Still winter.

This photo, though taken in January, accurately represents our feelings about dipping back below zero here at the beginning of March. I had the unenviable task of explaining to Cora that here in the upper-upper Midwest, it will probably take us a month longer to get to spring than it took when we lived in Minneapolis. The news was not received well.It is still winter, but all we can think about is spring!

I am keeping my fingers crossed that we will get a community garden plot (currently #5 on the waiting list), and that Chris and I can get our act together enough to find or build a high, narrow table for a windowsill herb garden. I have been having pangs for our old backyard, which was not a perfect backyard and needed so much work every year, but still was our own backyard - the garden, the deck, the patio (o! the patio!), the pots where Cora's beloved chives and parsley grew, my beloved bleeding heart plant and the peonies. The lilac tree and the Baffin roses.

Oh, Spring. You are so far away and have so many ways to break my heart.

Emily Marie, a cat, 1992-2010

When I moved to Minnesota, following a guy I'd been dating for about five months, my dad helped me load up my little white pick-up and drive my stuff out here. It was a three day trip, he didn't let me drive, and I loved spending so much time with my dad. I also bawled like a baby before we'd even left California, but nevermind that. We arrived on Nov. 1, 1992, and the next morning at breakfast he said, "Well, I think today we should get you a cat." (We also had to get ourselves some gloves, scarves, and hats, because we drove in with the first snowstorm.)

We found the nearest Humane Society location, finally figured out how to get there, and faced the daunting task of choosing among the dozens and dozens of cats there. There were cats who couldn't be around other cats, and cats in the "colony rooms" who were more sociable and well-behaved. I decided to start there. In the first room, none of the cats looked up when I entered, and none seemed too excited about the possibility of being adopted by a CA transplant trying to pass off a flannel shirt as a jacket.

So I went to the next colony room. When I walked in, only one cat turned her head to look at me. When I walked over to her, she jumped up onto my shoulder and began to purr. We took her into one of the "get acquainted" rooms and she continued to basically attach herself to me. Dad said, "I think you've got a cat." The vet at the Humane Society believed she was about nine months old. She'd been surrendered by a family that was moving and didn't want to pay a pet deposit (that's how it was phrased to me - perhaps they couldn't). Her name was Tasha.

We brought her home and I renamed her Emily Marie (for Emily Dickinson and Marie Curie). That first afternoon she took a nap curled up on my dad. She liked to sleep during the day in the bathroom sink. At night she would pull her favorite toy - a length of string - up into the bed and meow. She played fetch for a couple years. Our apartment was on the sixth floor of a building overlooking a freeway - she would sit in the window and watch the freeway, batting at the glass when am emergency vehicle or police cruiser went by with lights flashing. She once ran over and licked the speakers the first time she heard Brahms. When we moved to a duplex, she found new favorite spots and games. When we decided to get a second cat to keep her company...well, she put up with him. Mostly.

For the last few months she's been on a long slide downwards. In the last two months she began to let Cora pet her. She stopped coming upstairs at night. She begged for milk and cream constantly, but lost weight until she was only about 3 pounds. On Monday we took her to a very kind vet who had been seeing her, who gave us the space to make our own decision. She walked out of her carrier onto the soft blue blanket they had spread on the table. She lay down and waited while we signed paperwork and petted her. She waited patiently for the vet to find one of her tiny tiny veins with his tiny tiny needle, and then she just lay her head down and stopped. We had time alone with her, petting her, talking to her, until we felt like that soft furry body wasn't really her anymore.

During this time, Cora was with friends, who had lost one of their cats earlier in the year; people, I told her, who would know how she felt. I had talked with her starting a few weeks before about how Emily was getting closer to her time to die. We talked about other people we know who have lost pets in the past year. We read some books. She frequently expressed a wish that Emily wouldn't die. She wanted us to take a picture of her petting Emily. She would often pet Em's head very tenderly and say, very seriously, "Is it your time, Emily? Are you going to die?" Monday night she told me she would miss Emily's soft and beautiful fur. Tuesday night she cried because she wanted to kiss Emily one more time.

I understand that. I still think I see her out of the corner of my eye, standing on the table, wandering into the kitchen. I think I feel her jumping onto the bed. I wonder if our other cat, Arvo, has become so much more vocal in the past five months as a way of anticipating and mourning her death. I think about how she came into my life when I moved to Minnesota, and how she has left it just as I am preparing to leave the state.

