Greetings from Griefland

I read this piece last night at the very first Story Lab Chicago.  It was such a great night and I had a fantastic experience doing a live show for the first time.  It's a little tough posting this here, because I wrote it to be read out loud and I think a lot is lost without hearing it live, but for my friends and family who couldn't make it to the Black Rock, here's what I did:

“Grandpa died.” 

I have wandered into my brother’s dining room late Thanksgiving morning, blinking against the sunlight into the middle of an earnest conversation between my little nieces:

“Grandpa B died!” says Claire, age three and a half .  She takes a scoop of oatmeal and lets this fact settle over her younger cousin Evie.  When you’re three and a half, there are few opportunities to be the authority on things…Claire is taking this opportunity and rolling with it full speed.

Camping Alone

Last night, I read this during the open mic at Story Club Chicago. It was the very first time I've ever done a live performance of something I wrote that wasn't part of a class.  It went really well and I'm excited to make my billed-reader debut at Story Lab at Black Rock Pub on January 19th.

“Looks like its going pretty good now.  I was worried for a minute there.”

These Sudden Ends in Time Must Give Us Pause

Somewhere between three and five hours after writing my last post, my dad died suddenly.

In the bizarre grief world that followed, my words haunted me. The fact that as I was blithely typing away about the little time we have on this Earth and reassuring a former classmate that all was well, my father was living his last hours, alone and far from home.

Even though he had no reason to know his time was short, my dad was a morbid bastard. My brothers, sister and I planned his funeral services from handwritten instructions on paper from his familiar and favored yellow legal pads. A teacher of literature, he had chosen poems for my brother and I to read. For me, it was Year's End by Richard Wilbur, which I post here in memory of him and in honor of all of the students he touched.

Year’s End by Richard Wilbur : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

Don't Wait Too Long

I tore out this picture of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan from last week's New Yorker and tacked it up above my desk. 

I did this for two reasons. 

Then/Now

October in Chicago has been sunshine and honeycrisp apples in oatmeal and a slow easing into the weather change, like wading into a lake. 

That girl running on the lake path today, singing this under her breath?  That was me.





I follow Tavi's style blog. I get this weird pleasure from her posts extolling the virtues of Sassy Magazine, Hole and the movie Heathers. I was her age when all of that stuff was breaking, and one part of me is freaking out, feeling old and bewildered at how much time has passed. The other part of me is vowing not to miss out on Doc Martins this time around.

Dreamlife

I need to quit sleeping so much. 

I wigged myself out this morning with a two-part dream in which a little girl, about 7 years old, killed the Pope (oddly, JP II, not Benedict) and all of the cardinals and nuns standing nearby.  She walked up to him wearing a grey schoolgirl uniform and a beret, gave him a sweet hug and when she pulled away, he was a dried up, shrunken corpse.  All of his attendants dropped dead simultaneously. They were laid out, their skins like a blackened banana all around the outdoor altar we were gathered around.

The second part of the dream took place in a mansion or a compound.  I was trapped there with several other people, who decided to start eating the pets when the food got low.  I rescued Andromeda, Odin and a gray Burmese that was almost hairless.  All three of them went into the same cat carrier, and I walked through the streets with them, promising them that I'd never let anyone kill them. The new cat could talk, she told me she was scared.

Sleep is my drug of choice.  I didn't want to wake up this morning and deal with the logistics of attending a wedding in the suburbs tomorrow with only enough money to either rent a car OR spend the night...not both.  So I kept going back to sleep and to the creepier, more desperate choices of the dream world. 

September, je t'aime

Today was one of those weird days where you can see the moon in broad daylight.  Staring at it, I felt like an alien who had landed here, taking in the skyscrapers against the clear sky and wondering where it all ends up.

September's over.  I'm back at my desk in my treehouse (or, as I sometimes call it, the Kit Kat Club)  The computer situation is partially...mostly solved.  I've been ripping out recipes for braised pork shoulder and spiced cakes and pasta dishes heavy on mushrooms and red wine.  Looking forward to October, to writing my damn book and to hot apple cider with whipped cream.

Technical glitch aside, writing here every day has been great, great fun and good practice for me.  I may not be back every day, but if a week goes by without a post, by all means -- give me the business.  Sitting down and forcing myself to write something, anything before midnight comes has been a better exercise than I anticipated.

Big shout-out to JP at Buttered Noodles for hitting the big 3-0 (posts) today, too.