Tag: time

Living in the Moment, Things I Can

26. Things I Can Ignore: Contrails

smirkpretty

Way up there, a tiny plane skates across the early spring blue. Here, the bus wheezes up to a stop sign, waits its turn, then groans on. The sun has hours yet to make its languid descent into rooftops and half-clothed branches.

Scuffs streak the plexiglass. The eyes are trained to peer right through.

What would it be like to see only this in here? Only what’s behind? I still have hopes of Corsica. Each year another scar cuts across the frame. The edges blur. It’s clear enough, though, for today: Maybe almond trees, maybe the Pillars of Hercules. Or Galapagos. The Badlands at the very least.

It was just now, or near enough to now, that I pressed through a scouring wind to summit Mt. Snowdon in Wales and cooled my blistered feet in Llyn Ffynnon-y-gwas. Such a thing could happen again. Those engines up there could carry me to the source of the next pool where my toes touch bottom as fish nibble down to live skin.

Another renewal.

It’s not impossible.

Or if I choose to walk lightly, I could use my own traction. Starting on this very bus, I could cast off on a winding route to the borderlands where the last of the wildcats hush their flanks against night.

The sky is a door. I am 41 and just came from the gym where I pulled 70 pounds and crunched 100 times on an incline bench.

Now my pooch who narrowly missed her date with a Chinese abbatoir flies like a formula one race car across the dog park that backs against the freeway. She turns fast enough to send mulch and dirt blasting into the sound wall. I shed my jacket and hurl the ball, my arm getting looser now with each lengthening day.

Now I sit in solitude at a dim table at the Indian restaurant. I taste it all: the whang of the cilantro leaf, the spring of my jaw against cubes of cheese, the smoke that lingers in papered boils on the flatbread. Tabla music patters against the sizzle and clank of the kitchen.

Now I bend to this page and rub the dull lamp until it glows.

Everything here is here. Everything here is forward.

What luxury, this illusion.

How fleeting.

The texts ping in, one, then six or seven more. All day in bursts, each sounding a claxon. She is in the ER. She is prepping for surgery. She’s in the OR. She’s in recovery. Her hip is fractured. Her hip is mending.

If she makes it through the next three months, she’ll turn 95 in July.

What must it be to come up out of the fog of anesthesia into the even more stifling smog of dementia? To see only through scuffed glass, to see only the scars? No forward. Not even a here, really. The machines that didn’t exist in your lifetime then did, now they buzz across a silent blue you can’t see. Now they carry other people away into pockets of the world you’ll never know.

If you’ve even lost the comfort of memory, what then? Where do your eyes alight?

I am 41 and grip hard to delusion. This blank page is an open window. That sunlit frame holds no pane. I can step right through and cast my line up against gravity, snag that jet and let it ferry me into another fable, one waiting just for me.

I ignore the microscopic particles, the wind and all it carries, strafing the body of this vehicle. I pretend the light falls through unimpeded. Against the mounting evidence, I claim this day and this endless tomorrow.
 

Love, Relationships

Then as Now

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When it all falls away (pretense, fantasy). When we run out of words. When he is just a hunched figure in cotton underwear standing at the sliding door talking to the dog. When we are rumbling bellies and sore feet. When the teasing from hungry lips gives way to dishes and air leaking from tires.
 
Then. Only then. Not even now. Not yet.
 
Here is what is then: He looks up at the path, nothing but bare trunk and brown leaf, and sees a single white light hovering there. He stops and stoops, gazing. A tiny spaceship dips, indecisive, at the skin of our alien planet. This one light arcs sideways now, streaking there all wrong across the early winter path.
 
Mesmerized. Our breath, caught like mothwings. Light on a strand of spider thread plunges into some impossible distance then reappears an inch from our noses.
 
This is what he sees. Then as now.
 
I trust this. He finds filament hidden among knob and stone. He plucks the string and calls up the first note. The chord, an atonal twisting of this day, this everyday day, into its converse.
 
This will be then. On our most trodden route, I am lost in what he finds.
 
Now, he asks why we are busier. Are we busier? This second asking, the shift in emphasis. What is truth? Not only what do we make of it, but what do we choose it to be made of?
 
Summer came. I bought a home. He coached and then didn’t. We lost one weekend then another. We are more purple. Less driven. More painted. Less rested. Better fed. Steadier. Scruffier. Here.
 
We lay together far too late into nights, those fleeting nights forever becoming mornings.
 
The dog panted when the rain began. I thought the roof had opened and the sky had found us at last. No. It was just ice on the skylight. The clouds tumbled in when we weren’t looking. They shed their weight.
 
