On the way to school, Hadley said, “I feel bad for the cheetah.”

“Why is that?” I asked, thinking she was going to tell me that it is an endangered animal, or that maybe its habitat is threatened because we use too much hairspray or drink too much coffee.

“I feel bad for researching it.”

“You feel bad researching the cheetah?”

“Yes. I feel like I’m taking something away from it.”

Here’s a picture of me and Celena on her wedding day.  We are in Vieques, Puerto Rico. I learned that evening from her father that Celena’s name means, “Gift from God.”  I didn’t know that literally, but I think from the day she introduced herself during a lunch recess at Percy Julian Junior High, I felt it.

Here’s a picture of me in the best coffee shop I’ve ever been in.  I’m sick I can’t go back and do all my reading and writing there.  On each of the tables is a bucket with pencils and loose leaf notebook paper to write and sketch on.  When you leave, you can drop your words and pictures into a bucket called “Offerings.” I would’ve left mine but I wanted to keep the ideas I wrote down: that one wall of this coffee shop is painted so it looks exactly like a piece of notebook paper, a red margin line, three holes, and blue lines for writing. That there was a wine bottle, emptied and decoupaged with poetry and flowers placed inside.  That another wall has large chalkboard squares on it, and “The Original Story of a Girl” titled above them.  Patrons can sketch part of the story and write a caption for it.  I sketched the chalkboard idea and wrote, “What about, ‘The Stories of Two Original Girls’ instead?” I wondered if I could duplicate this for Hadley and Harper’s room; my two original girls.  Oh, Starbucks, why can’t you be more like this coffee shop? The world would be a much better place, I think.

Here’s a picture of drawings of ships that Jesse and I found when we explored a fort in Old San Juan that was occupied from the 1600s until after World War II.  The room with these sketches was a dungeon where a captain was captured and waiting to be executed. The room was sweltering and small and there was one window as narrow as the width of my arm and so deep that I don’t think you could toss a small rock and get it to the world outside. And even if you could, it would plummet to the ocean below. Way below.

The sketches were protected by glass, otherwise that is all that was in the room. I wondered how the sailor got a pencil. Maybe he used a stone? Or a piece of charcoal? I wondered if the ships were messages to his crew, what to be aware of, or maybe where secret supplies were stored. Then I wondered if maybe drawing the ships comforted him in some way. That the movement of his hand on the rocky wall calmed him for what he knew was coming. That creating something helped him steady himself.  I wondered what I would draw or write about if I were in his situation.

When we got home from our little vacation, all this pink was gone, and Harper was so sad. “It’s just green leaves now,” she said. I told her the pink doesn’t last too long, but they’ll be back next year. “And I took a picture of it,” I told her.

“It’s not the same,” she said.

No, it’s not.  It’s not the same as being in the picture. It’s not the same as living it. And when you look at it again, I suppose a little bit of that moment is taken away.

Maybe Hadley’s right.

I don’t know, though. There seems to be a lot to learn about the cheetah. Maybe this summer the girls and I will take a trip to the zoo and stand in front of it and wonder about it. Maybe Hadley will tell us what she knows about the cheetah, and maybe Harper will have a question that Hadley can’t answer so we’ll stop by the library on the way home to check out books on the cheetah.  Maybe we’ll have to read the books at the frozen yogurt shop across the street. Hadley will read from the book and Harper will draw cheetahs on napkins using pens from my purse because I always have pens in my purse.

Except that time in the coffee shop in Old San Juan.  That time, though, they were waiting for me as I sat down with my espresso. Gifts at the perfect time I needed them.

“I’m sorry I came out,” she says, “but one of my braids came lose.” She’s walking towards me holding the book with one arm folded around it and the other extending the purple elastic towards me.

“That’s OK,” I say. “I bet we can take the braids out now.” I criss-cross my legs and put Joan Didion to the side. Hadley comes close, still holding the pterodactyl book.

“Did you know that the Triassic Pterodactyls are the smallest pterodactyls ever?” Hadley tells me this as I unwind the braids and her hair springs lose.