Turn here for Memory Lane

Today I watched Natalie Merchant's Feb 2010 performance on TED; she sang songs from her new album, settings of old poems. It was terrific, especially her setting of Hopkins' "Spring and Fall", a poem I love dearly. Then at the end, for an encore, an old 10,000 Maniacs song.

And then I spent some time in the storage closet looking for my old tapes, remembering how many times I listened to those songs in Santa Barbara, in my old apartment, humming them on the walk to the beach, singing along with a friend at her place in Ojai. You know, throwing myself a big nostalgia party.

These are some of the songs I listened to while I packed up my apartment, getting ready to move to the Twin Cities.

These songs cover a lot of emotional territory for me. I found the tapes. I'm not sure I'm really ready to play them again.

Surfacing

It has been quiet on the old blog lately because we were on vacation - a glorious vacation staying with my parents in Southern California. Cora finally got to meet her cousins on my side of the family (she'll get a shot at the other side later in the summer), and it was wonderful to see them all together: five adorable little boys and Cora. Plus my grandma, Nana-Nanny as Cora calls her, my Aunts, cousins, and an uncle, too!

One of our favorite moments was Cora sitting with a Mother Goose book and calling to her cousins, "Boys, boys! Come here so I can read you a story!" while they madly clashed their light sabers a few feet away.

(Cora in the spa with cousins and me)

I could write a long time about how much I love spending time with my family, and how we so rarely get to, about how much they all love Chris and how much they all dote on Cora, and the fabulous food we like to cook for each other...but maybe I will just list a few moments that were highlights for us.

(Cora and cousins all in one chair! Crazy times!)

Seeing my brothers and their families, and especially playing soccer with my brothers and their sons for a while at the park - and seeing that those little boys are all nice enough to let their Auntie think she can kick a ball halfway decently. Well, except for when she tries a drop kick. She really shouldn't do that.

For Cora one of the highlights was having breakfast with Snow White! My cousin Traci is an amazing singer and an all-around good soul and she also does princess parties. She came dressed as Snow White and brought muffins, sang songs, told stories, did a craft, and taught Cora a dance and generally gave her a fabulous morning.


Traci had told me ahead of time that she really preferred to stay in character, so Cora and I talked about that and we thought of questions we could ask Snow White - and she remembered the questions, and had no problem pretending along with Traci.

(Can you tell how much she enjoyed this? And that dress - she dances with joy every time she puts it on. Totally worth the extra investment in Oxi-Clean!)

Going to the beach, Chris and I and Cora and my mom. Cora, of course, fell asleep on the way, so I sat in the car with her for a while and watched the waves, the sunbathers and kids running back and forth. And nearly wept with nostalgia and love for it all. And this time around Cora LOVED the beach. She watched while two young women near us took turns burying each other in sand, and then turned to me and said very decisively, "I need a fishy tail, Momma, will you make me a fishy tail in the sand?" So I did. It's so easy to forget how much fun wet sand can be! I taught Cora how to make drip castles and we made an impressive drip castle fort.

Being in the spa ranks high in the list too - Cora learned how to push off and kick with a swim ring, and she had great fun doing that first with her Dad, and then showing me what she could do.

My youngest brother bought his family 3-day Disney passes, and only used 2 days, bequeathing us the third day. We had planned to skip Disneyland this time around, based on the expense and thinking Cora might be too young still. But. Wow. She loved it - loved the few rides we went on (all the boat-based ones). Watching her watch "It's a Small World" was like a primer on enchantment. We didn't see many princesses, but she met Mickey, and spotted Mary Poppins out in front of Sleeping Beauty's Castle.

We made our pilgrimmage to In-n-Out Burger (mmmmm), played lots of Legos, watched some movies, my mom showed me all her current quilting projects (always an inspiration to me) and took me to her quilt shop (where Cora was charming until she left with a "goodbye green old lady!" to one of the women there), we ate great food, we went to their farmers' market with Mom and Dad - one of my favorite things is always grocery shopping with my parents, oddly, maybe because it was so much fun when I was little, though they might remember that differently.

Really, I just love hanging out with my parents. Isn't that crazy? Don't I hope Cora one day says the same thing!

(Oh, and, on the airplane? Cora was fabulously well-behaved. On the way out she got to visit the pilot and co-pilot in the cockpit as we were boarding. Both flights she stayed in her seat, had some snacks, drank most of our shared orange juice, watched a ballet on her little player, and took a nap. She was quite the big girl.)

(More pictures in a few days.)

