California Stars

Homesick all weekend. I've sat here for almost an hour now, trying to write about that, but the words won't come. I've felt in limbo since I got here, and such a non-place seems to defy description. Things aren't bad here at all--I love my job, my students, the many friends I was too far from for years. But now there are people (and dogs) on the other side of the country, and I can't really think about that distance too deeply, because I need to be able to function.
 
And there's the place itself, that other side. Maybe we only ever really find our place in the place where we find ourselves, whenever and however that happens. Maybe it would have happened here if I'd stayed. But I left before something in me was fully formed, and something about California helped me grow, expand, free myself.

All of this has been spinning around in my head. And then I heard this song tonight while I was driving, and suddenly I was on a cliff along Route 1, a damp, freezing wind blowing in hard from the Pacific, the scent of the ocean mixing with eucalyptus and coastal sage. And off to my left in the darkness there's a halo of light hovering over San Francisco, but it's nowhere near close enough to interfere with the millions and millions of stars in the perfect night sky.

Forsythia

One spring, when I was in high school, a friend taught me the Korean word for forsythia. I didn't know what it was called in English, so I couldn't tell her, and for quite a while after that, I only knew the Korean word for it.

I don't remember when I learned the word "forsythia," or when the Korean word or my friend's name fell from my memory. But every spring, I see the yellow blossoms and I think of her.

•artichokes•

I told Penn "True Blood" is not a movie. It is a television show about artichokes. 

Later, amidst the usual bedtime tears, my suddenly-five-year-old wanted to know,
"Are you gonna watch an artichoke show? I don't like artichokes, but if they're not going in my mouth I want to see it." Then, "You get to watch stuff and I don't!"

Well, yeah. And perhaps the eventual slumber of a five-year-old is better for it. 

Recently, a friend lamented having showed her daughter an animated film about dragons. The movie introduced the verb "killing" into the toddlers vocabulary. Another friend, the mother of a boy who I've credited with teaching my son the art of constantly pretending to have a gun in his hand, recently mentioned that her husband is very anti-gun. So. File all of this under no-matter-what-we-do? We've tried to relax about the gun obsession, in an effort to give it as little energy as possible. And we've started "Movie Nights" with Penn, in an effort to have a little bit of popcorn-riddled fun. A part of me wonders what he would be like, raised instead in the woods with hand-hewn chess pieces on a stump covered in checker-board moss. That I painted on, chia-ball style. What if. What if we raised our child with select omissions? No guns, killing, Darth Maul, black teeth, poison, or even that bad man who sent the planes with the bombs.* What would a five-year-old Penn be like, without his tart awareness of the world? Awkward though it may be, it's an awareness. 

Just musing. What is it that you wish you'd kept to yourself? For just a little longer?

xox
*Penn's description of Hitler.

•river sticks•

Plink, plank, plunk, go the blueberries in my memory.  (Pail, bush, Maine.)  So, too, go the stones into the river of January.  Smooth and strange weights of observation, and choice.  Who doesn't love a skipping rock?  Berry of the sea, blue on its way to the bottom.  


(Join us in writing every day in January!)  xox