the poet in you

Everytime I let my mind wander back to the errand I ran with Michael over the weekend I end up laughing. I can't help it. Sometimes it's just a wee little chuckle but today while driving to work, I laughed so hard it made my eyes tear.

We had to make our way to Target on Sunday afternoon. The light bulbs in our ceiling fan were going out one by one; there are a total of four. It was okay when the first one blew but then we lost another and I couldn't possibly risk trying to read by one meager 60 watter hovering overhead. So off we went.

We parked a ways out from Target, in one of the few shaded areas because the dogs were in the car. It was an absolutely beautiful but blustery day. The sky was clear and blue and it was refreshing to feel the cool breeze. There was a plastic grocery bag dancing on a gust of wind and it reminded me of the scene in American Beauty where the next door neighbor is sharing his own homemade "movie" with his newfound friend. You know, that scene where there is beauty in the ordinary and we are all one and your beautiful and so am I. Ahh, if only I had the soundtrack I would have been lulled into a sweet serenity just watching this inanimate object playing on the wind.

But we didn't have the soundtrack and we weren't all god this is awesome, we were just keeping our heads down and walking straight into the breeze. The bag whirled and flipped across Michael's chest, he reflexively batted it away. But it whirled back around following us and took up on another gust until it had plastered itself ALL OVER MY FACE. I couldn't get it off. It wanted to go one way and I was going the other so it just wrapped itself tight against my nose, my mouth, my glasses. I had one arm waving around and one arm swatting at the thing like it was a swarm of bees and I desperately yell out, "Michael!!!". You'd have thought I'd fallen overboard from a cruise ship. "MICHAEL!!!" I was suddenly blind and suffocating.

I felt like every car in the parking lot was occupied, like I was dancing around if front of the movie screen at a drive-in theater, spastically waving my arms like a madman. I half expected honking. Michael kept saying (between hearty bouts of laughter) "The weird thing was that you just kept walking". Which, I don't remember. I just thought I stopped and clawed at my face to remove the offending trash. He does walk faster than me, I was probably just trying to keep up. I felt nothing short of mauled. I'd been mauled by life and damn, it was the best laugh I'd had in weeks.

A friend emailed Sunday night, a someone that was a neighbor in the apartment I lived in during college. We've always written, emailed and made the occasional phone call. The last time we met though was probably ten years ago. We were neighbors and pals, nothing more. He's been through some rather intense situations emotionally over the past few years. I admire that he stays with it, rides the feelings through without trying to escape. He's a good observer and is willing to examine the self - both his and others.

By the end of the email though he had hinted at coming for a visit. I shot off a response saying how no, he couldn't because I am so not myself these days. I feel unattached to myself, I am a foreign visitor to my life. It's been gradual, 6 months or so and I've blamed my job at the clinic because it makes me want to retreat from everyone but I know that is not it. These intense feelings of dislocation are SO BRIEF but still they are so unsettling. Maybe my emotional center is shifting and it is natural at this age. Regardless, the unpredictability of my Self make it seem impossible to have company. I said no, not until I was through with menopause which could be such a long time considering I have yet to start menopause. And too, the mention of Michael was attached like an afterthought. He's no afterthought, that man. He's the sweetness of life.

I've been thinking though, a retraction may be necessary. Maybe I just need to regroup and make some choices and some changes. I feel a need to get back to the lists I'd make in college, lists of long and short term goals. What will I do this month, this year? What do I want in 5 or 10 years? And a map of the day wouldn't hurt either. What must I do and what do I want to do with this day? my mind is such a dither lately that this could only help.

It's too sad for words, Alan's passing. He kept the most wonderful blog, This Moment, one that I enjoyed visiting for his photographs, his sensitive and funny posts, and all that he shared. He would stop by my little blog address regularly and what an honor it was. I didn't expect this loss.

It all pales in comparison, the little bits of life here in Texas. This news of Alan just shut everything down for me. These connections that we make with our blogs, they are real. We share our real thoughts, our real selves with others. It is not entirely an indulgent act, bonds are forged, our hearts swell all because we have connected. Such a mysterious animal are we.

New developments in the past few weeks:

I am now an official library volunteer! I love it although it was a little disconcerting having to go through a criminal background check and having to get finger printed. No criminal am I but my mind conjured up a Camus inspired scenario of a computer glitch, an error that would claim I had a warrant out for my arrest and I would basically be tarred and feathered and banned from libraries worldwide. Phew. No such thing happened.

My emotional pendulum regarding the vet clinic was at an all time low for the past several weeks. I am looking forward to the positive swing but certain situations make that difficult to imagine. Saturday a family with 2 very young girls (4 and 8? or thereabouts) and a chihuahua puppy came in. Why parents insist on getting chihuahuas for young children I will never understand. At any rate, they let the girls bathe with the dog and they promptly drowned it. CPR was administered and the pup was brought in about 30 minutes before we closed. The daughters showed absolutely no interest in their ailing animal whatsoever, they were too distracted by the clinic cats and the puppies that another client had brought in. These daughters sort of blew my mind because they seemed completely bereft of empathy and the parents seemed okay with the whole thing. In fact, they asked, "Can't you just take the puppy and put it to sleep now?". I don't know why they did CPR on it.