Last night, after baths, I offered to braid the girls’ hair. As I braided, we told stories using “Tell Me A Story” cards. The idea, or the way we play, is that one person picks up a card, looks at the picture, and begins a story. Everyone playing gets a chance to continue the story using that picture until we’ve all had a chance.  Then we pick a new picture and repeat. The story we told last night was about a dog named Jack who drove a car to the mountains to his birthday party where everyone at the party had a name that started with J.

Hadley’s braids are out and I tousle them a bit with my hand. “They look good,” I say. She sits on the other side of the couch and opens up her pterodactyl book. I open up Joan Didion again. I’ve underlined only this from the essay: “fiction is in most ways hostile to ideology.” I underlined it not because I agree with or understand the statement, but before Hadley came out, something struck me about those words, though I can’t remember what. I try to think about fiction being hostile to ideology when Hadley starts to tell me about pterodactyl teeth.

“They have the same teeth as whales, Mama.” This time she doesn’t ask me if I know this. Now she’s teaching me. The book is open and flat against her stomach and she’s using her hands to tell me what she knows. “Its mouth is like this,” she explains. “The bottom teeth catch the food and the top teeth chew it.”

“That’s interesting. I didn’t know that,” I say.

We sit silently for a few minutes. I think maybe I can get a few more pages read while Hadley reads but I can’t.  This is not her fault, I just can’t seem to concentrate when there’s more than words in the room. Harper comes out, groggy and walking unsteadily.  It’s still early for her and she looks confused.

“Mommy I had a bad dream,” she tells me and crawls into my lap, Joan Didion’s pages get bent under Harper before I have a chance to slide the book out and put in on the couch.

“I’m sorry you had a bad dream,” I say and give her a hug.

“Will you take my braids out?”

I do the same for Harper as I did for Hadley a few moments before, and Harper runs to the bathroom to see what she looks like. “Mommy, I LOVE them!”

“I’m glad,” I say, getting off the couch and walking towards the kitchen to start breakfast. Joan Didion stays next to Hadley while she studies pterodactyls.  While I’m pouring juice, cutting an apple, and toasting waffles Hadley asks, “Mama?”

“Yes?”

“Can we do that again tonight? The braiding and the stories? Well, I sorta liked the braiding and you can do that again but I want to know if we can tell stories again.  Can we do that again tonight?”

“Sure,” I tell her as I bring her some juice. “We can tell stories again.”

Every summer the Little League teams in the Chicago suburbs were invited to Comiskey Park for “Little League Night” (at least, that’s what I’m calling it now). We got to wear our baseball uniforms, eat hotdogs, watch the Sox play, and the highlight was being able to walk around the baseball diamond while the crowd cheered and the organ played, “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” (or maybe it was “Pump Up the Jam”).

The night I went I had previously spent several hours at the dentist’s office getting a root canal. I needed a root canal because I’d gotten half my front tooth knocked out during one of my baseball games.

I love the reactions I get when people find out my tooth was knocked out during a baseball game. They look at me like I might be an athlete, and if I knew enough about baseball, I’d make the next part up and create a character who won the game while sacrificing her front tooth.

What happened was this: I was sitting on the bench in the dugout, trying to draw a butterfly in the dirt with my shoe. I heard cheers and screams, and looked up to see my teammate running the bases. She got to home plate before the other team could get the ball, resulting in a homerun. We jumped and “hoorayed” as she ran into the dugout slapping her “five” and hitting her helmet.

Now that I think about it, I don’t know how her helmet came into contact with my tooth. I was one of the last people to congratulate her, so maybe she wasn’t paying attention. Or, more likely, I lost interest in congratulating her and turned my attention to my butterfly dirt sketch.

What I do remember was the crack I heard when her head hit my tooth. And then the sand-papery feel of what was left of my tooth. Suddenly that warm summer breeze was frigid when I breathed in, and I put my hand over my mouth quickly to protect it while tears streamed down my cheeks.

So after the root canal, I’m walking around the baseball diamond at Comiskey, and all I can think about is the root my dentist showed me when he took it out of my mouth.

“Do you want to keep it?” he asked my mom.

“NO!” With that one word my mom was able to express disgust as well as her suspicion that the dentist might be nuts.

As we drove home on the Eisenhower, we were behind a school bus filled with adults, that, to my 4th grade mind, were not following the rules of good riding-the-school-bus-behavior. You NEVER stick your head out of the window, or stand up while the bus is moving. And you certainly don’t pull your pants down and press your butt up against the back window so the family in the brown caravan with the 9 and 11 year old kids can see it.

