Making the Heart Grow Fonder

When I have conversations about quarantine — which is, unsurprisingly, all the damn time — there is always a moment where I mention that I haven’t visited my family since February. (Presidents’ Day weekend, to be exact.) Whoever is in the conversation expresses some level of sympathy, and the conversation moves on.

I realized the other day that saying I haven’t visited my mother, brother, and sister since February doesn’t mean anything. I said it in April, said it in June … But some of the people I talk to maybe visit their families once a year, so my lament doesn’t hold any weight in their understanding, while it’s huge for me.

For the last several years, I’ve been visiting my family once a month. I’ve missed a month here and there, but generally, I’ve held my schedule. I visit because I love them and they are a few states away from me, and I miss them. I also visit because they love me and my being in the same place with them eases some of the tension in the air there. It gives us a chance to have conversations we don’t have over phone or email, let’s us do the regular maintenance requires on those ties that bind, gives us opportunities to laugh at foolish inside jokes, to look at old photos … and just be alive in the same space, together.

And I haven’t been to visit in five months. It’s starting to feel like a year. And the virus is still rampaging, and my job is staying virtual for the fall semester, so it might really be a year.

In these five months apart, I’ve missed each of their birthdays: first my sister’s early in lockdown, when we thought it might not last too long, then my mother’s, and just over a week ago, my brother’s. In about 6 weeks, my own birthday will be coming up. It’s on a Friday this year, so I would definitely have been spending it with them. My mother turned 84 last month.

Yes, I sound whiny. I am whiny. I know that I’m incredibly lucky. I am safe and healthy and working from home. My family is safe and healthy — even though my brother and sister are both officially “essential” and still have to leave the house and work. Our broader circle of immediate family are mostly safe and healthy (our Texas family is in the hot-zone with the virus creeping closer every day). I’m lucky. But that doesn’t mean I’m unscathed. I don’t make a lot of noise about what COVID is stealing from me, about the ways my life has changed since the start of lockdown, but that doesn’t mean I’m not feeling it.

Absence is purported to make the heart grow fonder. I suppose. But I’m already supremely fond of my family. All this absence is adding up to sadness and frustration.

I need one of my mother’s hugs.

I could use a great big waterproof hat.

There are for-sure some April showers on the way. And also, I’ve just been thinking this poem a lot:

John Had Great Big Waterproof Boots On

John had great big waterproof boots on
John had a great big waterproof hat
John had a great big waterproof mackintosh
And that said John is that
-A.A. Milne

It happens with surprising regularity that I have an A. A. Milne line (or twelve) in my head. Like an earworm. It is usually a line from one of three poems.

1) John and his great big waterproof attire, from which it is the final line of the poem that I find myself thinking on a loop.

2) The excellent and troubling-on-several-levels “Disobedience,” from which there is no specific line that repeats. I tend to have whole verses or large chunks of same running time after time in my head. A particular favorite bit might be:

James James
Morrison Morrison
(Commonly known as Jim)
Told his
Other relations
Not to go blaming him.

3) Or, finally, my most favorite of all the favorites, “Lines and Squares.”In the case of this delightful thing, I generally have to stop what I’m doing and recite the whole poem for myself. And that is what I shall do for you:

Lines and Squares

Whenever I walk in a London street,
I’m ever so careful to watch my feet;
And I keep in the squares,
And the masses of bears,
Who wait at the corners all ready to eat
The sillies who tread on the lines of the street
Go back to their lairs,
And I say to them, “Bears,
Just look how I’m walking in all the squares!”

And the little bears growl to each other, “He’s mine,
As soon as he’s silly and steps on a line.”
And some of the bigger bears try to pretend
That they came round the corner to look for a friend;
And they try to pretend that nobody cares
Whether you walk on the lines or squares.
But only the sillies believe their talk;
It’s ever so portant how you walk.
And it’s ever so jolly to call out, “Bears,
Just watch me walking in all the squares!”

After one of my long absences from blogging, March always brings me back, always reminds me how comfortable I am in this space, how much I enjoy connecting and sharing and learning here. Making it through the month always makes me feel as defiant and proud as Christopher Robin as he faces down the bears.

National Poetry Month starts tomorrow, and I am by no means ready. I think I’ve chosen a form. I think I’ve added my customary extra challenge. But I could wake up tomorrow and change my mind. I’m exhausted, which is how I always crawl into April. Should be interesting to see what NaPoWriMo dredges up out of me …

And that said John is that.

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It’s March, which means it’s time for the
13th annual Slice of Life Story Challenge!
Curious? Head on over to Two Writing Teachers
and see what the rest of this year’s slicers are up to!

The Lady and the Tiger

March is almost over. Another Slice of Life Story Challenge about to go into the history books. Today is also the birthday of my friend Heidi. And April starts National Poetry Month.  I thought of all that, and suddenly I knew I needed to repost a couple of very old posts.

Heidi is a musician. Her professional name is Heidi Sabertooth (hence the title of this post). Back in 2012, she embarked on a writing challenge just as I started the SOLS challenge for that year. Her challenge? Write, record, and post a song a day for 100 days. Seriously. And then she upped the ante on the challenge by undertaking to create a video for each song. Because she is clearly so very much more ambitious than I can ever pretend to be!

