the poet in you

I've put off writing an About Me page for me ebay store for months now but yesterday at work we were talking about little known facts that we knew about each other and it was very funny. I decided to take the same approach for the ebay page. I may have a run-on sentence or two but before fine tuning, this is what I have so far:

Five Little Known Facts About Me:

1. Time Enough At Last, the Twilight Zone episode with Burgess Meredith as the lone survivor of a war that annihalated mankind was a real nightmare for me. He is left with books and time and sadly crushed eyeglasses. Lesson learned? Be careful what you wish for.

2. As a small child I was once so mesmerized by a figure skater that I tottered spastically toward him as he practiced what seemed to be (in hindsight) a very long and drawn out scratch spin. I was struck in the gut with his extended leg and was attached to it with a g-like force. We twirled and twirled. This was the closest I ever came to participating in the Olympics. A veritable rush for me, infuriating for him.

3. I sleep with an Italian Greyhound and have created a fictionalized screen name for him: sexyboy_99. Despite the pretend moniker, you may rest assured, nothing untoward has ever taken place.

4. I carry a pink tape measure in my pocket when I work at the vet clinic so that I can measure dachshunds *lengths while they are sedated. I keep the results in a work journal. My boss finds this very unusual but tolerates it. At the last clinic I worked at I inked the feet of guinea pigs and made little inky imprints. We don’t treat guinea pigs at the clinic I’m at now. Such a shame.

5. I compulsively buy books, new and used. It’s a disease. I fear that this habit may one day land me in the “poor house”, a place my father, God love him, often referenced when I was growing up.

* The tip of the nose to the end of the haunches

My mind has an dark and ugly phrase clutched in its sticky little fingers and will not let go...ROOT CANAL. As much as I dreaded my first visit to the dentist two weeks ago, the visit today is causing even more dread and anxiety. I need a root canal (and yes, I've had one before and honestly, it wasn't so bad). But my mind won't give me any peace this time around. That phrase is banging around up there and repeating and repeating like an unholy mantra - root canal, root canal, root canal.

I fretted about it yesterday, I succumbed to a mild depression regarding the matter and now I am counting down the hours and minutes to my appointment. I'm practically paralyzed with anxiety so needless to say I got only a minuscule amount of book work done. I never printed out my book inventory from ABE or Alibris. I did go through and delete several titles that I knew were sold but that was done from my very feeble memory. I managed to list three books on Ebay last night and this morning I have a few books to package for shipment. At least that is some distraction, I just hope I don't write, "Thank you for your purchase. Sincerely, Root Canal" on any of my packing slips.

There's a part of me that really regrets posting my books on ABE again. When I started out selling used books online, ABE worked out really well for me. The price was fair, they did not take a percentage of the shipping rate and the only other venue I used was Alibris (and on the rare occasion Ebay). Now my ABE listings have become something to contend with.

About a year and a half ago, when my ABE sales started crawling and creeping to a near standstill I removed my meager inventory and posted it to the Biblio site instead. I prefer Biblio but they don't get the traffic that ABE does, hence, I still have slow sales but I don't have to pay through the nose to post them and Biblio does not take a portion of my shipping fee. What I did NOT do and regret very much, is keeping my SOLD file in the database up to date. When I signed again with ABE in November and uploaded my books, everything that sold over the past 12+ months was listed. I now get sale notices through ABE that I cannot fill and my rating has hit the floor with one very loud thud and is looking for cover. Plus, I have twice the books that I did before so I am paying more to post them and my nearly obsolete iBook is getting slower and slower and slower.

So on a beautiful morning such as this, when I am sitting at the kitchen table with my coffee and I click to open my 'in-box', I shudder to think there may be an ABE sale. My weekend project is to do an inventory and make sure that my Alibris and ABE inventory are in sync. I'm just glad that my garden tiller is at the repair so that I won't be too distracted with gardening.