We made a trip to the comic book store to pick up The Ticking by Renee French. It is a hardcover, 1st edition. Now if I could only find Marbles In My Underpants. I love Renee French, did I mention that? Love her. I also love Lilli Carre. Her book Deep Sea Diving is on my Holy Grail of Books To Find list. I find French and Carre to be inspirational in a graphic novel sort of way. They've stirred my imagination and I find myself creating stories for my non-existant book, Ronnie Stone's Beard. It stems from my smallest dog, "Baby" and her real life infatuation with a man named Ronnie Stone. Needless to say, he's bearded. He picks Baby up and she squeals with delight. The Husband and I always imagine that she finds his beard a sublimely intoxicating locale - full of heady aromas and tiny critters that only a dog could love.

Oh! And lest I forget, my very, very dear friend has had her second baby! His name is Jasper Mason. A beautiful baby, he was born on February 13th at 7 in the morning. He looks absolutely perfect. Can't wait to meet him!

So these are the events that life has brought my way. A little joy, a little trouble, a little something for the imagination.

When you live in Texas, there is no forgetting you are in Texas. Not that I forget my zipcode but we have lived in 4 different states since we wed ten years ago. No. It is the only place that when you ask someone how they are you might hear, "Well, I feel like I've been rode hard and put up wet." I've heard the doctor that I work for say that a certain someone should be shot and stacked like hardwood. And it is the only state where I've had a feral pig in my freezer. A feral pig. In my freezer. Sure, you might get some musky in your freezer if you live in Wisconsin, you might get some venison jerky in New Mexico. But the pig? The pig reeks of Texas.

Mind you, I am not a Texan. Not even remotely. Austin is tolerable but I am by no means a gun-totin', truck drivin', talk radio kind of gal. Texas may be bigger than France but I won't be boasting about it on my bumper (although "Texas, It's Bigger Than France" does appeal to me on some level and is, dare I say, more than a little tempting as bumper stickers go).

But back to the pig. Now I adore pork, perhaps the biggest pork fan there ever was. I've got chops in the fridge right now. And so far my best crockpot meal was a pork roast with cranberries. We have a beautiful new Rival crockpot but I digress. So yeah. Pork, man, pork is good. Personally, I like a really fatty little roast. But when Michael said that his co-worker was going to kill a feral pig that had been tearing up his property and then give him the meat, I suddenly felt as though Davy Crockett were standing in my kitchen. Davy Crockett of the famous, "You may all go to hell and I, I will go to Texas!" bumper sticker and coffee mug slogan that you'll see around town. My head whirred, I felt a little woozy, I felt like I was free falling through Alice's rabbit hole with images of Stubb's BBQ, cowboy boots, Dodge Rams, yolked shirts, Billy Ray Cyrus, armadillos all flying past me. I was falling, falling into the heart of Texas. THUD!

Now let me digress just a little further at the risk of creating the longest ever blog post. I knew that the feral pigs were a problem because when I went to a library book sale last year, the guy in line behind us was telling stories of all the damage the pigs had done to his property. Then, a few weeks back, there was a story on the local news about the pig damage in town. They also said that if you lived out of the city limits it was legal to gun the things down on sight. So I knew, but never did I imagine, that one would be stored IN MY FREEZER. And what makes me feel like the odd man out is that the reaction that I get is the same as if I told people that I had a quart of milk on the fridge, or Campbell's soup in the cupboard. I even get cooking tips. BTW, it seems to be fairly common knowledge that you do not want boar meat. The man-pigs are very foul smelling when cooked. So, I guess we're lucky to have received a sow. And a side note: armadillo tastes a whole lot like pork.

But this pig, it will be our marital undoing. My aversion to the pig borders on sheer revulsion. I do not want it cooked in the house and I do NOT want it cooked in my crockpot. Michael, on the other hand, can't wait to get it into the crockpot. I think I may have to hide the crockpot from him. And I knew that this was so and that he was keeping this grotesque desire of his a secret from me. I knew because of his silence. I've learned that after years of marriage, his silence speaks volumes. I knew he had some furtive, dirty little plan to put his frozen little friend in my newest appliance. It all came out when I phoned my mother and told her that there was no way I wanted to have that smell permeate the house for 8 hours. Michael overheard this and our eyes locked. His eyebrows did a funny little thing and then I knew. He had plans for the Rival.

As of yet, nothing has been done. I am home hoping that writing about this will bring me some clarity. Michael is at work. The pig is in the freezer. The crockpot? Gosh, I don't know where that dang ol' crockpot went to.

I'm really not much of a movie critic but I'll try to sum up my experience during the much anticipated JJ Abrams movie, Cloverfield:

Yesterday Michael and I were enjoying a nice casual Sunday. We had our
buttermilk pancakes, we read the paper, then we decided to go and see
Cloverfield.

We went to the Westgate Theater here in Austin because we thought that we would go to the
bookstore afterwards. We bought our tickets and proceeded to the "First
theatre on your right, thank you". We made good time, there was only
one other person sitting in the dark when we walked in. Even when the
movie started there were no more than a dozen of us altogether.

Ahhh, but then the movie started. It was loud, there was the handheld
camera action. Evidently that was to continue throughout the movie.
But I couldn't sit through the whole movie because that movie? THAT
MOVIE MADE ME SICK. Physically sick. I had to get up and go to the
Room for Those Afflicted With Motion Sickness. I had to hope that the
toilet didn't "automatically" flush before I was done...being sick.
Sometimes that auto-flush just isn't where it's at.

So there you have it. Cloverfield made me sick.