FUSSY

Which is why poetry comes in handy. This is by Mark Strand.

Eating Poetry

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.

There is no happiness like mine.

I have been eating poetry.

The librarian does not believe what she sees.

Her eyes are sad

and she walks with her hands in her dress.

The poems are gone.

The light is dim.

The dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up.

Their eyeballs roll,

their blond legs burn like brush.

The poor librarian begins to stamp her feet and weep.

She does not understand.

When I get on my knees and lick her hand,

she screams.

I am a new man.

I snarl at her and bark.

I romp with joy in the bookish dark.

Yes, I am wearing red underwear.

Jack: Do you want to watch Howard’s End?

Me: Howard Zinn?

Jack: Yeah.

Me: There’s a movie of him?

Jack: Yeah — we bought it last year, remember?

Me: No.

Jack: We bought it in Palm Springs at that used place.

Me: Really?

Jack: Yes, really.

Me: Howard Zinn?

Jack: Yes.

Me: Is it a documentary?

Jack: No. It’s fucking Merchant-Ivory. What are you, high?

Me: I’m so confused.

Jack: We bought it with that butler thing with Anthony Hopkins.

Me: Remains of the Day?

Jack: Right.

Me: OH, Howard’s End!

Jack: What the fuck have we been talking about?

Me, having made a cappuccino with half-and-half instead of regular milk: “Look at all that foam! Holy cow!”

Jackson, hanging quietly in his Johnny Jump-up: (blank look)

Me, doing a Foghorn Leghorn impression: “Why, I made a funny! That’s a joke, son!”

Jackson, growing confused as to what I’m expecting from him: (blank look)

Me, as a giant cartoon rooster with an improbable Southern accent: “It’s a joke, son!”

Jackson, struggling for an appropriate response: “Boeuf!”

* * * * *

This is how Jackson kisses.

1. Sees your face coming toward him, laughs.

2. Reaches out arms.

3. Grasps your ears, hair, or cheeks, depending on mood, reach.

4. Opens mouth ominously.

5. Plants big wet open mouth wherever he can on your face without regard to etiquette, geography.

6. Stays this way until you pry him off or start tickling him.

My mom was born in Chisholm, Minnesota, in 1925, the second-oldest girl in a family of seven children, three girls and four boys. Her father worked on building the Eisenhower Tunnel through the Continental Divide in Colorado, and her mother taught elementary school and raised her half-Finnish, half-Swedish children. They spent the winters in town and the summers on a farm in the country, picking strawberries and practicing their violins.

My mom is awesome.

I think growing up in the 70s and 80s made me feel as though I’d be less of a woman if I didn’t go out and conquer some male domain like banking or truck driving. Motherhood was for the girls who didn’t have (a) guts, or (b) imagination. But a tenth-grade course in world religion and a little half-baked Buddhism also steered me toward the belief that we don’t really exercise that much control over our destinies. My father got really exasperated with me at the time, asking me why I was such a fatalist. I had an annoyingly negative belief in fate, a “why bother trying?” sort of approach, which accounted for an uncharacteristic slippage in grades and pretty much assured that I wouldn’t get into the college of my choice. However, during a hastily arranged interview at Connecticut College, I was able to use this belief to my advantage:

Admissions Guy: “So, why do you think you’re here?”

Me: “It’s fate!”

And so I got into college after all.

It took a little maturity to become a reasonable and positive fatalist, to believe that things are handed to you for a reason so take a moment to extract the lesson. Just like there’s a reason I was fired from my job, a reason I’m sitting here blogging, a reason I married Jack even though I was scared to death of commitment, and a reason I had Jackson even though I never thought I was meant to be somebody’s mom.

And a reason we had a night from hell last Friday. Jackson went to sleep at 9:00 p.m., then woke up crying at 11:00. (Odd, because he’s been sleeping though the night for three months.) I nursed him back to sleep, then he woke up crying again at 1:00 a.m. I knew he couldn’t be hungry, so I steeled myself to do whatever I had to do to get him back to sleep without becoming the human milk machine. It took about 30 minutes of quiet perseverance, but he finally went back down at 1:30. Then at 1:45 he was up again.

T. Berry Brazelton says that babies experience cognitive leaps (such as learning to sit unassisted, learning to grasp small objects) that often disturb their established sleeping patterns, and that you just have to bear with them as they adjust. Adults and babies both have four-hour sleep cycles; at the end of the cycle you’re sleeping really lightly and may be prone to waking if something’s already on your mind (e.g. something your boss said to you, or the fact that you’ve just learned to roll over from your stomach to your back and wouldn’t now be a good time to see if you can do it in the dark?). But you need to teach a baby to put himself back to sleep and not to depend on you, or you’ll be helping him back to sleep for a very long time.

So there was no way in hell I was going to nurse him at this point, and he was wide awake, so I read to him, changed his diaper, rocked him, walked him, and finally got him back down at 2:45. I thought that he must be exhausted by now (I was), but no, he was up again at 5:00. After a half an hour of crying and walking I was starting to wonder if he was really sick, but eventually he went down and stayed down until about 7:30, at which point Jack woke up fresh as a daisy and said, So, how’d you sleep?

