a sleepy fancy

Friday comes and I hit the wall. Or rather, the wall hits me.

Last night I was so tired that I fell asleep reading in bed with the light on. I didn’t wake up until two a.m. to switch it off, drag the extra pillow from under my head, and roll blearily back under the covers. I don’t remember the last time that happened – when I was fourteen, maybe. And then this morning my body found it impossible to get up. I kept pushing Simon away from where he insistently stood shoving his nose into my eye; awkwardly guarding my face with my arm, I mumbled pitifully, "G’way..."

But the day came rolling onward with a royal carpet’s grand inevitability – maybe a careworn tattered grandeur; King Friday is a little old and leaky, stooped over the towns and fields with a muggy benevolence that really does nothing to liven one up. I stood on the sidewalk after Deb got the mail, smoking a cigarette and breathing the asphalt soup of the half-rainy air and wishing my eyes would open all the way.

If today were a statue, it would be of an old, old man, with a kind, deeply lined face and short scruffy beard, vague eyes staring off into the distance. He’d be wearing motheaten old heavy robes, a battered crown overgrown with ivy that waves over one ear and drapes itself down his back, and holding a green, eroded scepter in one hand. Bare feet. There’d be moss and bird droppings scattered all over him, and he’d be sitting in some weed-grown corner of a neglected park, his cement figure darkened in the folds with rain, the occasional pigeon lighting on his shoulders and arms with simple ceremony. Some vagrant with a sense of humor will have left a Styrofoam cup tucked between the fingers and thumb of his free hand, resting on the arm of his bedraggled throne. You wouldn’t be able to read the brass dedication plate anymore under the patient fingernails of time and the blazes of graffiti, but he doesn’t seem to mind or notice. He’s just sitting in his corner, soaking in the acid rain and the quiet of the park, a faint smile worn onto his face, and only the occasional drug trafficker or bum or immortal college kid breaking free from an afternoon of summer boredom knows he’s there.

of sweetness and Simons

I have never met a cat this devoted.

Rather, I suppose, I have never met a cat this devoted to me. I'm sure there are plenty of cats who are deeply attached to their people. But Simon is something of a wonder.

This cat gets so upset when I'm gone that he refuses to use his litterbox (a potentially life-threatening condition, for male cats). He wakes me up every morning purring in my ear and walking all over my back and shoving his head in my face. If I'm lying on my stomach with my arm over my head, and trying not to respond, he wriggles his head under my arm, and if that doesn't work, he pats my face with his paw. Tap, tap tap. Mom? Get up, Mom. He comes when I call him. He loves the weekends when I'm home all day and don't do anything; he'll come periodically to see what I'm doing and hunker down on the arm of my chair next to me, and if I'm taking a nap, he's curled as tightly to my body as he can get. On weekdays when I'm not around as much, he follows me all over the house, and curls up in whatever room I happen to be sitting in. We have developed a few of our own games that he loves to play, most of which involve chasing or ambushing me.

He loves to be kissed on the forehead, and will incline his head sharply as just the last moment the better to receive a kiss.

Right now he's playing with a plastic milk jug ring -- his favorite toy -- and usually whenever I give him one, right before I leave for work, when I'm standing around in the kitchen, he brings it to the rug at my feet and plays with it there. Now, however, he's rolling all over the floor with it in the living room, having carried it to where I am.

I just completely love this cat.

plans gone awry

I had planned on doing a few things this weekend. I had planned, for one thing, to attend the midnight release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows on Friday. I had planned to clean my house this morning. I had planned to go to a get-to-know-you-dinner-church-thing. I had planned to read Harry Potter slowly, to savor this, the final book.

But I was too tired to go to the midnight release. I went to bed instead. So today, I only did three things. I went to the bank to deposit my paycheck. I went to Borders to buy my reserved Harry Potter (where, happily, I ran into Meg and Phillip -- lovely strange arrangements of space and time). The line was negligible. I was out of the store in ten minutes. No one shouted spoilers. I was grateful.

