how things fit together

I'm consumed this week in finding a suitable (and yet, shall we say, practical) way to honor a grand achievement:  my parents' upcoming fiftieth anniversary.  In my search for a related poem, just as I was becoming frustrated, I found this.

The Great Order of the Universe

by Christian Bok

The notes say that it was composed in response to the fiftieth anniversary of the Lego patent, in 2008.  I suppose I could wish that the Lego anniversary coincided exactly with my parents' anniversary, but goodness! Isn't it pleasing when things fit together so variably, so neatly, so interlockingly coupled?

more, more, more (how do you like it?)

I made a fine discovery this week--my daughter's new reading teacher is a writer with a YA novel , Falling for Hamlet, coming out next year. I also found that in addition to her personal facebook page, Michelle Ray has a new "writer" page that she's using like a miniblog, if I'm reading it right.

This makes some sense to me, especially since purchase of a cell phone for said daughter has resulted in a new phone for me--a smartphone which is considerably smarter than I am at the moment--and which has downloaded all my facebook contact info.

So I find myself asking, in the interest of a more consistent online writer presence, what goal makes more sense: to double the number of posts to this blog to a whopping TWO per week, or to try and comment more briefly but more frequently on facebook? And (importantly): comment on what? My fervent desire to snatch Hermione's time-turner from around her neck as D2 and I enter Chapter 6 of The Prisoner of Azkaban? And what would be the reason to want a more consistent online writer presence?

All reflections welcome....

as civilization unravels

it's soothing to chant something like the following, in which everything set backwards and upside down leads to a sense of floating rather than sinking....

I Am the Song

I am the song that sings the bird.
I am the leaf that grows the land.
I am the tide that moves the moon.
I am the stream that halts the sand.
I am the cloud that drives the storm.
I am the earth that lights the sun.
I am the fire that strikes the stone.
I am the clay that shapes the hand.
I am the word that speaks the man.


~Charles Causley
from The Puffin Book of Utterly Brilliant Poetry, ed. Brian Patten

the beauty of the blog

This morning on NPR (and let's face it, if I don't hear it on Morning Edition between 5 and 7am, it's not news) I heard how Maxine Hong Kingston, winner of a special award at the National Book Awards ceremonies last night, had tried to get her essay on the election of Barack Obama, a fellow Hawaiian, published in a number of newspapers and magazines and failed. Her response, of course, was to turn to the Internet, and with the click of a "Publish" button, her essay went live.

Also this morning I heard from a friend, the one who moved to the gigantic mansion in Texas; we always knew she was the Erma Bombeck of this decade, and now her blog, Marge Ponders, proves that she has been a blogger-in-waiting since before we knew what a blog was. She writes today that her daughter will turn 10 on Friday and become a "zero-teen." Now here is a concept I had not encountered, nor did I realize that the only gifts for a girl of this age are pricey electronics or pricey American Girl dolls.

This is ever so pertinent, since I informed Daisy just a week ago that there will be no tweenage in our household--you are a child until you are a teen, I said, (just like I said in 2000 that we would never eat in the car, in 2002 that no one would play computer games until they learned to read, and as recently as 2007 that our family would simply never have a video game system, and guess who now has a Wii?)--and then I let her buy the American Girl body book. (Thank the stars she has no interests in the sissy I mean historical dolls or their clothes, and in my defense, I made her buy the book with her own extensive stash of tweenage allowance money.) Anyway, now that Marge is blogging, I can keep up with her family, have a laugh, and get some advice on the state of the economic bailout at the same time--a beautiful efficiency.

Another friend is using her blog to make sure that people like me, whose only news source is early morning NPR, have easy access to the alternative media. At A Nice Gal's Guide to Online News and Politics, she makes it simple for me to keep up not only with her battles against chronic sinus infection, but with the new discourse of the Internet. She and I probably don't agree on everything, but we agree on enough about the world that I can trust her to point me in the right direction--an invaluable public service from my least public friend.

And then there's Sylvia Vardell, more of an acquaintance than a friend, who keeps me up to date on events in the world of shadowy world of children's poetry. I read, I write, I publish (very intermittently), but I do all this in a kind of vacuum, not having time to read all the children's book journals etc etc, so I'm grateful that there's somewhere to go for digestible tidbits of news and more than occasionally a poem to enjoy.

Finally, as a recent convert to Facebook, I appreciate the blog-spirited Status Updates from people I see regularly and those I haven't seen since high school, and let's face it, some of those updates are more worthy of the literature label. It all contributes to the possibility of contracting TMI disease, but this is more of the beauty of the blog--I go get it when I want it and not otherwise.

But le plus beau here is this: I'm sure I don't have anything as meaningful to say as Maxine, and I don't have the financial nouse of Marge or the political savvy of A Nice Gal, nor the connections that Sylvia profits from--and yet I too can set myself a purpose, set up a blog, and click "Publish." If nothing else (and if no one reads but me), it's a way to think, to write, to craft, and to have my say. Without bending too many live ears.

fatherland

The year we just spent in France is not the first time I've lived abroad. From 1991-1996 I lived in North London with Fiona. Oh, it was a heady, youthful, liberated period,filled with Grant family weddings, O'Brien roast dinners, Salsa Rosada, traditional patchwork quilting, and Jubilee Line travel accompanied by Ruth Rendell and Oasis. There were also vast numbers of parties, primly organized around themes like Magnetic Poetry, indoor fireworks and “luxury” foodstuffs, all of which tended to degenerate pleasantly into plonkfests.