Winter edges closer.
 
In the window of the train is the reflection of the opposite window and then the reflection of this window in the bus kiosk wall. This I see now.
 
This commute like every other. Unlike anything ever. He does not ride with me except he does.
 
I think of the woman in the prairie who fell asleep on a winter night and rose three times, restless in the pitch black. She lay awake for hours until finally giving up the fight. She tried to step outside. The door would not budge. Snow piled in drifts to the roof had trapped her. Digging up through a window, she found the sun was setting on the following afternoon, which was, in fact, the day now behind her.
 
We are so frightened when we hear of those who fall alone and lay dying, hours into days with no one coming. I wonder how terrible this would be. To finally, finally know yourself as you are: solitary, and maybe not a you at all. To suffer there with your absent god, the songs your mother sang, the terror, the surrender. All of it, your own and not yours at all, because you are not yours. Not really. The illusion finally bends. In the polished glass, a reflection of self and the door opposite. The glow you thought was distant and sacred is simply spider floss. A trick of light. So very near.
 
Blood and lung. Salt and water. It is all just evolution’s clever twist, the story arc in the leather-bound volume you’ve become. You never owned it. It is on loan. When the reaper arrives, he is not a hooded wraith or a thief after all. Just a librarian with an overdue slip and an open hand. Then the cover closes on your meager pages, your handful of lines. Threads slip loose as they always do. Some maybe even still drifting from the spine.
 
When we are bent to bones. If he stays and maybe even otherwise. This is then: He catches those filaments between fingers fine and silvered. No knots. No binding them to or into. He holds the strands up before me just long enough then blows them to sky like lashes. Like a wish.
 

Living in the Moment, Poetry

First Light

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A drainless shower
Of light is poesy; ’tis the supreme of power;
’Tis might half slumb’ring on its own right arm.

-John Keats, “Of Sleep and Poetry”

“Get up, Mommy. Get up!”
 
I roll over and click on my phone to check the time. Four months in this place and I still haven’t bought an alarm clock. He climbs up on the bed and squooshes in next to me.
 
“Come on. It’s time to get up!”
 
“Okay, okay.” I slump back over and giving him a cuddle he endures for all of 3/10ths of a second. Then I click open the link from The Academy of American Poets. Every morning, verse lands like a charm of goldfinches on the windshield of my new day. If there’s time to idle on the shoulder for a minute, I can watch them flit and preen there, flaring necks and inflating the frills of their wings. Most days, I am in 5th gear before even one has a chance to alight. My gaze glances off the buttery blur as I brace myself for oncoming traffic.
 
My thumb moves to delete this one but I stop it short. “You’re not going to believe this.” I scootch in under the covers and show Bug the phone. “Do you see that title? This poem is called ‘Get Up, Please.’”
 
“What is it?”
 
“I don’t know. Let me read it.”
 
The problem with opening the Poem-A-Day on my ancient Blackberry, especially when it’s 7:20am and we were supposed to be walking out the door five minutes ago, is that I never know what I’m getting into. Will it be a 3-line haiku or the whole of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”? Do I dare dive in without the weight of ink to gauge my descent? This one begins, “The two musicians pour forth their souls abroad.” Bug listens. The lines have no shape on the matchbook-sized screen. Where one breaks and another begins is anyone’s guess. I read it as I hear it while Bug, in a rare moment of stillness, listens to me render Kirby’s story in verse.
 
The poem tumbles from the music to the makers then out past them all, from a santoor which looks like the love child of a typewriter and a hammered dulcimer (only with a lot of extra wires) to an Econolodge in Tifton, Georgia where Mrs. Patel explains the reason her children bend to kiss her feet before leaving for school. When the narrator bursts into tears, I come close. Bug looks up into my pause. “What, Mommy?”
 
I gather myself and go on.
 
On to the bus carrying the fourth grader to long division, on to the parents whom we never honor enough and then we are ready and then they are gone. On to Keats who claims finally to understand how martyrs could die for their religion because love is his, and he would die for it, for his You. Then comes the end (and I know it is coming because the ground is rising up under this poem, fast and nothing like soft) when squandered time meets surrender – too late for sure, but what choice do we have? – and we finally inhabit the shape of what we’ve always loved, even when we didn’t dare, even when it wasn’t enough. Even when it still isn’t.
 
In a final act of mercy, Kirby lets his poem “brush across the feet of anyone who reads it,” and this time, I really do cry.
 
I turn from Bug for a breath, unable to make my mouth shape the final line. Then I can and so I do, poorly but it will have to suffice. Bug is watching me closely now, taking the measure of this surge. His fiery mama. His sometimes far away mama.
 