“What is he doing?” my brother said, a mixture of awe and fear in his voice.

My mom, never to miss an educational moment, said,

“Kids? That’s what you call a pressed ham.”

A couple of pictures from the Creativity Journals my friend and I made for the class we are teaching.  The first class was this week and it was wonderful.  I was pretty nervous about teaching again but as soon as I started it was like putting on my favorite pair of jeans.

Hadley brought home a flower pot with daisy seeds in it from Girl Scouts last week.  I put it on our table with pencils, scissors, glue sticks and washi tape.  They sit on a bowl that a group of sixth graders made for me years ago when I was their teacher.  They took a line from an essay of mine and painted it on the bowl, then signed their names on the bottom. The line is: “Maybe someday when they’re sitting in my classroom, my students will open a gift that God has given them. That’s why I am a teacher.”

The dogwood trees have bloomed and Harper calls them, “ballerina trees.” On our walks she collects the pink pedals that have fallen to the ground and carries them around with her until their edges are brown.

My best friend from high school is getting married in May.  That’s us at our Senior PROM. I wrote an essay about she and I growing up and it submitted it in my graduate school application.  Here’s a part from it that describes a road in our neighborhood.* She and I used to drive it because its path took the same route as the Des Plaines River, making it curvy and fun to drive fast on.

“A part of the road branches off and becomes a dirt road that’s bumpy and swerves more than the main part. I think it’s a driveway or alley that is no longer used. I never drive this part. I don’t have it memorized like I do the main road. To drive this road you have to be the kind of driver who is OK with seeing only a few feet ahead of you. You have to be OK with sharp turns and wheels that might slip in the gravel. This is the part Celena drives. She drives it fast and at night when it is even harder to see what’s going on. I love riding along with her; it is both thrilling and terrifying, and I trade off laughing and screaming as we barrel down this tattered old road.

The day Celena falls during practice, I drive down my part of the road. The oak trees on either side are thick with large green leaves, their branches stretching out so that I drive under a green ceiling; bits of sun peeking in sprinkling glittery flecks on my windshield. Celena would have noticed this, I think. I make a note to tell her about it sometime.”

*Some of you who read this will recognize that I combined two roads. One of them is Thatcher and the other is the one we used to call “the Booya road.” Or maybe that was me who just called it that. At any rate, I combined them for the sake of the story.

What’s the same:

*Those eyes of yours. Although, not the red eye part in the first picture. Sorry. I couldn’t figure out how to fix that.

*I still see the baby in your face, especially in your cheeks.

*I used to call you “the warden” because it seemed like you always knew what was going on, from the moment you were born. You are the same way today. Not only do you need to know but you want to be at the center of it all.

*We live in the same home you took your first steps in. the same home where you rolled around over and over one evening on the living room floor.  You were wearing blue baseball pajamas, and though you couldn’t say it, I could tell you were so pleased that you could roll over and that’s why you continued to do it. Your eyes matched your baseball pajamas.

*You still wake up early and I still wonder if something’s wrong when it’s 7am and you aren’t out of your bedroom.

What’s different:

*You share a room.

*You have a sister.

*You are in Kindergarten, but just barely.  I see the incoming Kindergartners and they don’t look like you.  You are minutes from being a first grader.

*You read chapter books. When you were six months old, just before your morning nap, we read board books. Mostly Sandra Boynton. You loved Doggies and The Belly Button Book.

*You can whistle and go across the monkey bars.

Happy “And a Half” Birthday, Hadley.

This post was inspired by a Past and Present Challenge by Ali Edwards.

It’s been real but there’s a new color in town.

Can we also talk about what’s going on in these pictures?

Come and knock on our door!

Harper’s new past time is getting dressed.  She picks outfits out all by herself, then lays them on the floor of her bedroom to “see how they look.”

She does it for Hadley, too.

Hadley’s a good sport and puts on anything Harper lays out for her.  Besides, Hadley’s more interested in organizing her paperbacks.

I believe the ones on their spines have been read. The others are “to be read.”

Hadley also likes to read what I’m reading.