Outside my office window I can see my yard with all of it's beautiful potential laying in waste. For years now I've been looking out and imagining a very different view, one with raised garden beds, paths of straw, mulched  mounds of squash and vines clutching to string. On Tuesday it got to be too much. I so wanted to enter this dream that I went to the storage shed and found my old till. With no more than a utopian vision and the Craftsman, I set off to transform my yard. I found the gas, I found the motor oil, I pulled the cord...oh, the till started. It's dusty motor roared with all the vengeance a sleepy little tiller could make. But no sooner did the blades break the earth than I saw, to my horror, the gas leak.  Clearly world domination would have to wait. A repair shop would have to be found, a trip needed to be made. I was on a gardening high and there was no time to waste.

The upside to this? The very, very wonderful thing that came out of all of this was that we met Martin. Michael and I heaved our little machine into our wagon and were on our way to the fix-it shop when we saw a man, flanked by two dogs, watering his winter garden. One bed looked like mustard and I told Michael, "I've gotta stop and talk to this guy". I introduced Michael and myself to our neighbor and inquired about the garden. He immediately offered to take us to the back and give us the tour. It was wonderful. You wouldn't so much expect it from the street view but he had chickens, raised beds, straw paths. He was living my dream! I envied him. And he was so helpful, so generous with information and resources.

We learned about the Rhizome Collective, which I am convinced everyone but me must know about. We learned about different books and people and methods. It was very exciting. It was just one of those things where we were all in the right place at the right time. So yes, I am glad that my little tiller monster is in the shop this weekend. I have too much book work to do and digging in the dirt would be too much of a temptation.

PRAISE SONG FOR THE DAY

Each day we go about our business, walking past each other,
catching each others’ eyes or not, about to speak or speaking.
All about us is noise.
All about us is noise and bramble, thorn and din,
each one of our ancestors on our tongues.
Someone is stitching up a hem, darning a hole in a uniform,
patching a tire, repairing the things in need of repair.

Someone is trying to make music somewhere with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.

A woman and her son wait for the bus.

A farmer consider the changing sky; A teacher says, “Take out your pencils. Begin.”

We encounter each other in words, words spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed; Words to consider, reconsider.

We cross dirt roads and highways that mark the will of someone and then others who said, “I need to see what’s on the other side; I know there’s something better down the road.”

We need to find a place where we are safe; We walk into that which we cannot yet see.

Say it plain, that many have died for this day.
Sing the names of the dead who brought us here, who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges, picked the cotton and the lettuce, built brick by brick the glittering edifices they would then keep clean and work inside of.

Praise song for struggle; praise song for the day.
Praise song for every hand-lettered sign; The figuring it out at kitchen tables.

Some live by “Love thy neighbor as thy self.”

Others by first do no harm, or take no more than you need.

What if the mightiest word is love, love beyond marital, filial, national.
Love that casts a widening pool of light.
Love with no need to preempt grievance.

In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air, anything can be made, any sentence begun.

On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp -- praise song for walking forward in that light.

-Written and read by Elizabeth Alexander
for the Inauguration of President Barack Obama,
January 20, 2009

I almost hate to write this post because I am sensitive to my friends living in the brutal North and in the bone-chilling East. I played outside today, in the dirt. I've been putting off doing anything in our backyard because the soil is in such poor condition. In fact, I've been trying not to think about it for four years now because it makes me really fussy.

I used to love gardening and would spend days at my little plot at the community garden in San Diego. It was a wonderful place filled with plot after plot of little gardens maintained by lovely people who enjoyed getting their hands good and dirty. The conditions were perfect and it was a meditative and peaceful activity that I really needed at the time. But then I moved away, got married, zigzagged from state to state only to settle in Texas where the summers are merciless and I long for even one good lungful of salty sea air.

I knew right away, even before we bought the house that the yard would take a lot of very hard work to transform. It would take many, many hours and a lot of money. I didn't really know how bad the soil was though until we started digging around in it. Then we heard that the area used to be landfill but not a regulated landfill; it was pretty much an out of the way area where people used to dump just about everything. And that is what is in the ground. Everything. We find clothes, bottles, nails, tar paper, dolls, funnels, cans. You can always find broken glass. I few years back I was complaining about this and my friend suggested that instead of digging down, I add soil and build up so to speak. It is a good idea but the yard is so large it would take tons of soil to accomplish anything. So I've been quietly mulling this over for years.

