our lady of lost things

Sometime this past week I lost my debit card. And yes, I've retraced my steps and I tore the house and office apart, looked under the seats of the car and called the last place I used it, all to no avail. It is simply and mysteriously gone. I called on St. Anthony and the various statues of Buddhas and goddesses of mercy all over my house and then dug out the madonna I bought at an art show last year for a little star power. So far they have all struck out. I guess my debit card is with the last debit card I lost about six months ago and the cell phone I lost before that and various and sundry Really Important Papers, earrings, lovers, sunglasses and that black cashmere sweater I loved, all of which and more have drifted out of my life over the years. I loved this new debit card because the number ended in 4 sevens, soI've held off reporting it to the bank because I keep thinking it will turn up in some crazy unlikely place, like stuck to the bottom of a yogurt carton in my refrigerator. That is a totally believable scenario in my life. I have a new desk in my office at home, with lots of deep file drawers and new blue file folders and work space and cubby holes, but I know it won't help me hold onto anything because my life caroms about like a pinball machine instead of clicking into a smooth orbit. Categorizing, filing, keeping one list instead of 10, putting the debit card back in the same place in my wallet every time I use it is just never going to happen, but I think I'm learning to let go gracefully.

An Italy State of Mind

"How sweet to do nothing". I first heard the phrase in a Cary Grant/Sophia Loren movie and I use it as a mantra when I'm overwhelmed by life. I took this photo last fall in Tuscany at a party in Siena. Moments before, when I was walking through town to the villa of a new acquaintance, a storm came out of nowhere. Suddenly my friends and I were running through sheets of rain and hail between aged stucco walls under gorgeous chiaroscuro clouds. Out of nowhere, a woman motioned us into her car parked on a sloping street. She was a tourist from Sweden waiting out the rain. We were soaked, instant friends, grazie, ciao, etc. When we finally got to our party, the storm had passed, wine was passed, a slow evening stained the sky, and the whole world narrowed down to the view from a window overlooking the Italian countryside. I was supposed to be in Italy again this week, this very night, at the wedding of a friend. But I cancelled a few days before because, because, because. Because I needed to have nothing to do here in my own house, at the end of my own driveway, in my own bed. Because I knew I couldn't pack a bag, wait in an airport, go through security, take one more step out of my life right now. I know I'm a bad friend, but I also know it was one of the best weeks of my life, in which I said yes yes yes to me me me. I'm apt to take on my own guilt and any nearby free-floating guilt that no one claims, but for once I ignored it, plus all the people who said I was missing the chance of a lifetime (yes, yes, yes, I know I did!) and my own tendency to second-guess any decision I make--and stayed home and slept as late as I could, wrote pages of thoughts that had been building up like a northwestern log jam, read mindless mysteries, drank Rosa Regale at a bonfire, and let all the sad, bad, mad thoughts fall off me like leaves in a Vermont autumn. Maybe next year Italy will be waiting for me again and I will be ready.

Full Moon Saloon

Tonight I revisited an old honky tonk bar by the light of the full but waning moon on the island where I used to live. Bert's Bar on Friday night is a shadow of its former self, but I met myself coming and going. Gone the mushroomed hippies and carpenters, gone the raucous vibe when the Sensible Pumps played, gone our former younger we'll-live-forever selves. But still...there was fried shrimp and fried flounder, French fries and cole slaw and a band tuning up in the corner. There were people I'd never met before, from Ohio and Boston, and that kind of feeling after the first glass of bad wine that they might be your new best friends and the realization after your second glass of bad wine that they won't be, ever, never. And then you see ghosts of yourself out of the corner of your eye--there I am the night the crazy stalker followed me home, there I am in line for the bathroom with my best friend, there I am younger and less wise and so much wilder, over there at the pool table, never fearing a day-long hangover. The people from Ohio and Boston talked about the Pope and real estate values, and it was time to go home. Time to drive across the bridge off the island I used to know. Time to say goodbye to that, hello to this.