The next night, I heard a squawk about 5:00 a.m., got up, picked him up, he drooped on my shoulder, and in five minutes he was out again. Hmm, I thought, maybe he’s learned something?

Sunday morning I put him down for a nap and I stayed in bed reading the paper. After ninety minutes I was thinking, Wow, what a tired little baby! After two-and-a-half hours I was thinking, He’s probably lying there bright blue and that’s the end of that. So I tiptoed in and there he was, lying on his back, sucking his fingers and looking out the window. Enjoying a little alone time.

The point of all this hopeless blather is that maybe we were given that awful night for me to step back and let Jackson take another small step toward independence, toward growing up and learning that he doesn’t always need me if he wakes up at night, though I know there are times ahead when he will. After all, we’re just here as scaffolding for him until he can stand on his own, in every sense of the word.

Big, warm, strong, loving scaffolding.

* * * * *

I know it must seem like I’m a ninny about Philip Levine, but this was on the Writer’s Almanac on my birthday and I loved it so much.

On My Own

Yes, I only got here on my own.

Nothing miraculous. An old woman

opened her door expecting the milk,

and there I was, seven years old, with

a bulging suitcase of wet cardboard

and my hair plastered down and stiff

in the cold. She didn’t say, “Come in,”

she didn’t say anything. Her luck

has always been bad, so she stood

to one side and let me pass, trailing

the unmistakable aroma of badger

which she mistook for my underwear,

and so she looked upward, not

to heaven but to the cracked ceiling

her husband had promised to mend,

and she sighed for the first time

in my life that sigh which would tell

me what was for dinner. I found my room

and spread my things on the sagging bed:

and bright ties and candy striped shirts,

the knife to cut bread, the stuffed weasel

to guard the window, the silver spoon

to turn my tea, the pack of cigarettes

for the life ahead, and at last

the little collection of worn-out books

from which I would choose my only name–

Morgan the Pirate, Jack Dempsey, the Prince

of Wales. I chose Abraham Plain

and went off to school wearing a cap

that said “Ford” in the right script.

The teachers were soft-spoken women

smelling like washed babies and the students

fierce as lost dogs, but they all hushed

in wonder when I named the 400 angels

of death, the planets sighted and unsighted,

the moment at which creation would turn

to burned feathers and blow every which way

in the winds of shock. I sat down

and the room grew quiet and warm. My eyes

asked me to close them. I did, and so

I discovered the beauty of sleep and that

to get ahead I need only say I was there,

and everything would open as the darkness

in my silent head opened onto seascapes

at the other end of the world, waves

breaking into mountains of froth, the sand

running back to become salt savor

of the infinite. Mrs. Tarbox woke me

for lunch–a tiny container of milk

and chocolate cookies in the shape of Michigan.

Of course I went home at 3:30, with

the bells ringing behind me and four stars

in my notebook and drinking companions

on each arm. If you had been there

in your yellow harness and bright hat

directing traffic you would never

have noticed me–my clothes shabby

and my eyes bright–; to you I’d have been

just an ordinary kid. Sure, now you

know, now it’s obvious, what with the light

of the Lord streaming through the nine

windows of my soul and the music of rain

following in my wake and the ordinary air

on fire every blessed day I waken the world.

Every piece of plastic shit you see in the toy store has a label on it now saying Plays Enriching Classical Music! I guess Mattel and Fisher Price haven’t given up on the Mozart Effect quite yet, not as long as some parent somewhere believes that a few bars of of “Fur Elise” will boost his ten-month-old’s I.Q. Jackson has ended up with four or five toys that play bits of Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, and John Philip Sousa, but the one that makes me go hmmm is the spinning Mickey Mouse head that plays Beethoven’s Ninth and Pop Goes the Weasel. And the box doesn’t even tell you what pieces of music your stupid toy is playing! Is that Rimsky-Korsakov? I think so, but I won’t ever really know unless I take this moronic flashing little giraffe to my local classical record store, will I?

“Even some thirty years ago reports appeared that indicated that children taught sign language had acquired about seventy-five signs by the time they were nine months old. In contrast, the typical child of that age could understand fewer than ten words, regardless of how bright she was.”

– Dr. Burton White, in the foreword to Sign with your Baby, by Joseph Garcia

“Market research has found that children often recognize a brand logo before they can recognize their own name.”

– Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation

Ebenezer unexpectedly bagged two tranquil aardvarks with his jiffy vacuum cleaner.

This and other sentences that use all the letters of the alphabet available here.

The last time I was in Las Vegas was for a convention of day spa owners and aestheticians. I was representing the New-Agey health and travel magazine I used to work for, along with my boss, Stan, and the office manager, Marcia. The Las Vegas convention center is just down the street from the Hilton, where we were staying, just a block off the Strip. We got there a day early, driving from California in a rented van filled with thousands of pounds of magazines that we were going to hand out for free. (Was it a reflection of how little Stan believed in the value his own magazine — and a measure of his own lack of self-esteem — that we were giving away free magazines and free subscrptions to people who were standing there with their checkbooks out?)