I've decided to make several raised beds and small, manageable  cultivated areas. I will still need to amend the soil. Even with raised beds the roots will penetrate the existing soil and I am afraid the plants will absorb toxins. So today I tilled with my tiny tiller and I pulled handfuls of debris from the soil. And then the tiller gave up the ghost.

So this is my project: get the tiller fixed and dig like the devil. I am going to look into plants that absorb toxins. I read about plants that pull contaminants from the soil but I read that years ago. I'm not even sure where to start looking for this information. If anyone has any ideas please, pass them along. I'm all ears.

I've been listing gads of books on Ebay this morning partly because I suspect that Slip's eyes will need attention sooner than later. Although he is completely blind, his useless little eyes give him no end of trouble. They tear up, the lenses float free and I suspect he may be flirting with glaucoma. I know that either one or both will need to go so I'm trying to save for the inevitable.

I had to laugh though. I was posting Goethe's The Sorrows Of Young Werther and couldn't help but leaf through it. I've never read this book so I flippd it open at random:

"February 17

I fear that my envoy and I will not be together much
longer. That man is absolutely unbearable. His way of
working and of handling affairs is so ridiculous that I cannot
restrain myself from contradicting him; and I often handle some
matter at my will and in my own way - a way of course, which he
always disapproves. ..."

Change a few pronouns and I feel like this everyday. We are not much different now than in the 18th century. I do hope that young Werther was able to free himself of his envoy.

I finally made myself a dental appointment for next week, which I might add, I am dreading. I told the woman over the phone when I made the appointment that I was nervous and then I thought to myself that she probably hears that with every appointment that she makes. She probably hears it as often as I hear people tell me that they are nervous about having their pets sedated. She is, no doubt, immune to the irrational fears of others by now. If I persist I will be whispered about and there will be a coded message next to my name in her appointment book. So I give up and duly call back at her request to confirm my hour of torture.

I've tried to put the appointment out of my mind but that was doing nothing for me. The day, the hour was still lurking. I tried a different approach altogether. I started working the dental appointment into conversation with clients at the veterinary office. The two times I did it made me regret this maneuver. The first woman I told shared her last dental procedure with me. She needed a bone graft. Well this is interesting, I thought, my dog had a synthetic bone graft not long ago. Was hers synthetic? No. Hers was cadaver bone. Ok. Just for the record, I do not want cadaver bone in my jaw. For chrissake, I'll be walking around like a modern day Frankenstein.

The next woman was much older. I think she said 79 or 80. I wasn't going to bring up dentists with her and thinking back I really don't know why I did. It may have been to deflect the conversation that she started about my hair. After studying me from across the counter she stated, "Well, you've gone grey already."

It was very matter of fact, not mean at all. It sounded as if she may have just been thinking it to herself but she actually spoke the words aloud. It had been a long day, all I could do was sigh and agree with her, "I know and I think about it every day but then I think that I need to go to the dentist."

"Acchhh! I went to a dentist when I was 16 years old. He was right downtown on Congress Street. Right there, downtown. He had an office above a storefront. You had to go up the stairs." She paused, her memory taking the trip back 60 years. Then, very emphatically she said, "And he was a BUTCHER!!! Just awful".

So, no more sharing. It's like a vision quest. I just have to go out there on my own and get it over with. Talking about it is going to do absolutely nothing. I have to do it on my own,  all by myself. I am so dreading it.

 

I'm not much of a resolution maker, I really try to be kind to myself. I've made pretty silly resolutions in the past; resolutions that would take me to the movies or out buying a book or two. I also give myself the whole of January, even into February to work it out.

This year I may need to make a resolution that brings on a significant change in my life. I'm feeling a need to align myself with more compassionate people. Most of my time is spent at home but when I venture outside of that, I'd like it to be with people who are kinder and more tolerant than what I've been experiencing. It may have to start with changing jobs, you can only take so many months and years in an atmosphere that denigrates people on a daily basis.

I'd like to surround myself with individuals that value sincerity, empathy, gratitude. I don't feel that I can be my best self if I am asked to discourage thinking and questioning. I do not want to be a mindless rule follower and I find my respect is diminishing for those who do not ask questions, those who have a blind allegiance to what is perceived as authority.

I'll need some time to work out what is needed in my life. I am confident though that 2009 will bring on some very positive changes. Wish me luck!