Just Another Day in Fridaville

*wake up 6am, race to gym, notice the moon is still full -- no wonder I'm having wild screaming dog dreams, hop on a treadmill, get bored because my iPod Shuffle has a dead battery, hop off, get yelled at by a friend who sees me slacking, hop back on, hook up with my trainer, talk about our weekends (pitifully boring for both of us, but he's young single cute--what up with that?), lift weights like a crazy person half my age in order to impress young cute trainer--pitiful.
* race home, hop in shower, hop out, wonder why I ever thought a Posh Spice haircut would suit me. I don't look hip, I look haunted, like an extra in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
* Pace around waiting for yet another repairman to come and fix the problem he created when he came to fix my original problem. Check my hair periodically to see if it's become hip while I'm not looking.
* I'm late for work, as usual, so I stop at Starbucks. I hit the one where they think my name is Rita. Somehow they came up with that on a drink order and I just kept it. I like being a stranger to myself in Starbucks. All the rest of the day, I ask myself, What Would Rita Do?, when I encounter a problem at work. Usually the answer is, "fuck this shit" or "go to hell." I love Rita. Rita is my Jesus.
* I have on a new skirt today. A Narciso Rodriguez skirt, the same Narciso who designed Carolyn Bessette Kennedy's wedding dress. Obviously Narciso has fallen on hard times if he is designing for my ilk, but I feel fabulous. But uncomfortable. Like I'm sitting on a corncob uncomfortable. At the end of the day, I go to the ladies room to see if my hair is hip yet and discover that I've had a plastic tag the size of Ohio hanging inside my skirt banging against my ass for 8 hours. And I thought pain was just the price I had to pay for haute couture. No, it was Narciso knocking on my back door. Thank god it was inside the skirt and not hanging out like Minnie Pearl's price tag when I went to Starbucks, where my cute trainer was having a coffee all alone. I pulled my hair down over my ears and hoped he wouldn't see me put 3 sugars in my nonfat latte.
* In the long homestretch of the afternoon, my coworker, Katie, made a Peppermint Patty run to the convenience store down the block. We like to line them up on the cubicle dividers and take the Patties down one by one. If I were a lesbian, I'd date Peppermint Patty.
* 5pm and my hair seems to be shrinking...no I mean really shrinking. Getting shorter and looking kind of like it joined the Army and got its neck shaved.
*6pm I head home with Rehab blasting, find that the repairman has broken something new, and ask myself What Would Rita Do? Turn water into wine of course.

Battle of the Bones

Battle of the Bones

Tonight I had to go to a work related runway fashion show featuring uninspired expensive semi-haute couture worn by skeletal models stomping down the platform, staring down the crowd ("how dare you think you're thin enough to wear this!"), and blowing pretentious smoke up everyone's ass. The models were so thin you could see the bumps on top of their shoulder bones, so thin their thighs rattled together above their haute heels, so thin you could smell their ketosis breath in the second row. Yes, I can be snide about it, but as I sat there, all I could think about was how inappropriately big my very real post-menopausal breasts are...how stretched out my stomach is from five pregnancies...how short and Shetland pony-like my body is. All of which means I bought into the media perception of what I should look like--and I'm media! I'm my own worst enemy. I was stricken to be so shallow. Then, when I was driving home, a molten silver full moon rose out of a dark cloud bank, its ripe curves ruling the night sky. Thwack! I will never be the crescent moon again. I will never have hip bones that stick out beyond my stomach. I will never have tiny breasts that ride above the punctuation marks of my rib bones. Yes, I miss my skinny 17-year-old body because it was me for many years, but I don't miss my undernourished 17-year-old mind. My high school boyfriend reappeared in my life recently via a long distance phone call and probed for what I might look like now, desperately wanting to ask if I was fat but trying in a pitiful way to be politically correct. After asking if I was still diminuitive and listing the many machines he works out on, he said, "I think you should be the best you can be at any age." I am, I thought, I am. Too good for you, stretch marks and all. I am the full moon rising, and it's just the right phase for me.

Written in blood

I don’t consider my writing is real unless it’s in red journals from Pearl River in New York City. Yes, it’s an affectation, a superstition, an aesthetic preference picked up from a revered writing mentor. I can’t help it. I have to have a row of ready-to-write-in red books lined up on my desk. Red for opening your veins and letting the secrets out. Red for words that burn a hole in the page. Red for the dress I was wearing when I met my first true love the first day of school when I was 14. Red for regrets that never fade. Red for rage. Red for midnight wine. Red for Isaac Mizrahi fuck-me pumps that I feel silly wearing. Red for sirens in the night that remind me to live because death and danger are our constant companions. Red because my heart is beating in time with yours and yours and yours and yours.

