Category: Creativity

Children, Creativity, Love, Things I Can

12. Things I Can Make with Him: Classroom Valentines

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The note in his backpack says the students can bring valentines. Participation is not mandatory, but you must choose everyone or no one. Bug grabs the paper and gives it the once-over. “I don’t want to.” He starts to hand it back then notices the small postscript: Students may bring a small treat to share.

Now he’s interested.

“We could make teeny-tiny slices of chocolate cake,” he says. I picture his teacher trying to pass out 25 wobbling mounds of frosted pastry.

“That might be a little hard for Mrs. C to serve.”

“Cupcakes!” He says. “With icing!”

It is already 6 pm. We don’t have cupcake cups or a carrier. What we do have is reading, homework, dinner, bath. CVS sells sticker cards and the store is just two blocks from where we’re sitting in traffic. “How about just writing out valentines? We could go get some.” My offer is tepid and he knows it. He grunts. “Okay then,” I say. “Brownies. They’re just like chocolate cake, right?”

He sits on this. We’re turning onto our street and he’s in the back trying to get the dog to poke her nose out the window. Evening is sliding fast into night night and it’s been one hell of a week at work. “You know,” I say. “You don’t have to do anything. It did say no one — ”

“Oh! I know!” he cries, “GINGER SNAPS!”

I take a breath . . .The things I can. . .  and urge a smile into my voice. “Okay, ginger snaps.”

With this “yes,” I’ve signed the contract.

After dinner and reading and homework but before bath, we pull out our supplies. Bowls, flour, eggs, cookie sheets. Even from scratch, ginger snaps are the easy baking project, the one my mother used to leave to my sister and me when we were home after school. The butter would be out softening on the counter, the stained recipe card leaning against the floral tin box. Mix the “wets” with the “dries,” form into balls the size of walnuts and roll in sugar. When Bug outgrew a half dozen quasi-food allergies around age 4, he fell in love with ginger snaps. He used to call them the “black cookies,” for reasons I never figured out. We made them together every few weeks. Standing on a stool next to me, he would hit the sweet spot between creative focus and sugar mania, plunging himself elbow-deep in the mess.

I didn’t realize he held a fond memory — or any memory, for that matter — of ginger snaps. We have something of an unspoken cookie ban in this house. I haven’t eaten a cookie in over two years and haven’t made one in even longer.

Even so, this recipe is printed right into my hands.

And although the stool is no longer part of the set, Bug is as thrilled as that long-ago preschooler to bring this delicious idea to life.

The kid wants to measure, pushing brown sugar deep into the cup. He wants to crack the eggs, taking one careful whack at a time. I ask him if he remembers the spices that go into the recipe. “Cinnamon,” he says. “And, um. . . oh! Ginger!” I let him sniff at the cloves to identify the third, and he says, “I know that one from the botanical gardens.” In early winter, he and I wandered through the sunny spice exhibit together, trying to identify and describe cumin, onion, vanilla, fennel.

He fits the beaters into the mixer and whips up a tornado that melts into a pungent batter the color of café au lait. Because it’s only Thursday, we decide to refrigerate the sugary mush and bake it tomorrow so the cookies will be fresh on Friday. He unties his apron and bounces down the hall to his waiting bath.

It’s late now, well past bedtime. I’ll be grumpy in the morning. Even so, I leave the heap of dishes and follow him to the bathroom, rolling up my trousers so I can soak my feet as he jabbers away in the bubbles. He’s well past baking now and is on to square roots and number lines.

I pour water down his hair and back. He hums and curls into the cascade, head tilted back, eyes closed.

There’s a good chance this boy will someday have a sweetie. There’s a good chance that she or he will drive Bug bonkers as he tries to figure out how to do the love stuff. No doubt I’ll be cringing on the sidelines, complying with the semi-permanent gag order he will have issued at puberty.

Tonight, right here and now, may be my only chance to have a say.

On any given February 12th, when Bug smacks his head and realizes he didn’t make the reservations or buy the tickets, he can always take a deep breath. Wander into his kitchen. Open the cabinets. Begin.

Creativity, Growing Up

Cut a Rug

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The moment on the living room floor. Scratched record, skipping back again. Recollection as perseveration. The sweet cling of liquor breath. Neck. Night. The dim light, a carpet brown or beige or bare depending. Each time the thousandth time.