I highly recommend Booked, by the way.  It is a must read, and after you read it you are going to want to write just like Ms Swallow Prior.  And when I write “you” I mean me.

Speaking of what we want to be when we grow up, here’s a gem of a conversation between the girls and me.  Hadley expressed interest in becoming a teacher.  I told her being a teacher is a great job.

“Does it cost a lot of money?”

“To be a teacher?”

“Yes. How much do you have to pay to be a teacher?”

“No, no,” I said to Hadley, “you get PAID to be a teacher.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, really!”

“So, jobs pay you?” Hadley spoke as though she might have won the lotto. “Hairdressers get paid?  And those people who stand on the side of the road dressed like smoothies and hot dogs?  They get paid, too?”

“Yes, they all get paid.” 

“Great,” Hadley said with relief.

“Mom?” Harper asked.

“Yes?”

“When I grow up can I get paid to be a princess?”

So we have the hot dog guy, a teacher, and being a princess as possible careers so far. That’s cool. I wanted to be a Luv-a-Bull when I grew up. And Scarlet O’Hara. Or somebody who shops for a living.  No, no. Not a personal shopper. Just somebody who gets paid to shop for herself. This is why I always failed those career surveys in high school. Those kinds of things are not on career lists.

So that’s what we’re doing.  Will you join us?

Click on the link below and share it with others if you want.  Or just tell them about this here blog.  Because, it’s not such a bad place to spend a few minutes, is it?

Exploring Creativity through Yoga Flyer (1)

I want to tell you about a coffeehouse I found while I was in Port Townsend. To get there from Whidbey Island, I had to get on a ferry and cross the Puget Sound.  It’s a lovely ride along what is called the Whale Trail so I had to stand at the bow to look for some. I didn’t see any, sadly, but another writer who was on the boat with me (and had been to Whidbey before) knew that a depression in the water could mean that a whale was just below the surface. He showed me what to look for and I looked hard for fins and blow holes clutching the camera just in case.

On the ferry there are booths where you can sit and talk with your other writer friends about writerly things like how cool would it be if a whale jumped out of the water and over the ferry.

Some of the booths have puzzles laid out on tables, and when I first got on the boat and saw a guy working on one of those 4,675 piece puzzles I thought, “Geez. This boat ride must be long if he brings a puzzle along with him.”  But on the ride back I realized that these puzzles  are there for everyone.  You sit down for a time, take a look at the problem, see if you can contribute to the whole picture, and then be on your way.

Isn’t that nice?  You do what you can for a time and then give someone else a chance to create the picture.

But back to the coffeehouse.  Look at that beauty.  You know what this kind of coffee does to me?  It makes me tell you stories.  All kinds of stories.  I start running at the mouth about my kids, my husband, my brother, my best friend from high school who’s getting married in a month did you know and let me tell you about the time when we…well, you get the picture.  This kind of coffee makes me happy and safe and when I’m happy and safe I can tell you stories.

I came with a group that day and when we walked in one of us said to the baristas, “Did you know your website says you’re closed on Tuesdays?”

“We know,” they told us.  ”He’s not gonna change it,” one guy said pointing with his thumb to the other guy making our drinks, to which he replied, “Isn’t it a nice surprise when you come here and you think we’re closed and we’re not?”

I felt very welcome in a place that hopes on surprises and ordered a macchiato (not a caramel macchiato you Starbucks folks – NEVER a caramel!  That’s like drinking Boone’s or Milwaukee’s Best) and sat down with some friends and told my stories.  A few hours later I came back and ordered more coffee. This time, I talked to the baristas while the darkest brew they had slowly plunked into my cup from the filter above. I told them how much I loved the individually brewed cup of coffee and we began a discussion about Intelligentsia.

“This kind of coffee,” I said, including theirs and Intelligentisa’s, “is so much better but it takes more time.” I continued to tell them that in Chicago, there is a Starbucks across the street from one of the Intelligentsia stores and for every one person that goes in, probably 25 come out of Starbucks.

“Yeah,” they both say, and smile. Surprise! You had to wait a little bit longer but isn’t this so much better?

I bought a pound of coffee for my parents on the way out.