The Ballerina and Me

I'm not sure exactly when I started taking dance lessons, but I do remember my mom picking me up after school in our old yellow station wagon. This was my grade school, so I must have been seven or eight. I would sit in the way back (without a seat belt!) and change into my tights and leotard as she drove me to ballet class. I added tap classes later on. Dropped tap after a few years. Added jazz and then modern dance. Eventually dropped ballet (jr. high brought the harsh reality that I would never have a "ballet body") and added more modern dance classes. At the height of my dance "career" I was probably taking three or four classes at a time. Plus the occasional workshop in new and exciting dance techniques like, um, breakdancing.

Well, as much as I loved dance, I was never really best in class (most flexible, yes), and it would never have been a real career. A big family move, high school, and a spectacular knee injury eventually pushed me into different fields, too. But, I really loved dance. I would spend hours in my room choreographing dances to my favorite songs and I devised a kind of shorthand with which to notate my choreography. I know I spent weeks on one dance to a medley of Fine Young Cannibals songs, at least. (That coupled with the breakdancing should enable you to pinpoint the year of my birth with near lethal accuracy.)

Sure, I loved the costumes and the French vocabulary and the studio crowd and the various fashion and social aspects of dance. But now, looking back, what I most remember is that I had a much better opinion of and relationship with my body. I knew what it could do. I could make it do it. I had a kind of confidence in my legs, especially, and my sense of balance and muscle memory. I still have really good muscle memory. I don't have a great sense of balance if I'm moving (though I can still stand on one leg for a while). I have almost zero confidence in my legs. Partly I think this is traceable back to the knee injury, and part of it is due to that flexibilty. Can you take much pride in your flexibility when it turns out you just have spaghetti tendons? I liked having the belief that my body was a thing of power and capability in action.

I've been thinking about all this again because Cora is moving into the next stage of ballerina love. The Nutcracker - the Clara music - is still part of her nightly bedtime ritual, and she still watches one of the movies once a week or so. And there's the tutu fetish. And the developing slipper fetish - sometimes she has a hard time deciding if she wants to wear the "glass slippers" (her good white shoes) or the "ballet slippers" (a pair of red Robeez). And then she started tripping merrily in a circle, on the balls of her feet (demi-pointe) with her arms in a near perfect second position.

And that's when I hunted up a video that would show her the positions, of feet and arms, and some simple steps. I found one at the library, called "The Ballerina and Me". We put it on last night. It was an aged video, the sound quality was awful, the video quality shaky, the overall production values painful to an adult, but she was transfixed. She tried to do the positions, the arms, the steps. She had me demonstrate them. We tried to get Daddy to do a plie. She used the arm of the glider as her barre. She tried to say the French words. She was wearing a diaper, a tutu, a pink long-sleeved shirt, a Cinderella dress-up shirt, and a constantly changing variety of footwear.

It made me yearn to dance again.

Diamonds in the rough

Saturday night Cora fell asleep before 7pm, which enabled me to get the last 20 papers graded (whew, and ack). She woke around 11pm, and again around midnight when I came up to bed, but all in all a really good night.

Then came Sunday night and the two-hour bedtime battle. Now, I know that there are many mamas out there who would love a bedtime battle that was only two hours, and many who would love even more the way things usually go in our house, but last night really almost broke my patience.

Okay, it did break my patience, and eventually even the duct tape was starting to look a little fragile. We had stories, we had songs, we had wailing, we had weeping, we had more songs, we had flailing about, we had clinging. It was a miserable affair that ended with us just sitting in the chair under a blanket, in the dark, quietly, waiting to see who would fall asleep first. Thank goodness the papers were already done, because I had zero energy afterwards for anything more than boiling water for a hot buttered rum.

But in the midst of all the angst, there were two especially memorable moments for me. At one point Cora insisted that before she could go to sleep she had to fix my hair - or, as she would say, "I have to make you a haircut!" This basically consists of her telling me which way to look while she lifts up my hair and lets it fall in my face. This went on for about three weeks. Then she looked at me, holding my face in her little hands, and said, "Now you look so beautiful!"

Earlier in the day we had watched most of The Nutcracker Ballet - did I mention she is also now a ballerina? - and so, once we had moved on to the sitting quietly in the dark phase, she kept putting the blanket over her head. Finally, I had to ask her what she was doing. "I putting on my mousie mask, but you no worry Mommy, I not real mouse, I just pretending for my ballet dancing."