A cue I did not catch the first time around.

Cut.

I stand and walk from that place.

Over and over.

In lucid dreams, you cut.

Chop off the climax. Slice open an exit. Saw a hole through rooftop, treetop, pillowtop, sky. You reach up with your hands and trace the shape of yourself wherever they land. You open a manhole from the bottom up.

Out you go.

And this is where things get interesting.

Because that place where you step? Where you land up there? That has not been designed yet. The production crew hasn’t made it to the second story.

Cut.

You are writer, designer, main character, and director. You decide, crack boom, with a flick of your chin, the next act. To spin up through the rings of Saturn, to brush your belly over a tropical canopy, to alight on a garden pillar in Babylon. You can tumble-stomp your way up the marble stairs and swan-dive into a dragon’s lair. This is your place. Your riches. Your loving arms.

Your script.

One tilt of the glass. One stroke. One cut.

It took me 30 years to trip into it. Another 10 to realize I could use it for more than grasping at innocence.

You know.

The hush of the cradle before the first time your father failed to come home, your mother told you too much, your friend laughed and left you stuck in the gears of your bike, you laughed and left your friend crying for help. Before you knew how sharp the teeth of the moon. Before you knew that your name did not fill the sails or patch the leaks.

When you were held. When only falling and fire showed the dropped stitches in your untested faith.

That is the place I learned to revisit. The place before the living room floor.

Do you know this before?

When you finally find the capacity to color your own imagined set, this is what you do. You lean back. Back into a grownup simulacrum of infant security. Wealth and luxury. Feet up, rolling open, feathered cloud. Because the mind longs for rest. The body aches for comfort.

At last, to stop having to consider the threats? Someone else will assess the dangers. There are no predators. No failures. No lives at stake.

It feels like peace. The truest gift you can give yourself. Pure, full, trusting quiet. Not sleep. No. Rest. Within your skin, your here-and-now, your wakefulness. That wakefulness no longer vigilance. Whether the place is one of being embraced by complete and utter adoration, or one of total silent solitude, in any event, the desire is deep-down the same.

And maybe, like me, you stop there.

The outer limit of imagination is a few thousand iterations of rest?

Still. And always. The power courses down beneath. Untapped. Barely even poking one toe up through the soil (or down through the roof, as it happens) and roots that trail down from above may look like spiderwebs, veins, the simple ductwork of oxygen, the delineation of your quarters. Of your chosen universe. But they are only the finest tendriled extremities of something so much larger growing outside your line of sight.

This is what happens:

When you decide rest is not an objective or a measure of wealth, and you decide at last, Oh, I choreograph the dance unfolding now. I choose the color of everything around me, the everything of everything around me, then you really begin.

When you have the guts to admit that there is more than returning to before,
more than getting up again and again from the place where the world forced itself on you and broke open the egg in which you could never have stayed anyway

and with intention alone
squeeze onto the wall ceiling floor you face
the ambergris and ochre and butter and blood
then hone your blade with floss and schist
and begin to score the scene

of what is here

and how you might proceed.

Cut.

Creativity, Poetry

Trigger

smirkpretty

It is impossible to sleep with his feet fixed on their beacon. He presses them behind knees, into hip, against spine. I stiffen my skin and try to fall further in. He belongs right here I suppose, even though each time I sink into the lagoon, his hook cleaves the deep and rips me from my chosen oblivion. One touch sets the chain cranking back over its pulley and drags me towards unwelcome air.

So much like birth.

(So much for sweet erasure.)

My mother’s friend was found dead day four days ago.
She makes her hand into the shape of a gun. Points it at her head.
It strikes me
as she bends her thumb
to blow a tunnel through her skull
that this gesture is the international sign

for get me away
from these morons
when you can’t bear the noise
one second more, caught
in a riptide of voices
belonging to you or to the ones
in whose company you’ve found yourself
snared
hurling
attribution at each wave
every angle of light
anywhere but the lungs
from which they come
and what you want is to
(hand, gun, thumb)
hitch one hell of a ride

Into?
Away from?

