Building Framework

Last year, I was able to submit my taxes online and it went well, efficient; this year there were choices according to how old you are.  So I picked the category that fit, punched in the numbers, and the computer said CONGRATULATIONS!  You get $11,448.00 back.  

After finding my glasses to see if the decimal point was in the proper spot, numbers were checked, re-entered, and like a carny show Aladdin's lamp, the same answer lit up the screen.  CONGRATULATIONS!  This isn't right.  I allowed myself two seconds to believe in fairies, then went to the IRS site and printed out hard copy forms to figure the amount by hand.  It came out to the usual refund that made sense.  But ladies and gentlemen of the jury, $11,000.  For a brief synaptic flash, it was $11,000.  I coulda had a Subaru.

Tisn't a flood of money, but for a windfall out of the air, it would have been fun. Use some for taking the kids to the Keys, a down payment on a car, the rest in the bank.

This evening I framed my Roscoe charcoal and the man looks dapper; if I put a frame around my head, would my students listen more intently?  Only if it looked like a video game screen frame, and anytime they got the answer right, a gold coin would appear over my head.

I dug out the picture frames as I dismantled the second room, third star to the right, and found things that I thought were still hanging on the wall.  Sorted out frames, and repotted houseplants; nothing exciting, all domestic stuff; but it will allow me to put the exercise bike in there. Heaving and ho-ing.  Drag the table out, get rid of stuff, let the neighbors have whatever; I need room to grow and thereby must pare down my collections and projects.  Come in to the museum slash art studio.  That's the goal.

Years of cozy have come and gone and good riddance; frankly, cozy can go eff itself.  Not that I didn't enjoy making a home when I had a family, but now the aim is little care, less dusting, fewer piles of quilts and stuff.  I have things to do that don't involve tasteful arrangements of the latest holiday whimsy, but require cleared, flat surfaces to mat and frame, build canvases, and lay out immense tubes of paint.  What gets in the way is sentiment; the latest theory says to say goodbye to Grandma's things, to keep her in your memory.  I'm not there yet.

The last Christmas, she had four ceramic clocks made for each of us girls; they are the kind of ugly that scares children and animals but: I will not give mine away, she was so proud to be able to do something at the last, and she loved me.  I have my mother's teacups, green glass compote dishes, and a box full of newspaper clippings telling how to get stains out of cotton with a lemon, or how to make chicken surprise for twelve.  Part of this is the life she had.

She wasn't allowed friends, or to go places, or to have nice things; after her death, I found the box and read through the recipes and handwritten instructions that were basically directions on how to entertain, what to serve at a card party, a barbecue, Thanksgiving.  She had recipes for church suppers, potlucks, fundraiser nights.  I had never understood why she saved newspaper and magazine clippings as she did; I thought it was just another recipe that she'd never make, something we'd never eat.

She did it for herself, it gave her a temporary sense of belonging to a bigger world where people had fun and could talk to neighbors, get the grill out and toss on a few dogs while Mom got her Potato Olive Salad for Twenty out of the fridge.  Dorothy wanted to be around people, to learn the give and take of friendships, to talk and laugh about commonalities without having her potato salad bowl get thrown against the concrete patio by my father because she said hello to someone he didn't like.  Going behind my back.  You're always, then you get me mad.  You don't ever.  Hear me?  HEAR ME?

So, you see, I can't throw them out.  They were like a happy fairytale for her.  Some of them are yellowed crumbles of old newspaper, so frail from years of being saved; others are hilarious combinations of Jello, mayonnaise, and grated cabbage, colored in sixties inks as women in flaring skirts and heels are shown bringing these creations to a table of guests. If my mother could have climbed into the pictures, she would have, dragging me and my brother with her.  I would have been allowed to sit at the dinner table (I wasn't, I ate on the floor in the living room on spread out newspaper), maybe the adults would sit and talk after, (boy that was the best Jello mold ever, Dorothy), and then go outside in the late sunset to toss the ball around while the adults swatted mosquitoes and breathed the cooling air.

Don't look back, I tell myself; learn from it and move on.  But not yet; I can winnow the myriad clippings for rhubarb crumble down to one or two, toss out repeats; she's got at least a dozen home solutions for brighter whites.  Not everything.  To my son, they will mean nothing, but by that time they could be in a scrapbook, a short story; Dorothy's story.  I'll go toss out that box of sewing scraps instead, even though they came from when I did make a quilt for my son; he sat on my lap at the machine as I sewed. Well, maybe not all of them.

Sleep you, and let go of the day with its busy, with its movement.  The dark curtains the daytime events, lights go out, people sleep; it's a period of enchantment and quiet thought.  You have your own clippings, wishes; what pulls you there, what draws your attention, what have you to do with finding your own desire?  A bird cracked out of an egg today; I picked up the hemisphere of blue shell and brought it home to a glass case.  Sleep covered in feathers, a beating heart.

Interwoven Webs

Oh am I glad to be home.  Oh, so glad.  Getting back into this country took a full hour of inching the car up, watching trunks be opened, cars pulled over and minutely inspected, and you know of course that I have a broken pane of glass in the trunk from a framed poster.  I haven't found the leather gloves to wear while picking up the pieces, and half the time I forget about it except when I'm going through customs and I see other trunks opening like the mouths of trained seals.  They'll think I'm hiding something underneath that mess.

