nearly every single thing over the last 24 hours has been like an early birthday present:
+ last night at the softball game -- a game in which we were totally massacred by the opposing team -- I stopped a fast ground ball to second with my left kneecap. the resulting, instantaneous bruise is dotted with the lines left by the laces of the ball. it's a fabulous bruise, a real badge of honor. I had my rally cap on (hat turned inside out) & my signature rainbow socks-turned-leg-warmers; earlier I had been trash talking the opposing team. the ball that nailed my knee rolled straight to our pitcher, who threw it to first to score the hitter out.
+ the one time I got up to bat I hit a lame pop fly right to the pitcher, who somehow missed catching it, but it had so much backspin that the chumps, who were already at least 20 points ahead, let it roll all the way back to the plate for a foul call. I walked huffily back to the plate (I had long since made it to first) and nailed one into the outfield, running easily back to first base.
+ the injury, in tandem with a couple snagged balls in the infield and an RBI, scored me the game ball for this week. the game ball is a tradition on the team: it starts at the opening of the season as an unassuming softball, modified slightly by the person each week who is, basically, voted MVP of the game. last year the end result involved a mexican wrestling mask, sparklers, and cartoon jesus band-aids. two years ago it included a barbie suitcase and theme music. this year it already has a talking napoleon dynamite figurine and a candy dispenser. the bar is set pretty high.
+ I was picked to be on Horse Master with Julie Goodnight, a TV show about horseback riding/training ! they're coming to shoot in Portland at the end of June. by some miraculous stroke of luck, they begin shooting the day I return from hawaii. I requested to work on that little problem we're having where Cookie doesn't turn well to the right.
+ last night lauren gave another friend (whose birthday was saturday) and me belated/early birthday presents & strawberry shortcake; today my boss brought me a carrot cake cupcake w/cream cheese frosting & coconut as an early birthday treat. seriously, this has been the rockingest birthday week. I feel so lucky!
+ today on my midday run a pair of guys I passed called out, 'hello beautiful!' and rather than assume they were kidding/meanly teasing and ignoring them (which is what I usually do), I assumed they were serious and yelled 'hey!' and waved. it was the kind of day where I could believe everyone meant the best.
+ DISNEYLAND YAAAAAY
and even the cons are tinged in things uplifting:
- tomorrow I have to crowbar myself out of bed at 3:30 to get to the airport, but this is only because my friends hannah & joe are also going to the airport and have sweetly agreed to take me so that I don't have to leave my car. my flight leaves for long beach at 7.
- it's supposed to be 86 degrees in portland while I'm gone -- my favorite kind of weather! and 66 in santa barbara. but DISNEYLAND and hanging with Cristina and the beach and barbecues and home cooking and my sister's little family and my toddler nephew and my friend josh and guitar hero and MICKEY MOUSE and seriously, you guys, this is the best week.
May 27, 2009
May 26, 2009
durum wheat
Memory at its finest lacks corroboration
—no photographs, no diaries—
nothing to pin the past on the present with, to make it stick.
Just because you've got this idea
of red fields stretching along the tertiary roads
of Saskatchewan, like blazing, contained fires —
just because somewhere in your memory
there's a rust-coloured pulse
taking its place among canola yellow
and flax fields the huddled blue of morning azures—
just because you want to
doesn't mean you can
build a home for that old, peculiar ghost.
Someone tells you you've imagined it,
that gash across the ripe belly of summer,
and for a year, maybe two, you believe them.
Maybe you did invent it, maybe as you leaned,
to escape the heat, out the Pontiac's backseat window
you just remembered it that way
because you preferred the better version.
Someone tells you this.
But what can they know of faith?
To ask you to leave behind this insignificance.
This innocence that can't be proved: what the child saw
of the fields as she passed by, expecting nothing.
You have to go there while there's still time.
Back to the red flag of that field, blazing in the wind.
While you're still young enough to remember
a flame planted along a road. While you're still
seeing more than there is to see.
-- lisa martin-demoor
—no photographs, no diaries—
nothing to pin the past on the present with, to make it stick.