With each of these moments I felt a pang of regret that the rest of bedtime had been so miserable, for both of us, and a foolish wish to encourage the sweet moments to last longer, and a little chagrin about that last one. But most of all I felt grateful to be reminded that underneath the wailing, whining, crying, flailing, and screaming that surfaces once a week or so, there is still my sweeter-tempered, imaginative baby.

In memory of a friend

For a few days now I've been struggling with what to say about how on Friday evening we lost a dear friend to her long drawn-out argument with cancer. We didn't find out until Saturday, and when we heard we changed our evening plans to be family time and we went out to dinner and toasted our friend's life.

Like my husband, Denise was a composer; they were in the same graduate program. Denise later moved out to NYC for her doctorate degree, got a teaching job, continued to compose, and came home to MN a couple times a year. We'd see her those times, and kept in touch by phone and email in between times.

She was last here in August - just three or four weeks ago - and we had dinner together. She and Chris talked about their latest projects. We discussed class plans and dealing with students and the general challenges of a creative life in the midst of a working life. It was a good visit. Cora loved Denise, and practiced saying her name, and showed her some of her favorite books and toys. Denise seemed frailer than she had other visits - she always maintained an upbeat attitude, she taught through all her surgeries, chemo, radiation, and diagnoses - even though this was the first time I felt like I really saw the physical toll cancer had taken on her, I never expected she would pass away so soon. And it sounds, from friends who talked to her last week, that she really didn't expect it either.

I find a lot of the conventional language about cancer unsatisfactory. Really what I want to say is that a strong, beautiful, talented woman, someone I cared about, died last week. I miss her. I wish it could have been differently for her - I wish her path had been easier.

Identity Quakes

I read recently another blogger talking about the shift in identity that took place for her when she became a mother, how unprepared for that she felt. Reading her thoughts led me to reflect on ways I experienced this when I became a mother. There was definitely some new terrain to explore in terms of how I identified myself, what had shifted in terms of my interests, priorities, and values, and how I felt about all that. I don't want to downplay these things.

But, when I think about sudden, massive, disorienting identity shifts that I've experienced, there are two events that spring to my mind: moving to Minnesota, and being laid off. Moving to Minnesota for grad school really shook my foundations in a way I had no expectation of in my conscious mind. Clearly my unconscious was plenty aware because as I headed out of the beloved state of my birth, my dad driving me, my (formerly his) truck, and a paltry load of possessions, I bawled like a baby. A baby who somehow knew she was entering a colder world than she was used to.

It took about five years to settle into this new place. Now, sixteen years later (gulp), there are so many things I love about the Twin Cities, and I've made many friends (though most are transplants, too), and I get the weather now - here on the last day of August I am already wondering when the first snow will fall and pretty much looking forward to it. But, when it's time to write a biographical note for a competition or an artist's statement, or a program...the first thing I say is that I was born in California. When we fly back to visit, I cry when I see palm trees. On many visits I have not been able to face the ocean, because it just is too heartbreaking.

I was also surprised by the shifts that being laid off triggered. When you are laid off, if you want to collect unemployment, you have to attend a session at the unemployment office on dealing with being laid off. One of the things they tell you is that being laid off launches an emotional shitstorm surpassed only by the death of a child. I thought this wouldn't be true for me, given that I didn't even LIKE the job I was laid off from - the company was entirely dysfunctional as were many of the people I worked with. Frankly, I think the company made me dysfunctional as well - compartamentalized, bitter, angry, cynical...and those were the good days.

But, it was still where I spent the vast majority of my waking life. It provided me with the biggest salary I have ever made. I had very enviable benefits. I saw a good friend every week day. I had the kind of job title that people recognize and find respectable. I still took pride in my work and in the accomplishments of my department. I still tried to be the best manager I could be in the conditions provided. I had a lot of myself wrapped up in the work I did, and to have it made so clear that someone else found all of this completely disposable was very, very hard to take. I was amazed and appalled both at how hard it was to take, and for how long the shadow of this fell across my life. I would say that it took at least a year for that shadow to dissipate. I'm not sure it has completely vanished yet, and it happened six years ago.

So, when motherhood came along, a state I had avoided so well for so long, and then decided to pursue, and then found within my grasp so quickly and easily, I was braced for another big identity quake. And I found it just didn't happen that way. There were - and are, still - moments where I do feel a kind of disorientation, but it doesn't feel like the same kind of awful drowning, of being totally unmoored from myself. Maybe because I expected it? Maybe because I tried to meet it head on? Of the three events, motherhood was perhaps the one I entered into most wholeheartedly, but I know many women who would say the same, and who felt the identity quake more strongly.