The three of us had loaded the van rear-heavy, and every time we hit a bump the front of the van would almost lift off the ground. Halfway across the desert Stan pulled over and we shoved everything as far forward as we could. We were going to Vegas a day early so we could “smell around,” in Stan’s words. The convention hall was ruled by Teamsters and Stan was going to find a way for us to get all our stuff — display booth and magazines — in without paying the extortionate portage fee that all the other chumps (exhibitors pushing everything from cosmetics to massage tables to aromatherapy) were paying.

What Stan lacked in practical knowledge about growing a subscriber base and loading a van he made up for with a sixth sense for petty larceny. He had a working class New England background, and he once hinted that he’d beaten a man so badly that the man later died. I tended to gloss over this sort of thing — who knew if it was actually true? But I wanted to keep my job so I listened to his nutty stories (including highlights of what he did in bed with his girlfriend) and carried another box of magazines into the hall.

Marcia and I were sharing a room and Stan was next door. Marcia was about ten years younger than me, very cute, had absolutely no tits whatsoever, and was claiming that she hadn’t taken a shit in about three months. I gave her some herbal laxative and we got ourselves settled and waited to hear from Stan what our next move would be, preferably dinner. He called us about an hour later to tell us that there was an adult-film industry convention going on in the hotel, and that downstairs was an absolute parade of porn stars.

We had Mexican food and margaritas for dinner at a little place just off the casino. After we finished eating, Marcia suggested that we all have a scotch to kick off the night. So we went over to a lounge on the other side of the casino and had some well scotch. Stan was paying for all of this.

At some point we decided that absolutely the best thing we could do next would be to go to a strip club. The Palomino was the only one I’d ever heard of, so we got in a cab and went downtown to the older part of Las Vegas. Two pitchers of margaritas and two scotches each at this point.

The cover ended up being something like $25 each and Stan didn’t have enough cash, so I paid and he promised he’d pay me back later (which he did). The place was big and dark and not very full — just a few guys sitting around the stage — I think it was only about 9:00. So, feeling discreet, I guess, we picked a table away from the stage and ordered the first of two required rounds of drinks. I think I ordered a Coors Light, which tells me that maybe I was drunk, since I normally wouldn’t drink that shit on a bet. After a few minutes of getting used to being a woman in a place where other women took off their clothes for entertainment — it took Marcia a minute, too, and I think Stan needed to digest the fact that he was in a room with a bunch of naked women and a couple of women he couldn’t lay a hand on or he’d be sued right into the twenty-third century — we decided that we might as well go right up and sit by the stage.

This was a good plan. We got a great view and the dancers seemed to like having us there. Stan went and got a bunch of $1 bills and gave us each a few so Marcia and I could tip the girls we liked. I remember some wacky costumes — cowgirl, I Dream of Jeannie, 70s biker slut — and I also remember that one woman looked like she had just had a baby, her stomach was all poochy and stretch-marked, which kind of freaked me out.

Then one dancer came out who was really cute. She had long-ish dark hair and a lean body and real breasts (there was a lot of silicone on stage that night, or, as Sam Shepard says, “silly cone”), which, after several more terrible beers now, made me want to stand up and applaud her integrity. Instead, though, I took one of Stan’s dollars and, when she made her way around to me, stood up, tucked the bill in between her little tits, and told her, You’re beautiful.

After a while the whole parade became kind of a blur. A terrible comedian came out. I mean terrible. He was making those “Am I in a mortuary? Because all I see out there stiffs”-type jokes, and he was too mean for me to feel embarrassed for him. After he left and more girls started coming out I think we’d all had enough. So we started to get ourselves together to leave. Then the cute dancer that I’d given a dollar to came running over to me, put her arms around my neck, and gave me a kiss. We went to a diner and had omelets and Stan started moaning about how superior women were to men. I was like, That’s crap, and Marcia was like, Does talking like that get you laid?

The next day I was so hungover I wanted to kill myself. But when you’re the editor of a magazine at a convention full of quote healers unquote, people will trip over themselves trying to show you how their particular shtick will make you feel better. (The aromatherapy was helpful, actually, and so was lying down and putting my ankles in a “chi machine,” which rocked my legs back and forth for three minutes — “it’s how fish exercise!”) Plus, the air is so bloody dry in Vegas that you have to drink bottled water pretty much constantly just to keep a normal level of hydration, so if you’re already dehydrated due to poor drinks management the night before, you will suffer almost no matter what you do.

The second night we ended up at a party where the bartender was so drunk that when Stan asked him for a rum and Coke the guy filled up an 8-oz. glass with rum and cracked open a can of Coke and said, Enjoy! Later he had to be carried out, so Stan started tending bar while I screamed into a cell phone as Jack gave me a play-by-play of a Lakers playoff win against I no longer remember who.

Poor Marcia never took a dump the whole trip, even after Stan bought her a Fleet enema two-pack and massaged her abdomen. (On his bed.) I did get to meet a famous porn star– Houston 500 — actually, now I think it’s Houston 620. I have another Vegas/porn convention story from a different trip there with Stan, our art director, two salesmen, and Oscar de la Hoya’s girlfriend, but this post is way too long as it is.