I Dream of Alchemy

These are just a few of the dozens of pens, pencils, crayons, pastels, watercolors, Sharpies and and paintbrushes on my desk. And one fat soft black Graphite stick that I bought in an art store because I loved the way it looked. Its heft made me feel I would produce something weighty with it. So far, the only result has been doodles and black dust on my fingers. I will never be a real artist, but I love to draw and color and cut and paste, always hoping for some amazing accidental alchemical creative reaction. Arthur Koestler said, "Creativity is the defeat of habit by originality," and habit is my worst enemy. The habit of looking in the same direction today as I did yesterday. The habit of tackling a writing assignment like a sumo wrestler instead of a tightrope walker or a trapeze artist. The habit of waking up expecting nothing much new instead of wondering who I'm meant to meet today or what astonishment is waiting for me to get out of bed. If I take the time to fool around with pens and paints and poems, to waste time, I can eventually lead myself into a state of creative grace. Or allow myself to be called out to play.

A New Leaf

Two years ago, a friend gave me a couple of baby banana trees for my backyard. One succumbed to a winter freeze and the survivor seemed to be permanently stunted. Other people I knew had giant banana trees, monster banana trees, genetic freaks growing in their yards. I was frustrated--I wanted to be able to look out my kitchen window and see a forest of banana leaves and think I was living in Key West or Hawaii, not an ordinary street in an ordinary southern neighborhood. Because I always want to be somewhere else, but I'm too lazy to uproot myself and move to that magical place where everything will be better, which changes every time I open the NY Times travel section. Just like I think I want to travel until the enormity of it overwhelms me. Packing, passports, money, 3 ounce containers in zip lock bags, which shoes to take (I need them all!), fear of flying, fear of airport bathroom germs, the godawful adventure of it all. I'm embarrassed to admit that I love being in my house, on my porch, in my own bed, because it's so provincial and boring to be that kind of person. This morning when I looked out my kitchen window and realized my banana tree is suddenly all grown up and lush, I didn't think I was in Key West or want to be. I thought there was no better place to be that minute than to be standing in front of my kitchen sink washing dishes and drinking in green leaves against an aqua September sky on an ordinary street in an ordinary southern neighborhood. To be ordinary me.

Storm Warnings

When I'm in emotional turmoil, I long for a thunderstorm to sweep into town and kick up the fuss I'm too polite to cause myself. I love the weird light changes, the boiling clouds, the smell of ozone, the energy bouncing around the atmosphere. I'm afraid of lightning and fascinated by it at the same time. Who doesn't want to throw some bolts around the office or the house now and then or singe the hair off the back of someone's neck, someone who has skated along your nerves far too many times. Not hurt them, of course, but show them who's the goddess in the house. If I were a goddess, I don't think I'd choose to be a nurturer like Demeter. I'd rather be Athena and go around smiting shitheads. I scare myself sometimes.

Open Me

What if ... every time a flower opened in your yard there was a message inside, as if it were a fortune cookie from Mother Nature, or a nagging Earth Mother?

"You're wearing all black again today?"

"You might as well open up--what's the worst that could happen?"

"A little perfume works wonders."

"Conjugate this: pink, pinker, pinkest."

"Grafting is safe sex...I miss the bees."

"I get to bloom once a year...you have a shot at it every day."

"Earth worms are easy."

"Every time I bloom, I think I'll never be able to pull if off again."

I Heart London

It's funny how you can get out of bed and go through the whole shower-brush teeth-brush hair-eat a halfassed breakfast-find and lose car keys a couple of times-leave the house-remember what you forgot ritual every morning on auto pilot, and then one day something happens to remind you that you're spending way too much time on Discovery Channel or The Girls Next Door and that you need to stop waiting to live until later -- when it's more convenient, when you have more money, when your kitchen is finished, when you've got time to relax. That you can't Tivo your life.