I say, “Wow, what do you think of that?” Coming back to him, smiling as best I can.
 
“I don’t know what any of that means,” he tells me. Now it’s his turn to look away.
 
“Yeah, it’s pretty long. Also, poems sometimes loop all around to get at what they’re trying to say. Do you want to know what I think it means?”
 
He surprises me with his nod.
 
Even though it’s a school day and the sun is already up, even though we will surely be late, I put my phone down and begin. I try to make my own words do justice to what I heard. Music, gesture, the mighty dead. Mrs. Patel and Fanny Brawne, the kiss. The bow. In each of us, the god. I tell him what I believe to be true (at least this morning. Another morning is anyone’s guess) that it’s hard to decide what’s important enough to die for. That it can be even harder to decide what to live for.
 
Then I say, “Those kids bow to the light within their mama. Would you do that to me?”
 
“No,” Bug says.
 
“Oh, come on. Let’s start our day like that every morning. Let’s start right now.” I sit up in the bed and spread my arms over my son. “I bow to the light within you.”
 
“Stop it!”
 
“No!” I dip down and nuzzle his belly. He squirms away. “Your turn,” I tell him. “Bow to the light! Bow to me! Respect the distance I’ve traveled!”
 
“Stop, Mom!” He cries. Giggling, he twists off the bed. “Get up!”
 
“Please,” I say.
 
“Get up please,” he says.
 
“Okay. “ I pull back the covers. “Since you asked so nicely.”
 
—
Visit the Academy of American Poets site, Poets.org, to see the full text of David Kirby’s “Get Up Please” and to register for Poem-a-Day.
 

Mindfulness

Happy 100 Days: 29

smirkpretty

Blink.
 
The boys gather in the lobby of the rec center, one after the other striding out of the locker room. Blood warms their cheeks. Hair crazed by pool water sticks up in the back. They are swagger and ease. A mother in her track suit has brought pastries and Sunny D. They tear huge bites from their bagels and laugh silently on the other side of the glass, collared shirts tucked into belt and trouser. The tall one with the dark hair stands and slips a royal blue tie around the back of his neck. He talks talks talks, eyes bright, slipping silk and nylon around and around, up and over and through, not even having to think anymore about the rote motion of making that mighty noose.
 
Somewhere down the road, my own son rides in the back of his daddy’s 11-year-old Subaru past the private school. He is wearing Payless sneakers already rubbing bare at the toe even though I just bought them (yesterday?) He has on last year’s jacket. He won’t need it today. He plays and plays, building one version after another of a tower topped with armaments that can rule the world. He still believes everything is possible. He doesn’t yet conceive that anything is in his way.
 
There is this glass between these boys and me. I cannot hear them. Still, I hear. Their confidence booms. Today, I will go into the city and marvel at their grown-up counterparts stepping from the backs of gleaming black cars purring at the entrance to the Westin. I will make eye contact with one of the pair laughing with precision over half empty plates at a sidewalk cafe. The flint edge of his jaw will work against the sky as he drives home his point. He will glance back at me.
 
Fleeting. Maybe never there at all.
 
Blink.
 
This summer December day. The worn out toe in my son’s shoe. The red leather handbag, butter and velvet, slung over the shoulder of the woman standing at the curb waiting for the light. The thin hips on the runner in the hot pink shorts, ponytail swinging as she turns the corner.
 
Blink.
 
The bad taste in my mouth. The winter heat. The unresolved question. The pretty, the powerful, the cash, the castles.
 
Ancient ruins, cities rubble and weeds. We are gone. Everything we’ve ever loved and hated and coveted and ignored. Every truth, every law, every laugh.
 
Blink.
 
Tiny braids spray across the girl’s narrow back, red hoops swaying from her ears. Her boredom, her long neck, her right leg crossed over the the left. Her lean, her gaze, her proximity, her anonymity.
 
We are dinosaurs. We are meteors. We are dust. We are the next big bang.
 
The wall of glass. The tight knot in royal blue. The worn out toe in my son’s shoe.
 
Nothing is in the way. Everything is possible.
 
Nothing is fixed. Everything is already gone.
 

Happy Days, Poetry

Happy 100 Days: 30

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Twice today, all the clocks in the universe vanished. On both occasions, this occurred while I was writing. Once was at work and once at home. Someday there will be no difference between the two, and someday I will forget I once knew how to tell time the way I forgot the French I learned at a desk in middle school. Once, I only knew the Is, and that was before the idea of me, the idea of time, the idea of such a thing as “idea.” It was before description. It was when I was inside of that Is, and even though quite alive, not yet even born.
 