Just because you've got this idea
of red fields stretching along the tertiary roads
of Saskatchewan, like blazing, contained fires —
just because somewhere in your memory
there's a rust-coloured pulse
taking its place among canola yellow
and flax fields the huddled blue of morning azures—
just because you want to
doesn't mean you can
build a home for that old, peculiar ghost.
Someone tells you you've imagined it,
that gash across the ripe belly of summer,
and for a year, maybe two, you believe them.
Maybe you did invent it, maybe as you leaned,
to escape the heat, out the Pontiac's backseat window
you just remembered it that way
because you preferred the better version.
Someone tells you this.
But what can they know of faith?
To ask you to leave behind this insignificance.
This innocence that can't be proved: what the child saw
of the fields as she passed by, expecting nothing.
You have to go there while there's still time.
Back to the red flag of that field, blazing in the wind.
While you're still young enough to remember
a flame planted along a road. While you're still
seeing more than there is to see.
-- lisa martin-demoor
May 10, 2009
mother's day
I was born when my mother was only nineteen, an 'oops' baby that changed the course of her life. She was married to my father on Valentine's Day 1981, three months before I was born; she was divorced two years later. Afterwards our little nuclear family consisted of me, my mom, and my maternal grandmother, a cranky, functional alcoholic who my mother turned to only out of desperation, at a time when she had just declared bankruptcy and couldn't afford day care.
Many of my sweetest memories involve my mother: standing on a chair at the stove on Saturday mornings, flipping pancakes as she poured batter; playing Around the World on the basketball courts at the elementary school; riding in the back of her new pick-up truck; taking road trips to New York, D.C., Ocean City -- and that accompanying feeling of getting up early in the still-cool fog of morning, and picking up breakfast on the road; learning to move the gearshift correctly on her stick shift (she'd push in the clutch and say "now!" and I'd shift). We went to Broadway shows and to the circus; we traveled around the East Coast.
As an adult I am grateful for the way she taught me -- and now my sister and brother -- to feel wonder at the world, to take notice of things, to be unabashed. She still feels so much youthful excitement. Last year she was incensed at how my siblings refused to take a day off school to go feed the circus elephants in Lexington Market. "Who are these spawn?" she cried. (She herself hated school and was adept at cutting class). On our cross-country road trip she was game for anything, and often sought out crazy things to do on the way, like stopping at "the mustard capital of the world" (Mt. Horeb, Wisconsin) or driving down a forgotten scenic highway in South Dakota to see the World's Largest Quail.
The thing that is hardest about living in Portland is being 3000 miles away from her. We're close; we talk a couple times a week. The worst nightmare I've ever had in my life is one in which I discovered my mom to be dead. My first reaction was, "Who will I tell my stories to?" Because we're so alike, my mom is my sounding-board for nearly everything. Something doesn't seem real unless I've told her about it.
love you, Mama. Happy Mother's Day.
Many of my sweetest memories involve my mother: standing on a chair at the stove on Saturday mornings, flipping pancakes as she poured batter; playing Around the World on the basketball courts at the elementary school; riding in the back of her new pick-up truck; taking road trips to New York, D.C., Ocean City -- and that accompanying feeling of getting up early in the still-cool fog of morning, and picking up breakfast on the road; learning to move the gearshift correctly on her stick shift (she'd push in the clutch and say "now!" and I'd shift). We went to Broadway shows and to the circus; we traveled around the East Coast.
As an adult I am grateful for the way she taught me -- and now my sister and brother -- to feel wonder at the world, to take notice of things, to be unabashed. She still feels so much youthful excitement. Last year she was incensed at how my siblings refused to take a day off school to go feed the circus elephants in Lexington Market. "Who are these spawn?" she cried. (She herself hated school and was adept at cutting class). On our cross-country road trip she was game for anything, and often sought out crazy things to do on the way, like stopping at "the mustard capital of the world" (Mt. Horeb, Wisconsin) or driving down a forgotten scenic highway in South Dakota to see the World's Largest Quail.
The thing that is hardest about living in Portland is being 3000 miles away from her. We're close; we talk a couple times a week. The worst nightmare I've ever had in my life is one in which I discovered my mom to be dead. My first reaction was, "Who will I tell my stories to?" Because we're so alike, my mom is my sounding-board for nearly everything. Something doesn't seem real unless I've told her about it.
love you, Mama. Happy Mother's Day.
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