It would also be fair to say that although I talked to my parents every week, I was officially estranged from my father. Reasonably enough, I now realize, it was tough for him to embrace my divorce and new “lesbian lifestyle,” no matter how essentially traditional my relationship was (and those who know both Fiona and my dad will have noticed a few spooky similarities). And I’m afraid he took it personally that I couldn’t any longer factor his desires and opinions into my life decisions.

So for a few of those five years we didn’t really talk about anything important, and if we did try, our conversations tended to degenerate unpleasantly into sulkfests. And then we both, me and the man who hand-built a wooden case for the used electric typewriter I lugged to college, discovered e-mail.

Here was a whole new way for us to talk—without having to face each other in person, without the painful tugging at heartstrings created by patronizing tones, by furrowed brows, by uncomfortable smirks, by tears. As a pastor in the habit of carefully crafting his sermons week after week, but not so much in the habit of revealing his personal uncertainties in the pulpit, my dad used this e-mail miracle to write about what he didn’t understand, what he didn’t believe in, what he worried I was losing through my choices.

On my side, I gained time. I could read his letters hot off the printer and again on the Tube. I could contemplate his meanings, take time to simmer down, take time to develop at least a little empathy. And I could use all my well-honed writing and teaching skills to educate my father about Heidi the Person (not Heidi the Daughter): my uncertainties, what I couldn’t believe in, what I was gaining through my choices.

Now, I’m not saying that “The Power of E-mail Mended our Broken Hearts, Praise the Lord!” If truth be told it was really the eventual arrival of the grandchildren that brought us all to our senses, and now, ten years later and back together again in Mid-Atlantica, computer-aided communication can’t always be relied on (my dad read the October 15 post with Rebecca McClanahan’s poem and thought I was writing about my nephew. Satchel, have I ever tried to teach you to type, dude?).

But I am saying that there are times when the combination of low-tech written word and high-tech instant messageability are just what the shaman ordered for improving communication. We chat, but we slow it down by typing. We write, but we speed it up with fiber-optics. We leave homes, but we don’t lose friends. The peasant in me is reconsidering her objections to our brave new digital world.

hotspots

There was a short-lived website here called backfence.com which was supposed to recreate, on the Internet, that old-fashioned opportunity to share news, ask advice and exchange opinions over the common back fences of our yards.

As useful as the Internet is, as much as I rely on e-mail in place of knocking on a neighbor's door or even picking up the phone ("Mommy, why are you calling the Superys instead of just walking across the street? That's not good for the earth."), the low-tech peasant in me still needs the face-to-face experience that a thing like backfence.com can't replace, even with all those clever avatars to customize. So where am I getting it?

My hu-co* hotspots are the Ayrlawn bus stop, morning and afternoon, and in the little copier room at school. This is where I see the same folks every day, where we can pick up where we left off last time, where I can ask how to save a dying plant (sounds like it's already dead), when class photos are (today) and where to find a dozen pairs of scissors (go buy them at Staples). These neighbors will do me a favor if I'm running late, will ask me a favor if they need one, and laugh at my stupid quips about school or national politics (out of politeness if not out of actual amusement).

And these exchanges are as close to concrete as social relations can be. They're here and now, live and unedited, and they remind me (as my conversation last night with the children about Samantha Smith, the Cold War and nuclear weapons did) that just because we can doesn't mean we should. Just because we can communicate almost solely by IM, Blackberry, email, evite, Facebook, blogger.com, cell phone, and other highwired tools doesn't mean we should. Sometimes we need to look each other in the eye.

So I'm going to get up, open the front door, walk 50 yards, and say good morning to a neighbor I have not laid eyes on since we got back on August 4. And if she's not there, I'll send her the link to this post.

*human-contact

typing

I wish I could say that I go around with an image in mind of letters dangling from the tip of each finger—the h, j, m, n, u and y, the 7 and 8 trailing each move of my right index like the starry streak that follows the sweep of a movie magic wand.

But the passage of words from my brain to my screen seems to leap right over the keyboard: that is, I think the sentence I want to say and my fingers type it without noticing that the words are balloon or umbrella or pasteurization. That’s the job of my eyes, and if they’re watching the screen, suddenly my fingers have a lot more work, especially the right middle, because that’s the one that does the backspacing and deleting (though I had to slow way down to even figure out that it’s the right middle who’s in charge of erasing).

I’m thinking about this because Daisy will start a “keyboarding” class soon, and Duncan has learned to hunt down the llll-e-t-t-e-rs-sss of his name, and because of this poem I heard on The Writer’s Almanac a while ago now and have not forgotten. The distance between h and two ds seems suddenly much greater than two keys.


Teaching a Nephew to Type

Because you lag already
years behind the computer-and-
otherwise-literate boys with fathers,
and your handwriting is a tangle
the teachers have grown weary
of unraveling, and because you are as close
to a son as I can manage, though nothing
about you is manageable anymore,

I am teaching you to type. The trick
is to look anywhere but down.
Your fingers are dumb birds pecking,
just follow the chart I’ve made.
We’ll begin in the thick of things,
the home row to which we’ll always
return. Little finger on a. Then tap
your way next door to s. Now

you’ve made as. Don’t think, I say.
Just watch the chart: dad sad fad
a flash a flask a lad had. Tomorrow
we’ll move on to reach and return
and the period key, but for now
just use the comma, it’s like catching
a breath, or you can type a colon,
double dot, old snake eyes, luck
in your future, meaning watch this space:
something is about to follow.

~ Rebecca McClanahan
from Deeplight: New and Selected Poems 1987-2007. © Iris Press, 2007.