Some days, the capricious universe chooses to bless me. I forget everything but that language which wasn’t even language. This is where we begin and it is certainly where we end. Eventually, we all revert to the first tongue. It always eventually draws back into silence our best attempts to speak new patterns into existence. Today, it was a death of all I learned. It was awakening. It was bliss.
 

Uncategorized

In the Bank, part 2

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If time is money, then Pay Yourself First. In the Bank, part I.

 
Behind the pressing noise of the divorce, the quiet question nagging at me over the past 18 months has been this:  How do I invest those rare hours each week in order to build a foundation for Bug’s and my future?
 
I figured my only hope was a windfall from one of three sources:

1)      A man

2)      A bestselling book

3)      A more lucrative job
 
Because options 1 and 2 are the stuff of soap operas, I hurled all my initial energy into making myself a more marketable career gal. A scattershot approach was the best I could manage. I took on every additional responsibility I could at work. If even the slightest gap appeared between our team’s offerings and students’ interests, a project took root. I began to apply for a PhD. I looked into and Organizational Development training program. I explored a Public Management graduate certificate.  Every conference or seminar that came across my calendar, I attended. “Need help organizing it? I’m your gal!” I learned names. I shook every hand.
 
Where has this left me? With the same income I had a year ago, without a single new job prospect, and exhausted.
 
As 2011 wound down and the start of the spring semester neared, I kept thinking, Something has to hit, right? Even as my ammunition dried up, I continued to shoot high and wide. I signed up for and then dropped one graduate class after another, desperately searching for a way to make use of the tuition waiver my job provides. What kind of bonehead wastes the opportunity to take courses for free? Especially one who wants to beef up her resume, and needs to make More Money?
 
Besides, I love learning.  The challenge and the demands of scheduled assignments keep me hopping, and those oh-so paternal expectations of the instructor force me to reach. When I am in a class, I dig into the corners of my wallet of time, and what little I find I hand over to the syllabus and its personal counterpart: the instructor. I do not bother with Facebook or TV. I only say yes to invitations that compel me and do not conflict with assignment due dates. The teacher is important enough to pay first, and I am frugal, and I keep my receipts. The prize, supposedly, is my own improved scholarly understanding of something or other.
 
The problem? Every syllabus I read made me wilt like a dust bowl dogwood. I love to learn, but “Human Resources for the Public Sector?”  Please. Stick a fork in my eye.
 
Here is what I realized. I was looking at each of the three items on my Man-Book- Job grocery list as nouns. Goals. Finish lines to cross. But if I shift the angle a bit, if I turn them into verbs, what happens?
 
This:
 
1)      Make friends. Go on dates. Enjoy getting to know people. Welcome connection and even love, should it choose to come around.

2)      Write. Then write some more.

3)      Work with focus and enthusiasm. Seek opportunities. Build relationships and skills. Stay one step ahead.
 
This lifting and shifting of my gaze peeled the haze from my surroundings. The sudden brightness brought into focus the formerly obscured direction of travel. In Tuesday’s post, “Love: Letters,” I worked my way around to admitting that my One True Love is and always has been the ink. If I treasure writing best of all, and practice sometimes brings improvement, why not Pay Myself First? No writing classes are offered here on my campus? So what? For goodness sake, design a course! If one of my students wants to study Computational General Equilibrium and no one in our department teaches it, I tell them to develop a syllabus, find someone who can guide the learning, and go for it.
 
So, I did. I designed a syllabus. The course is called “Process, Practice, Publish.” It lists eleven learning objectives, including these:
 

  • Integrate a writing practice of approximately one hour (1000 words) into the daily routine
  • Maintain writing “storehouses”—in print and in electronic format – for organizing writing products and research

 
It details four sub-sections of course expectations, like this one:

  • One hour of editing is required weekly. This can be editing a single piece or a collection. This editing should take place in a discrete segment of time, separate from the writing process.

 
It includes a time line describing weekly assignments from January to May, including these:
 

  • By February 7th, identify one writing group or class, and join for regular meetings with fellow writers.
  • By  February 21st, develop an annotated list of 3 publications and their submission guidelines.

 
Three weeks in, and I am already gathering speed like Hi-Ho Silver.  It is a marvel, this concept. Those few feathered strands of time try to slip loose, but now I have simple instructions for how to braid them into reins to keep this filly at a full gallop.
 
Who is the instructor? The toughest of the tough cookies. And hell yeah, I’m going to pay her first.
 