I didn’t know before
his name and didn’t have a chance to say
look
lucid dreaming is a dark magic that is not without its costs.
They’ve got you pinned
against the seawall and the tidal crest
rushes, yes
but you learn
to tear yourself from those eye hooks
and swing the whole facade around

to block the salt that surges for your throat. You are left safe (for what it’s worth) and now your only direction of travel is a terrain with no visible geography and no written rules. You have to turn. You have to face the blank expanse. Your hand alone holds the purple crayon.

You may be asleep but you cannot count on dreams anymore
to read your desires, to lay them out
on a carpet of oil and flesh for you.
You claimed your mind. You signed on the dotted line.

You chose this spell.

He and I could have put our heads together
two wholes almost
puzzling over this:
How do you draw the world you would inhabit if no limits existed, not even the laws of physics?

(Does the very idea make you weary?
Do you, like me, ache to creep back to the cliff,
to swallow the sea?)

It doesn’t matter.
Put the gun down.
Open your hand. It will take
the shape
of what hasn’t been sketched
just yet.

Heaven cannot possibly be a release from the burden of imagination.

We would cast a legion of lines
to him to pull him back
to hold him here
to rub him warm from the shock of return
if we could
(as if we could

have).

In the beachfire steeldrum night
I would say
look
if fate or invention or the forces of providence could anticipate your desire
and angels set to work manifesting each component fragment a split second before the notion cracked free of its seed,
wouldn’t you still need your hunger? Your taste for color? Your private lyric? Your thirst, your frisson, the key bending to your tune?

He does not show up to hear my impassioned speech.
The blanket I’ve wrapped around him is stiff and hollow.
A week late, I plead myself hoarse to an empty room

not so empty after all.

My son’s toes rake like harpoons into my fleeing back and rip me up
towards the sting
of waking.

I ask myself if for once I might come to shore glad of being saved.
I ask myself
as my fantasy flits off ahead trailing ghost threads
whispering me down to that disappeared place,
what stops me from hooking my thumb
into a loose strand, hanging tight,
and hauling it up with me to the cracking dawn?
Why not lash it to this canvas
lift its corner with this imperfect air
let it billow
and smash
into any of its thousand
shapes
around the inevitable breaking
open day?
 

Choices, Creativity, Divorce

Post Box

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“You have to go the way your blood beats. If you don’t live the only life you have, you won’t live some other life, you won’t live any life at all.”

– James Baldwin

I’m not married to him now.
I remember these things.
He could weave string into bracelets. Yarn into pouches. He picked up discarded wrappers and curled them and knotted them and made them into chains.

When he asked me to marry him, he brought out the ring in a box he had made from paper tucked in on itself.

He is not my husband now. I remember these things.

The soil of my own life was restive in my hands. Its thrum vexed me. It was so pliable. So insistent. It offered no clues yet demanded everything of me. As if some larval creature moved through it, the contours kept changing. I would press my fingers in halfway but pull back, plugging the divot before it had a chance to drill open a corridor in me I was unprepared to claim. I could not – would not – choose a manner of shaping, let alone the shape itself.

My very own life in my very own hands. I was confounded.

Potter, sculptor, bricklayer, farmer. Technical skill is just the beginning, all hammers and season, chisels and heat. The other work is the inversion of craft. Abstruse. Intangible. Vision? Call? It is the sense of shape before shape. It is a moment of conception in stop-action. The mind must coil around the shimmer and foam and draw from-in-with it, frame by frame, a creation splitting into its own origin.

Here is art. Here is courage.

Skill marries imagination in a painstaking process. It requires coaxing that inner membrane out, out to reside within the material at hand. Slipping. Adjusting. Aptitude falling short. Hands seeking the next nuance, the next skill to call that thing into being. And the thing, the virtual life, when it meets tool and clay, shivers without permission into forms no one ever imagined. It slips into sync with the material world as much in spite of the artisan as because of her.

This was me, holding a pulsing handful of wing and seed and licorice root, warming the rank, luscious matter that cannot be created or destroyed but is always only changing form. This was me without any idea which of the six dozen flitting shapes in my mind it might take. This was me, seeking an instruction manual. A trail marker. A sorcerer for whom I could apprentice.

He offered me a tiny folded box. It fit in my palm.