Identity can be tricky ground - it can look and feel solid, until that faultline deep underground twinges. And then when the shaking stops, it looks solid again, and we can feel betrayed, tricked. When the faultlines are active, when the plates are shifting, there's havoc. Sometimes the shaking stops and everything looks different. Sometimes the aftershocks are more devastating than the initial quake. Every once in a while it turns out to be such a little thing that it was almost enjoyable, a gentle rolling just to keep us awake. Because, as much as we try to remember, in quake country, that our solid ground can shift, in the day to day we forget. We have to, in many respects, in order to keep going, even when we really know better.

Today is my Momma's birthday!

Happy birthday, Momma!


I've been thinking about what I should write about my Momma, and how if I actually listed all her best qualities, no one would believe she could possibly exist! (Although I do count her secret streak of deep black humor as one of her best qualities - I know not everyone would, but I do!)


My Momma is an amazing cook who loves to try new recipes and can make anything from the homiest of comfort food to extremely fancy dishes. My favorites include her special salad with warm goat cheese wheels and roasted pear halves, her prime rib, and I have some fond memories of my childhood favorites, meatballs in Yorkshire pudding and hot dog casserole! But one of my favorite childhood memories is her book of kids' cakes and how we could look through it and pick the cake we wanted for our birthdays. My brother Rob was a strict adherent to the castle cake, but I tried to pick a different one every year, with the cat cake being one of my favorites.


She's also possessed of an artist's eye for color and composition, although because she lack's an artist's giant ego (hee hee), she would deny this. We have several quilts that she has made, and each is different and beautiful and loved. I always look forward to hearing about her new projects and seeing them over Skype or in pictures. She is responsible for my own interest in quilting. And each time she branches out into something new, the result is amazing, as with Cora's yo-yo bunny (the beloved Mr Bunny).

She's musical, she's funny, she's got fashion sense and understands accessories (while I still think socks are accessory enough for me), she's a good listener and a good conversation partner, she's keeping herself healthy, she's kind, she's politic, she's a spiritual seeker, she's a good gardener, and she's one of my favorite traveling companions.

But, aside from all this, she is (in my opinion) the perfect mother for me and my fervent hope is that I can be half the mother to Cora that my Momma is to me!



Happy birthday, Momma! I love you!

Writing it all down

Yesterday I was on the phone with a friend, who could hear Cora babbling in the background and asked what she was doing. She was lying on her belly across my lap, singing to (apparently) my knee and bobbing her body up and down like a harp seal making for the ocean.

"You’re writing all this down, of course," my friend said.

"Of course," I said, mentally revising her words to You mean to write all this down, don’t you? And I do mean to, because while I know better than to trust my memory, I seldom actually get around to the writing part. I think a lot about the various ways Cora’s babyhood is being recorded, all of them faulty to one degree or another.

I have my memory - famously bad about things like dates and places, famously good about plots and characters. I have sharp mental pictures of Cora in her silly moods, the way she jack-knifes her body and laughs at the same time, overcome with the fun of whatever we are doing. Or her expression as, early last September, her Dad carried her around the shallow end of a hotel pool, Cora in her bright green swim diaper, the one I almost didn’t buy for the trip, and a little t-shirt, clearly thrilled to feel the pool water on her legs. A waterbaby despite her Taurus birthdate!

We have photos, conventional and digital. Often in these she is blurry, either because our cameras are not high-end or (and?) because she seems to be always in motion. Always bobbing with excitement. The digital photos feel strangely fragile to me - somehow half-imaginary, existing only in the camera, on the computer. Putting them in the blog actually makes them feel a little more permanent. The problem here is that we’d rather experience Cora’s babyhood rather than have complete documentary record. (Hence, no Thanksgiving pictures this year, except from goofing around with hats earlier in the day.)

And then there is the written record. I think there are about three different journals floating around the house, including one on the computer, where I’ve tried to put together accounts of my pregnancy, Cora’s birth, the days just after. I’ve had such small spaces of time to try to write things down, I tend to use whatever notebook is closest to hand, hoping that some day I can somehow collect them all and create a whole out of the pieces.

Clearly, it’s an imperfect system. I’d like to believe I will always remember how she looks, what she sounds like, the things she does; already sometimes I have to really work to remember how she felt in my arms when she was a newborn. But other times those same memories, the ones I thought were all but lost, flash on me with astounding clarity. Does this continue? One day, fifteen years from now will that harp seal moment wash back over me, perhaps as I listen to my daughter talking on the phone to one of her friends?