After 50 minutes of wait, I pulled up to the officer who was being trained by another officer standing right behind her; her movements were angular, quick, and mechanical, fueled by adrenalin.  What I saw was a nervous young woman, I wanted to tell her to slow down, show confidence; her ten-hut movements told me that I could have led her down a rosy path if I had the training.  But answer honestly and calmly and you'll be fine.

"Citizenship?"  US
"Where did you go?"  Chippawa.
"What for?"  To get my hair cut.
"Did you purchase anything while in Canada?"  Nothing.  Just the hair cut.
"Whose car is this?"  Mine.
"What is that stuff in the back?"  School supplies.
"Any alcohol or drugs?" No.
"What is the name of this hair salon you went to?" The Hair Booth.
"The what?"  The. Hair. Booth. (nicely).
"The Hair Booth?" She was incredulous, somehow, her voice took on a normal tone, and she tried not to laugh but broke out into a spontaneous grin that she covered up by turning away and getting very busy with the keyboard.  I am guessing to hide her amusement from the crew cut standing behind her.  He was watching her, she wasn't 'perfect' anymore. Without turning, she whipped my passport card almost up my nose, dismissing me with a
"Have a good day."  Thank you.

You'll be fine, young lady; you will learn not to show fear with over precise movement.  Just my impression.  Thank heavens I didn't have to explain broken glass in the trunk.

Security had been amped up that day, who knows why?  A good-sized amount of drugs had been confiscated last week, international groups were playing gotcha last on television; by looking in my trunk, was the government safeguarding the mostly unguarded Alaskan border on the longest boundary between two countries on the planet?  Many places, I hear northern Montana, have holes in the walls where you can just walk over and have a butter tart.  At this crossing, it is more difficult to get back into your country than out.  Like Facebook.

Concerning a basically estrogen-powered private group, three short days after it's creation a photo of a man pops up as a new member.  What?  Invited by someone who didn't, obviously in a place he seriously did not want to be.

I contacted the other members, asking what the hey, does anyone know?  And no, they did not.  We notified each other, I fired off a message to the innocuous victim, and while he said thanks for the information, my cell phone started beeping, listing a call coming in from him, research paper guy.  Did you just try calling?  "I don't think so" he said in tech terms.  I don't think so?  What does that mean?  You have no idea if your fingers plugged in numbers?  That would be a yes or a no.  I don't think so is fuzzy, ambiguous; the only way it could be accurate would be if you sat on your phone and your rear end dialed.  But then, he's a busy man and I don't think so covers a large area, possibly designed to shut the inquirer up so he can go back to researching more stuff.  And it does sound like something he'd say.

Any computer is a fallible electronic gadget connected to every other telephone line in the world plus the entire population of India.  Just think, your words could appear unbidden across the screen of someone's monitor, invade a college channel, be printed on the back of a box of Calcuttan breakfast cereal with prize inside, a mini-snowboard that would make any Indian kid inevitably wonder, what the naraka is snow?  So, no wonder the border patrol is hyper-stating questions designed to expose human facial responses.  They do things that a machine has difficulty reading, physical cues; I understand software is being developed, but it runs along the same thing a dear friend has run into.

This person has almost no fingerprints, they have worn away, which is not all that unusual; however, if a job wants fingerprints you are fighting an uphill battle.  Apparently retinal scans haven't hit the offices they are dealing with, and so a limbo of governmental platitudes has been handed to my friend.

Reading the human face is successful only by another human, and usually is instinctive on a gut level; we don't even know it occurs but happens within anywhere from the first three to six seconds.  You've heard the terms "tense atmosphere" "smell fear" or "hey baby";  the day a computer is able to read smell will probably come sooner that one capable of facial reading, but again we animals have the advantage of microprocessing the cues.

So social media needs exclamation points, passwords, awareness that any freaking thing you post is vulnerable, and room for mechanical or organismic glitches.  The thing is a machine that does not run without electricity, we are humans who left the iron on.   Sys admin and Apple genius friends tell me my cat could get into a Facebook account by going around the backdoor.  Yup.  I wondered how that tuna fish Kickstarter happened in my name.

The days are lovely, the groundhog burrows are being cleaned out, evidenced by mounds of fresh dirt around each hole.  Hopefully, the coyote didn't get all of them.  I haven't seen any rabbits, but then, the shoots are just beginning to emerge from the still cold ground.  After the snows melt is a difficult time, for people think the wild ones have plenty to eat, and they don't; it's still a month of scarcity.  The seeds and dried berries are long gone, and so toss out a carrot or food for the birds; they need calcium and will eat your eggshells in order to form strong shells for their own eggs.

But last night I slept with the window open, and the spring air was welcome; today the sun is out and there are egrets flying over the river.  It feels good to stretch and not have to layer woolens and scarves. Liquid flows, the remaining scapes of snow are ebbing into the ground, swelling the water table, filling streams; we flow as well, in and out of changes, months, seasons.  Mark what you know, strive to learn what you don't, be at peace and forgive yourself for falling short of your expectations; it's the only way you can move forward without becoming a pillar of salt.  Share with someone, it will ease your heart and open your spirit to what is happening outside, new green birth, a feather and a cracked egg, a wee kit in a mother rabbit's nest.  Sleep in anticipation of the human who you are now, are becoming.  Well and all, dreamville waits on tiptoe.