I learned to knit while we were married. A bucket of bamboo needles. Yarn by the mile. A haberdashery of hats and scarves and ill-fitting slippers.
I squirmed on the sofa. I ignored the ache. I forced my gaze to zero in on the next stitch in the pattern.
This was me, making something with my hands.
At last. Something.
This was me, turning fairytale outside-in. Deaf to the clatter of limb against wall. Surrendering to threads biting fingers, ankles, throat. Hewing my own Gepetto out of fine-grained evasion and then feeding him my lines.

My son grew into the oversized hats then grew right out of them.

The man I married looped ribbon into lanyard. He did this, as all things, without haste.
I took up those strings. I practiced those boxes. I pulled and folded.
I pretended they were mine. I wanted them to be mine. His paper box fit in my hand. His cellophane chains fit my wrists.
My fingers ached. Below me, the fecund earth roiled. I stilled the urge to plunge.

In the winters, our house, whichever one in whichever time zone, was edged in white-gold lights. He laced every corner. He installed timers at the outlets. I walked through the dark mountain frost on those blue-black nights. Miles from any town, the only cloud brushing that carpet of stars was the one I alone breathed.
I followed the bend until our house appeared on the hill. My cloud found its kin. A fire there. Odd relief: the communion of breath with ash, the shared obscuring of depth.
A ribbon of smoke, a runway of light. A place to land. The home we made.
I imagined it was ours and that I was an equal part of the Us who created it.
Our marriage. Our son. Our Christmas. Our hearth.
A rectangle of lights framed the door. A square of lights outlined the window.
Strings of light made boxes of light made chains to grip in the direction of travel.
Always, the urge to plunge. Did I admit that it was almost as strong as the one that pulled me back? Almost. Not enough.
It could have been.
Down to the creek, the glassed stone, the trout slipping down low. A canopy of mist kissing the water’s quaking skin. Somewhere near, the bald eagle in its nest. A screech on the hillside. The towering stone, the natural bridge, the dirt road twisting down and away. Down from light. Away from the frame, the flame, that steady glow.

Almost.
My son in there. I went home. Always.
Until I couldn’t.

Now, I am making the Christmas that a good mom should. My son and I drape aquamarine garland from the doorframes. We follow lines scratched deep in the vinyl.

The sound is tinny. Grainy. There is dirt in the grooves. Weeds push up through the cracks. Seeds rupture. Their dogged tendrils erode the smooth edge.

Something unfurls in the air here. It is not pine. It is not mulling spices.
Carapace and decay. Bud and birth.

The Christmas I make is my penance.
Yet no one is demanding it. No one has handed me an invoice or called me before jury.
Peers don’t speak their judgments aloud. Not now. They have their own failings to answer for.
The man who was my husband is not holding a yardstick. He never was.
The box fit in my palm. The box fits all of him. Of course it does. It is his. It always was.

The man who is not my husband still has the Christmas stocking from his childhood and he takes it with him every year no matter where he ends up on December 24. He makes sure our son’s stocking is wherever our son will be on December 24. The stocking goes back and forth like a lunch box.
Like our son.

The tree twinkles. Gifts are piled in heaps that brush the low boughs. Cards wend their way around the globe.
The season squeezes. The strings pinch but no one is here to pull them. No one but me.
I find a spade. The dulled blade is still sharp enough to split threads. To crack floorboards. To pierce ice and soil and root.

In these moments when my son is with his father, I marinate in disquiet. I look around the home we are making and see the places where we spill from the corners. The dining room table is a hard-hat zone of paint and pennies and half-written poems in calligraphy ink. The empty floor of the living room yawns wide and pulls me to dance under low lights. I write. I pace. I wander out into the night with the dog and turn my bare face to winter sky.

Christmas is changing shape. Everything is.

The material comprising the ground under my own feet still puzzles me. Frightens me. Yet this terrain I inhabit, both alone and with my son, is all I’ve got.

This is me closing my eyes and seeking the shape preceding shape. I follow its source. I feel its beat and match my pulse to that throb.

I bend. I reach.

This is me.
Plunging.
 

Brain, Creativity

Things I’ve Forgotten

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Conjure the nouns, alert the secret self, taste the darkness. . . speak softly, and write any old word that wants to jump out of your nerves onto the page. . .

-Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing

The mark on the door jamb. The combination. The locket. The circle on the calendar. The taste of his mouth. The recipe. The receipt. The dice. The route.

Changing the filter. The menu. The tooth. The thanks before dinner. The linebacker’s name. The sequence. The shoes. The envelope. The year. The rules.

The phone number. Her favorite song. The breast exam. The pull-out couch. The green felt. The tickets. The Frontline. The stamp. The 29th president. The repairman. The will.

That I’m not straight. The French for erase. The first knot. The neighbor’s wife. The soup pot. How to change a tire. The promise. The lyrics. The sound of his snoring. The pattern. The painter. The cat. The buttons. The lie.

How deep to plant them. How hard to press. The hip. The question. The punch line. The yes. The penguin. The turn signal. The fry oil. The way in.  Continue reading “Things I’ve Forgotten” →

Creativity, Poetry

Economy Class

smirkpretty

Here’s my kid in his Jack Sparrow
goodwill T-shirt, belly-down
in a spill of hand-me-down legos
pressing flat planes
into airplanes
singing
“I’m gonna pop some tags
Only got twenty dollars in my pocket.”

What what?

The contraption has train wheels
on the front end and truck tires
backing mismatched engines
but it takes wing
with guns blazing, enemy fighters
crashing in a fiery screech,
no match for the patchwork leviathan
my kid is smoking
like threads
like foes
like the beat he pulls
with a what what
nod
from the hole
in his pocket.

—

Apologies to Macklemore and Ryan Lewis. Thrift Shop.

Creativity

Murder your Darlings

smirkpretty

Last night’s writing meetup began with a lively critique of a zero draft. Building a frame from the pulpy beginning is the most entertaining part of the process. It’s a barn-raising. “Develop the scaffolding like this.” “It needs a 10-point list and then the explanation.” “You’ve got to figure out which of these two things you are doing, because right now you’re trying to do both and it’s not working.” The author, all grace and nods, filled three pages with notes. She knew she had brought us rubbish. Her excitement about taking the suggestions home was infectious and everyone was giggling by the end of the discussion.
 
It turns out proofreading for a government contracting journal can be more pleasant than a root canal.
 
The benefits of writing group participation are obvious to anyone who has been in one. We know anecdotally that the combination of camaraderie, accountability, and feedback keep us moving towards better work. If only my frazzled doctoral students would drink the kool-aid. They hear it from everyone then hear ten more times from me: Cobble a group together early. Like first-year early, well before you head off to the Balkans or Omaha or wherever your research strands you. Before you discover you must birth this monster all alone.
 
Curious about the scholarship out there on writing groups for graduate students and hoping to find a study correlating participation and degree completion (I didn’t), I dug around in the education literature. The piece I wrote on the topic, Writing Better Together, notes that the intuitive benefits of group participation are supported by the research. Students who participate in groups report improvements in output, skills, and confidence.
 
Surely, we hoi polloi can glean a thing or two from the findings. Here is one: Groups with diverse membership showed the greatest gains. The ideal setup is a mix of native and non-native English speakers with various levels of experience and a mix of research interests. Participants are forced into a greater awareness of the reader and more dexterous communication with a wide range of audiences.
 
Here is another: Some folks complain that groups are a time-suck and that energy is better spent attending to one’s own work. This doesn’t pan out. Collaboration and group participation contribute to productivity, even when the attention is on others’ material. Beyond the obvious improvement from receiving feedback, folks are often surprised at how much their own writing develops as a result of giving feedback. The reciprocal advantages of peer tutoring help explain why attending to the form style, and clarity of some other fella’s work can improve the writing of the one doing the critiquing.
 
Finally, a good writing group thwarts the doubt, insecurity, and fear of rejection gumming up the works. Regardless of variance in skill levels and topics, folks who stick by one another report being more productive, confident, and motivated to write.
 
We are lucky. Our first Tuesday meetup has a solid core surrounded by a porous outer layer. The folks who stick with it have come to depend on each other. Taking our work out of our private alcoves and placing it into rough, human hands makes it better. Or rather, it makes us better at making it. Signing on forces the choice: improve or keep hiding.
 