Uncategorized

In the Bank

smirkpretty

Personal finance gurus say the secret to amassing great wealth is to Pay Yourself First. Before you take care of your auto loan or head to the mall or supermarket, you put a chunk of change where it can earn interest. It helps if you have to jump through some hoops to get your hands on it.
 
Getting rich may or may not be in the cards for the 99%, but the psychological effects are as compelling as the financial ones. Conceiving of you – your very own self, your well-being, and your future security – as being more important than a restaurant owner or oil executive can do wonders for your momentum. The icing is that at the end of a decade or three, you have a nice little cushion for doing the things you really want, not just having things that slake the fleeting thirst.
 
When Tee and I were married and living on one income, we managed to siphon into a savings account a bit off the top of every paycheck. We found ways to save (I can make my own baby food! I can also cut hair!) and discovered that our quality of life did not suffer. The small bank balance we cultivated allowed us to split without either of us going into arrears. Even in my currently strained financial circumstances, I have continued to drop one chunk of my meager income into retirement every month, and another into a savings account. Both bits are paltry, but the habit of treating Shannon, Inc. as a creditor has stuck. It helps me breathe easier to know Bug and I have enough in reserve to survive the next disaster transition.
 
Where do you find these few bucks? I will not insult your intelligence with another collection of tips. You can barely turn around without bumping into another ten-point bullet list for plumping the piggy bank (Turn down the heat! Pack your lunch!) All the advice columns re-package the same simple counsel: Don’t squander the pennies on junk. They add up to real money.
 
Pay Yourself First!
 
Piquing my curiosity lately is the notion of what happens when this principle expands beyond the wallet. Maybe money is not the only currency that matters. Every so often, you have to stop and ask yourself, “What is really valuable?” Besides cash, what other resources can you invest in your well-being, to be able to do the things you really want to do in the future? To be the person you really want to be?
 
I had lunch with a colleague today who just told me she just received a significant promotion. She is moving from supervising one department to overseeing three. It is a new position, and she will be building it as she goes. The exciting opportunity gives her the chance to test the waters in two areas she has not supervised before, forcing her to learn new skills to navigate murky waters. It will give her a giant headache, and it may prove to be a disaster.
 
She took the promotion for not one cent more in pay. No raise for doing two whole new jobs? Is she crazy?  I asked her if she would have kept her previous position if they had offered her more money to stay. Her immediate answer?
“Not a chance.”
 
She is too curious, too excited, too ready to see where this might lead.
 
Open doors? A sense of professional adventure? Challenge and responsibility? These are currency.
 
Health and fitness?
Family and friends?
Peace and quiet?
 
All are currency. So is a safe and thriving neighborhood. So is a sense of contributing to a greater good. So is freedom, in all its manifestations. Even (ahem) love.
 
Your list is going to be different from mine. Only you know what you amass readily and what you waste. What things must you bank, every month or every day, in order to keep the system oiled and moving towards your best self?
 
For me, and I suspect for many others, the most precious currency is time.
 
Time is the Crown Jewels in terms of pure value. Like many parents, my most prized commodity – and my most overdrawn account – is the sliver of the week I have to myself. (Of course, the time with my kid is an investment in its own way, but stick with me here. . .) Between the office, the chores, the kiddo, the dog and the errands, these teeny tiny silvery, slippery strands of time drift around me, loose and hard to catch. I fritter them away for a whole host of feeble reasons (I’m tired! I don’t know where to begin!). Far too rarely, I weave these threads together into something moderately substantial, like an afternoon hike or a night making art with friends.
 
Time, as much as or even more than money, is what I can use to build a nest egg for my own rich life if I Pay Myself First.
 
Like the Better Homes and Gardens ten-point inventory for saving $2012 in 2012, a gal has to look at where she wastes time in order to sock more of it away. (Facebook, anyone?) I am not talking about idleness. Creative loafing is a noble art, and quiet stretches of unscheduled time nourish the mind and body. I am talking about the noise and clutter, the ways I lose time to activities that sap me while offering nothing in return. Besides the several-times-a-day detour into social media to check status updates that have little to do with things about which I care, I also find that I peruse the Groupon and Living Social deals that appear in my inbox five times a day, and jump every time the phone pings.
 
Like the financial gurus, I offer the same simple counsel here: Don’t squander the minutes on junk. They add up to real time.
 
The past few weeks, I have decided to Pay Myself First. Instead of letting those loose moments drift away, I have been practicing tucking them into places that hunger for them. It is turning out to be a fun and fascinating project. In my next post, I will write more on how it is unfolding. For now, though, time’s-a-wasting and the other work calls.