I interviewed her when she was almost halfway through her challenge. And she had chosen one of my poems to set to music, so the interview and the song were posted on the same day.

Beans and Rice: Power and Control is the 8-year-old post that led to the poem Heidi set to music. Catching a Tiger by the Tail is the interview with Heidi that includes the video of the song. And I’m still trying to do that, still trying to catch that tiger, still taking on the SOLS challenge every March, still pushing myself to write a month of poetry every April, still striving.

It’s been a good month of writing. A good month of priming the pump to get ready for the grueling challenge of April. I am, as I am every year, grateful to everyone who reads here, grateful to the wonderful team at Two Writing Teachers who keep this challenge going and hold this space year after year.

❤

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It’s March, which means it’s time for the
13th annual Slice of Life Story Challenge!
Curious? Head on over to Two Writing Teachers
and see what the rest of this year’s slicers are up to!

Getting by with a little help from our friends.

…

Rearranging my position
On this friend of mine who had

A little bit of a breakdown.
I said breakdowns come
And breakdowns go.
What are you gonna do about it,

That’s what I’d like to know … *

The all-important question that I won’t be asking anyone any time soon.

Had a troubling conversation earlier with a friend who is definitely entering cabin-fever-freak-out territory. She’s been home longer than I have and called me today to discuss some catastrophe options she has been debating with herself.

Let me just say here that discussing — in a level of painful detail — catastrophe options is not a thing I want to be spending my time doing out loud. It’s bad enough that I have these thoughts from time to time. I don’t need to say them into the cosmos.

My friend is really scared, and I feel for her. We are scared. Most of us, maybe especially here in New York City, are scared. That’s real. And the reality of it makes it hard to take on someone else’s fears along with our own.

I said this to my friend, and she laughed. She acknowledged that she’d had “a stress explosion” all over me. “But,” she said, “didn’t I also give you today’s blog post?”

And look at that. She did.

I don’t want my friend to be so scared. She’s having trouble being home alone for such an extended period of time. That’s a problem I’m not having, so I tried to help her think of ways to fill her time more effectively. What she really needs, of course, is not to be on lockdown. I can’t do that for her. I offered to spend time with her virtually, as long as that time wasn’t spent thinking of all the terrible things that could become realities. I definitely can’t do that for her. We’re going to try streaming movies together. I hope something about that experience helps her.

It’s hard to take care of people from a distance. But this is what we have. We have each other long distance. We have whatever ways we can reach out, whatever ways we can offer calm, whatever ways we can be a listening ear, whatever ways we can offer a welcome distraction. Whatever ways.

__________

* Paul Simon, “Gumboots” (Graceland)

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It’s March, which means it’s time for the
13th annual Slice of Life Story Challenge!
Curious? Head on over to Two Writing Teachers
and see what the rest of this year’s slicers are up to!

Who’s Zoomin’ Who?

More Zoom adventures. Last night it was storytelling, today it was poetry. I have been a sometimes-member of a poetry salon since the summer of 2014 when I had the good fortune to meet the creator of the salon when I was in Berkeley for my third VONA. The salon is a monthly gathering. Our excellent host invites a featured poet who leads a generative workshop, then the featured artist gives a reading, and then there’s an open mic.

It’s always wonderful. I’ve met so many amazing people through the salon. I was hesitant about going at first because I’m not a poet, but a) no one cared whether or not I was poet, b) who says I’m not a poet, c) the prompts and discussion can fuel many kinds of writing, not just poetry, d) could I please just get out of my way and let myself do things I enjoy already?

Today, we had the salon over Zoom. This meant the salon was much bigger than usual. We usually meet in someone’s home and the size of the gathering is dictated by how people can be comfortably seated in that person’s living room. But a virtual gathering allows for different options, and there were more than 60 people at the salon today!

And it was great. Some interesting writing came out of me today, and I may have an idea for my April 30/30. So, you know, super successful day for me.

And … I got to learn a little more about Zoom. Because there were so many of us, our host put us into breakout rooms so we could share and talk about the writing we’d done with a smaller, more manageable group.

Zoom is one of the tools we’ve suggested our instructor try as they offer their classes online during our locked-down semester. One of the reasons we’ve suggested Zoom (and Blackboard) is the breakout room feature, but I’d never actually tried it.

I like it. There are still some things I want to figure out about it, but it worked well, and it’s easy to set up. Having such a large group could have erased the intimacy I’ve come to expect from the salon, but the small groups let us have that. Getting to talk to just three other people, however, made it possible to share work that was entirely rough and raw.

We had talked about incorporating the breakout rooms in last night’s storytelling, but we didn’t do it. Now I’m thinking about how we might use it next month, how I might use it in the big meeting I have on Tuesday.

 

While Apocalypse-World means I should focus on relearning the homesteading skills I knew as a child, some tech savvy will surely come in handy, too …

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It’s March, which means it’s time for the
13th annual Slice of Life Story Challenge!
Curious? Head on over to Two Writing Teachers
and see what the rest of this year’s slicers are up to!