Last night near the end of the gathering, our own Sir Edmund Hillary led us into a heady conversation about criticism. “What was the best critique you ever received?” Around we went, re-living the mortification of having mentors and friends pierce our inflated egos. Here are some of the scars that make us marginally better today than we were yesterday:

  • Where’s the “so what”?
  • The first draft is always garbage.
  • Clear writing = clear thinking.
  • The reader doesn’t care about this subject unless you are in love with it.
  • Don’t be boring.
  • Be the reader’s surrogate.
  • Murder your darlings.

We go home and hammer away at our projects. Someone who knows we are capable of better and more will be asking us about it in four weeks’ time.
 
Commitment is a cruel mistress. She cracks the whip.
 
Now, how to get my students to enlist?
 

Creativity, Determination

Piece of Cake

smirkpretty

Is there nobility in poverty? That’s probably a stretch. At a minimum there is resourcefulness, and that can look like creativity or innovation. Or something. Please indulge me. If I don’t get to live at leisure, at least I can feel virtuous.
 
The co-worker whose birthday unluckily follows mine has been subject to my noble projects since we started working together. She will enjoy the delight of yet another DIY disaster tomorrow.
 
In our office, we take turns celebrating birthdays by each taking responsibility for cake, card, and scheduling for the next person in line. The beautiful, polished team-mate whose January birthday I plan also had the poor luck to draw me as her secret Santa at the holiday exchange. She ended up with a home-made bookmark and a second hand cookbook in December. Now she gets to smile politely at whatever I manage to glom together in my kitchen tonight.
 
I just can’t abide dropping $20 on the designer cupcakes. How could I possibly justify that to myself given our increased payroll deduction and my impending (inshallah) mortgage payment? Even with the time store-bought pastries would save, I can’t bring myself to do it. I mean, a gal has to spend money on all sorts of things she can’t do herself, like root canals and oil changes (and perhaps she’ll get around to tackling the latter sooner or later), so there is no earthly reason to short the kid’s college fund on something so easy. Baking? Come on. Piece of. . .
 
Okay. Last year, Beautiful Team-Mate mentioned that she likes plain-Jane yellow cake with chocolate frosting. She is an easy-going Midwestern gal who likes just about everyone and whose smile makes the boys swoon, in no small part because she has no earthly idea of her effect on them. She would never ask for anything fancy, so yellow-with-chocolate she had last year.
 
So, today on my lunch break, I schlep it over to the supermarket and buy exactly one yellow cake mix (the one with Box Top for Education for Bug’s school, of course. Ten cents right there!) I don’t start on the project until nearly 9:00pm, given bath, bedtime reading, lunch-making, dishwashing, and generally lugging around the weight of the world. When I begin, I realize I have no concept how to proceed. I mean, I want to do something special, right? Something more than yellow-with-chocolate, because. . . Why? I don’t know. Because she’s nice and she deserves a little effort? Because this is my playtime? Because I can?
 
Because it’s just really fun to learn something new?
 
While the oven preheats, I poke around the kitchen. All these things I never notice appear in the nooks and crannies, items that go bad or go stale, that we forget we bought in a moment of inspiration. Unopened sour cream. A whole cabinet full of liquor. Powdered sugar, gelatins, puddings and extracts. Nuts, chips, candies and sugars. Oh! And already on the shelf? A yellow cake mix just sitting there. I could have saved $1.29!
 
I visit a website called Yummly and type in “sour cream cake mix kahlua.” A bunch of recipes pop up. This one for mocha cake is the one I follow. More or less. I mean, who knows why — no one in this house eats pudding or even likes it — but I happen to have a box of chocolate pudding on hand. Not vanilla. Also, coffee crystals seem like a good idea, and anyway, it just play. Glop, glop. An extra egg. Who knew you could just pour alcohol right into the batter? And what’s with the pudding? Crack, whip, scrape. The whole blorp of sour cream. A little extra sugar. A few more chocolate chips? I hope the small ones are little enough not to sink. Beat, fold, pour.
 
An hour later, the faint aroma of liqueur and scorched chocolate drifts into the upstairs bedrooms. The concoction comes out of the oven looking nothing like mama’s yellow birthday cake. It is crinkled and singed and lop-sided. There is a good chance it won’t make it out in one piece. It actually looks a little tubercular, all wrinkly taupe and sunk in its fluted tube.
 