On Tuesday, two weeks to the day I was sitting at the coffeehouse, the girls and I took a trip to Washingtonian Center to play at the park, then go to Barnes and Noble to read books.  On the trail to the park was the train, that to our knowledge, only comes out in the summer. Surprise! Here it was with its red, blue, and yellow cars, waiting to pull kids around the water.

“Do you want a ride?” the conductor asked.

“Of course!” we said and got in the yellow car.

It’s not Port Townsend. It’s man made, and commercialized and oh so suburban. But surprises are here, too.

Surprise! My oldest child, the one whose transitions are like butter melting on pancakes, got scared on the train. Hadley was gripping the sides of the car when Harper noticed first.

“Here, Hadwee, hold on to my hand,” she said and Hadley took it.  Then Harper held out her other hand to me. “You can hold my hand, Mommy. I’m not scared.”

Surprise!

I wanted to tell you about this coffeehouse almost two weeks ago but didn’t get around to it.  Up until I began this entry I thought those pictures I took and that story in my head would just drift away because the moment was over. But a friend of mine suggested a few days ago that instead of instantly updating a status, refreshing a feed, clicking the button on the camera, we allow stories to be in our hearts for awhile. So I thought again about the coffee house, and my writing, my girls, and the stories we are all living together.

Maybe you don’t see the whale. Maybe you don’t complete the puzzle. Maybe you have to wait a little longer for the good stuff.  I say that’s OK. I say pay attention to it all anyway.

The whale is there. The puzzle can be finished. And your stories can be told. Your past is usable.*

Surprise!

*taken from Breath for the Bones: Art, Imagination, and Spirit: Reflections on Creativity and Faith by Luci Shaw. Quote, “William Saroyan, an American writer, said: ‘The task of the writer is to create a rich, immediate, usable past.”

Enjoying: Hennepin from Ommegang Brewery in a Dogfish Head Alehouse St. Patrick’s Day pint glass.  Is that OK to mix the beer and the glass?

Making: lists and plans with a Snow White pencil.

Feeling: happy to have completed another residency and happy to be back home again.

Reading: Breath for the Bones by Luci Shaw. A lovely book for anyone really, but especially anyone who is interested in faith and creativity.

Hoping: for warmer weather.  I think this is the first Spring in DC that I haven’t had a chance to wear flip flops in March. I love flip flops. They are my favorite kind of shoe. I want to wear them ASAP. I have no patience for this kind of weather.

Five Years Ago: I stand corrected. At a year and a half, Hadley was all bundled up at the Cherry Blossom Festival. No flip flops were worn that day.

Four Years Ago: A great video of Harper screaming at her toys.  You don’t want to miss it.

Three Years Ago: Here’s a post about the warmer weather we are enjoying. It happened four years ago on this date.  We will not be enjoying warmer weather on April 2, 2013.

Two Years Ago: Awww, Baby Otto.  I love this one.

Last Year: Ticks.

It was windy on Whidbey Island this week, and this produced waves I could hear all over Camp Casey as I walked around the campus.

Sometimes the wind blew so hard that all I could do was lean into it and wait for the gust to pass. I’ll be honest, I got sick of the wind smacking me in the face most of the time. It whipped through my jacket despite my efforts to hunker forward and keep it from stinging my stomach. I was jealous of the water that seemed to dance to the music that the atmosphere provided. I wished I had enough assurance to be comfortable enough to not worry about balancing and putting one foot in front of the other.

Each night at this residency, one of the mentors would read from something they wrote. This time, each writer chose something that was a work in progress. I’m not sure whether they were comfortable with the idea of revision, the longer I stick with writing the more I understand that creating second, third, seventeenth, drafts involves confusion, scars and stretch marks. And while there might be apprehension in knowing the road they were heading down, I think there was an excitement and wonder as they spoke of what their stories would become. “Who knows what kind of story will come from that mess?” one writer said, and I’m pretty sure she smiled when she said it.

Another writer, a poet, discussed a time in her life when she was sad. She didn’t want to be sad so she took herself somewhere and the place she went gave her inspiration for several poems she would begin to write. The sadness was still there but she put herself in a place where she could sit with the sadness.  ”If I feel confident in my emotion I can even make stuff up,” she told us.

I liked that and wondered what I might make up from the wind I had to lean in to this week. I think I’ll start to see some stories swirling around that wild mess.

Love,

Mama