not to toss and turn, playing the trick my grandmother taught me of counting all the body parts and how they were sleepy, unable to focus on a single muscle without also cataloging every injury, every insult.

Your toes are sleepy, I tell myself. Toes, you are very sleepy! And also he had no business telling me I was irresponsible for not finishing the project; we were moving across the country the next week and I think it was unreasonable to expect a seventh grader to make up sentences for 20 vocabulary words when her family is nearly off its hinges.

Insteps, you are sleepy; stay still and stop twitching. Think long relaxing thoughts! And Dennis standing at the foot of the bed and he's going to fucking kill me, rip me apart, and so again I am sleeping on the couch in the office where I work.

Heels, to heel. And the place where I passed out on the floor of the bathroom, cracking my head against the tiles, and they told me it couldn't be a gas leak because gas smells bad.

I'm not up to my knees, I'm not even at the fidgety parts yet, and why do I store so much that makes me sad, and what is it that wakes me at three in the morning and says let's think about all the bad places you've left instead of let's think of all the good places you went to.

Listen, I keep everything. I remember everything. On good days I am able to say that I got to live with a beautiful woman who made paper by hand and who had all of Leonard Cohen's recordings on reel-to-reel tapes that were copies of copies and scratchy from being loved so much; that my boss went out and got me McDonald's for breakfast and told me I was radiant even with office couch creases on my cheeks; that California turned out pretty well. But this month has been a month of sleeplessness, and remembering all the bad places I've slept is not the worst catalog I've got, but none of my catalogs are all roses either. Be patient with me. I know good things and I'll tell you them soon.

stair master masters the stairs

Every time I got to a staircase on Saturday I couldn't see the stairs. All I could see is the floor I was on and the floor below that I was going to and the giant falling place in between, swirling with danger. I could see myself falling and falling and then at least broken bones, words like crumpled and shattered. I made a system where I would explain to somebody nearby about the vertigo, an odd dizzy trepidation, which I have gotten before. Some of them just put my hand into theirs before I even finished explaining, and they would take me down the stairs while I stared at their shoulders or some other vague horizon and chanted don't look! down! in the rhythm of the descent. Squire took me downstairs, and my first boss when I moved here, and a doctor I knew for a while. Strangers, too. So many kind people, so much sweetness. It's embarrassing to have to keep telling people that there are some things you can't do. I can't go down stairs. The amount that it is embarrassing to tell is the same amount that it is liberating to say out loud, and I had to learn every time, and there were so many stairs.

Finally I was sitting at the top of the flight, above the stairs I couldn't bring into focus, waiting for somebody friendly to come along and hold my hand. Squire's most amazing babysitter, who is now a most amazing woman, came and sat down next to me as I finished my cigarette. I started to tell her how I couldn't see the stairs, how I needed help. And she said, you know, the stairs in this building all recede when they're not being used: you have to push a button to make the stairs come out. You probably just hadn't noticed because you'd been afraid to look. And she pushed it, and I looked down for the first time, really looked, and watched the stairs unfold below me. And then we walked down the stairs, and I laughed, brave and giddy.

Dear brain, I wish you would let me sleep past 4 a.m., but I thank you for waking me up laughing. And for giving me the best metaphors, all the time.

war, battle, skirmish: This is why we fight.

Listen, that I was never one to understand it
is part of the reason I never supported
waved, cheered, yellow-ribboned
the boys back home. There was too much
desperation, too much last option taken without
other options considered. But look: show me
a world without ghettos, show me
women lined up for their first vote, show me
something better after and I can understand then that
this is why we fight.

I am easily distracted by terms and thus my hate
for words like survivor and victim. Meanwhile,
nothing smells right in this room,
old copper onion stale sweet rot
everyone's lost something and everyone wants more,
one more moment of joy; she passes
the photo of a newborn baby and everyone touches
and weeps and orders another round of chemo
and I understand it goes beyond the self and that
this is why we fight.

It is more than I can summarize in ten lines because
it starts with the idea of stories, but yours
never goes beyond you, never counts the idea
of more than one narrative, never considers
who suffers, who could be saved,
who should be saved for, except if "who" is you.
It is more than missed birthdays that send me
reeling in tears from the room.
I can't explain, though I do understand that
this is why we fight.