On the stove waiting for morning is a double boiler at the ready. Poised nearby are chocolate squares, butter, powdered sugar, and the bottle of kahlua with its lid already loose. Mocha glaze may be a bit ambitious for 6:30 am, but the gal’s got to try to save this poor wretch. Where first aid and a transfusion fail, try chocolate. And a hit on the flask.
 
Necessity may be the mother of invention, but a deadline is the ultimate inspiration. If disaster awaits on the other side of the bundt pan, there is always that extra Betty Crocker mix waiting patiently on the pantry shelf. It only takes about 30 minutes in a 9×13 sheet pan, and I can pick up a can of chocolate frosting at the supermarket on my lunch break. I think those go for about $1.49. Beautiful Team-Mate may have her simple, happy cake after all. Even then, I can say, “I made it with my own hands just for you.” Bug’s college fund is safe (for now). I even have an idea of how to use all that old rum and Bailey’s taking up precious space in my dining room.
 
Tomorrow at 3:00 in the conference room, a dozen of us will get our sugar kick one way or another. I can bask in the glow of my secret treasure, that proud nobility of knowing I swung it all — creativity, learning, play, and even, yes, cake — for the price of a loaf of bread.
 
A loaf of bread on sale.
 

Creativity, Happy Days

Happy 100 Days: 7

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‘Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the house, everything was exactly right. Everything, that is, except for one little burr under my saddle.
 
The cheese grits and cranberry sauce were prepped and ready for morning. Presents were heaped under the tree. Shrek on the TV was babysitting my kid while the grownups sat in a circle around the kitchen table gabbing about things that were of no interest to him. The cousins who happen to be near Bug’s age were off with their other grandmother for the evening. The only other big kid in the house had grown up so much, he was more interested in finishing up Ulysses than in playing cards or hide-and-seek with the resident 6-year-old.
 
Between the raucous stories in the kitchen and Shrek in the living room, everyone seemed content.
 
So, why was I feeling like the Grinch?
 
This Dallas gathering has been a bright cacophony.  We are immersed in family and busy-ness, yet somehow, I am unsatisfied with the familiar chaos. Something is missing. Of course, this is the first time I have had Bug at Christmas since Tee and I broke up. But it is more than just not being with Bug’s dad. It is also the loss of ways we had created together when we became a family. Where are the Christmas carols? The nighttime walks? The outings for ice skating? The group games?
 
Why won’t anyone here sit down with my kid and play with him?
 
One thing about Tee that attracted me to him was his tribe.  They have created ways of being together and being in community that expand a person’s spirit. Hell, the first time I met his family, we attended his older sister’s wedding which took place at a YMCA camp. We celebrated her marriage with canoe races and zip lines. Tee’s family’s annual caroling party is a city-wide epic undertaking. Every holiday is an endless string of group sledding adventures and multi-generational board games. These activities are not grafted on; they are woven deeply into the fabric of their family. A person barely has to try. It is all there for the taking.
 
Of course, I couldn’t stay married just to his family. It’s a package deal. The just-add-water approach of patching a new name onto the end of my own is not an option (and didn’t work, after all).
 
The holidays are just another reminder that even in the midst of the chattering, loving embrace of my extended family, I do have to grow up and figure out how to cobble the new ways together from whatever I have on hand.
 
I know that in the coming years, Bug and I will be on our own for the holidays. We can make our own traditions. It’s just that I don’t want to wait. I wish I knew how to break familiar habits, or at least bend them enough now to put into place some of the activities I would like us to nurture in our home. It is so hard to push against the settled ways to create room for these things. It gets tiring to suggest them and to face a wall of derision and resistance. It isn’t just me. I have seen others try before me and eventually give up.
 
As the movie wound down, I pulled out paper and crayons.
 
“Sweetie, what are we going to do for Santa?”
 
Bug scooted off the couch and started re-arranging things in the den. He hung his stocking, clearing the conch shells and driftwood out from the unused brick fireplace so Santa wouldn’t knock them over. He put out the milk and cookies. Then, he sat down and wrote the note.
 
“What about the sugar?” He asked when he was finished.
 
“The sugar?”
 
“Yeah. For the donkey.” He explained that Santa has a donkey who travels with the reindeer and helps fly. Something about keeping Rudolph company up front? It was all very vague, yet Bug was firm in his knowledge. This revelation required us to fill a bowl with white sugar to feed Santa’s donkey. We also put out ten baby carrots for the reindeer. Bug arranged all of these treats in a circle around the note on the coffee table in the den.
 
“Alright, buddy. Bedtime.”
 
Bug raced to the back bedroom, leaping onto the bed, bouncing and singing nonsense.
 
“Dance, Mommy!” He had music in his bones. He shook his rear end in my direction and giggled hysterically.
 
“Where’s that iPod of mine?” I asked.
 
We found it and clicked on Bug’s favorite new tune from One Direction, that unavoidable pop number, “That’s What Makes you Beautiful.” Without speakers, the boy-band’s voices came out even tinnier and, well, tinier.
 
Bug marched around the mattresses on the floor in his jammies, bopping his shoulders and spinning in circles. Then, in a burst of excitement, he threw open the door and raced down the hallway.
 
“CHRISTMAS EVE DANCE PARTY!” He grabbed my mom from the kitchen. “Come ON, Gramma!” He dragged her into the bedroom. “DANCE!”
 
Laughing, she swayed her hips. “I can’t even hear it! What are we listening to?”
 
Bug didn’t stop to respond. He just clicked the iPod to repeat and cruised out the door.  “I’m going to get more people!”
 
One by one, he dragged every member of the family into the bedroom. First an aunt, then another, then my dad. The big cousin. An uncle. Eventually, even his ancient great-grandmother was balanced on her cane in the doorway looking both confused and delighted.
 
“Dance, everybody! It’s a Christmas Eve dance party!” Bug called. He leaped and spun and sprang across the floor, weaving between his assembled family members. Everyone swayed and grinned and made embarrassed faces at one another. As the song wound down, they began to disappear.
 
“Whew, that’s enough for me,” said one aunt.
 
“Me, too. I’m pooped!” The aunt’s boyfriend followed her back down the hallway.
 
Chuckling, folks called “Merry Christmas! Good night!”  My mom and one aunt, true troopers, stuck it out to the last chord. Then, pink-cheeked and breathless, everyone said goodnight and I shut the door.
 
“Let’s get ready for sleep, Buddy, so Santa can come.”
 
“Okay!” He said, and collapsed onto the bed.
 
My boy, not realizing that such things are not done, broke the rules and created something new. Santa’s entourage includes a donkey. At Christmas now, this member of the team simply Is and Always Has Been.  Might the same be true for bringing music, dance and play to this place? Perhaps we do not need to wait. Maybe we don’t even need to try. It might be as simple as saying, “This is what we do. Come on! Join us!”
 

Creativity, Happy Days

Happy 100 Days: 12

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Bug's Subterranean Bunker
Bug’s Subterranean Bunker

 
While I lay in the bed singing Christmas carols from the old songbook, Bug draws. This elaborate little world is his latest creation. He stops me before I kiss him good night so he can explain all the elements of his picture.
 
Conveyor belts rolling down from up in the treetops carry suitcases to the inhabitants below. The suitcases have “all the things people need, like food and hammers” for underground life. The dude on the right sitting under the tree is fishing from the subterranean spring that runs along the bottom. His catch is stored in wooden storage boxes up above, and the conveyor belts ferry fishes down when people need food.
 
The ladders help people and dogs and cats go up and down, too. There are also slides. The little dwelling on the bottom right is a dollhouse someone built so the kids have something to play with down there. There is a kitchen for cooking. The brown stuff is the soil, Bug explains, and tunnels through the soil are for the worms. The guy fishing uses the worms for catching fish.
 
The skull, bones, and wishbone in the middle of the brown patch are remains of a deer skeleton decomposing in the earth, which Bug put in to show that this whole place is “way down underground.”
 
You know what gets me? Every single inhabitant of this bunker is in a state of perfect bliss. The fisherman, the cats, the children: all happy. The dudes schlepping suitcases are grinning. The fish swimming in the spring and languishing in their boxes are wearing smiles. Even the dead deer is content with the situation.
 
Predator, prey. Worker, player. Compost, bloom. No matter where anyone lands in the tableau, happiness is an option.