And I read Harry Potter. I couldn't stop reading.

I finished it in nine hours. It was Beautiful.

a song of comfort, for the moment

Vito's Ordination Song

I always knew
you
In your mother's arms
I have called your name
I've an idea
placed in your mind
to be a better man

I've made a crown
for you
put it in your room
and when the Bridegroom comes
there will be noise
there will be glad
and a perfect bed

When you write a poem
I know the words
I know the sounds
before you write it down
When you wear your clothes
I wear them too
I wear your shoes
and your jacket too

I always knew
you
In your mother's arms
I have called you son
I've made amends
between
father and son
Or if you haven't one:

Rest in My arms
Sleep in My bed
There's a design
To what I did and said

~Sufjan Stevens

i don't want to work

This is possibly the worst part of the week: Sunday night.

I do. not. want to go to work tomorrow.

Ugh.

trials and trialities

This is why Americans are taking fewer and fewer vacations.

Coming back is a bitch. I spent all of Monday wondering if I could somehow invent a body double to come in for me, so I wouldn't have to deal with the First Day Back. Blugh. The peace and relaxation lasts into the work week for all of an hour before all the stress and worry you left behind redoubles in ferocity and you wish you hadn't gone away at all.

The Reckoning Time has come for the Big Unmentionable Screw-Up of a month or so ago, and I'm dealing with the repercussions. Boss-Man has been beyond understanding, but even his kindness has limits, and he's been emphasizing the employer-employee dynamics of our interactions, and less and less of the friend-friend or surrogate father-surrogate daughter. It's reasonable and understandable, and I certainly fouled things up royally and am doing my best to be an exemplary, shining, professional employee, and am taxing myself to the extreme to make the firm work to make up for it as best I can. At the same time I feel lost and lonely and sad -- he and his wife have become centrally important to me, and a rug has been yanked out from under my feet, and I feel disoriented.

Yesterday was a Bad Head Day. I moved into my own office -- a definite yay, because I could break down in tears a few times in privacy and sniffle my way through transcriptions. I drove home and spent an hour and a half just watching the cat, who is having another bladder episode and isn't doing very well. He was adorable, though, and we played a new game of Sarah Peeks over the Edge of the Armchair and Simon Ambushes Her Face with His Paws. Watching him play and wash his sleek black coat made me feel a little better. Mostly I felt shell shocked, barely capable of doing anything but stare fixedly ahead of me. I ate dinner because it's something one does.

At least I went to see HP5 with Joan. That was a huge booster.

It was a day of internal turmoil, and a sense of overwhelming aloneness. I get like that sometimes. Mostly when everything on every side appears to be yielding to flux, with little constancy. Work has been in upheaval for months, Simon's health yo-yos disconcertingly, and human relationships are tenuous at best.

These are the times that should throw me back on the solid rock of Christ; but these are the times when I tend, like the pillbug (or "roly-poly," as they're called around here), to draw myself up into the smallest spiritual ball I can and wait for everything to pass. Like I'm always afraid that, with so much hurt from relying on flawed human systems, if I open myself up to the divine, and God abandons me, I won't survive, so I'll just go it alone, thank you, because if I fail myself, well, that's nothing new, and I can live with me all right. Any finger poking from an outside source, and I draw myself up tighter.

And it's not like I talk to people about it much either. I'll talk to my mom, or Meg and Phillip, or Leigh Ann, but often, and sometimes even then, it's when I'm coming out of it. If someone who sees me on a regular basis asks me how I'm doing, I tell them fine, or okay, or not so good; I may even give them the facts; but I shy away from divulging how horrible I'm actually feeling (except to my poor mother. I bawled on the phone with her while driving to work this morning). Call people? Answer their calls? Nah; I have other things to do. Like mentally catalogue all the spots on the walls.

I don't know. I feel like I used to be a little more open, but maybe I wasn't. A high school friend of mine I was catching up with a few weeks back told me she had no idea how difficult my years were back then; I did a good job of hiding it, she said. But I think living alone, with no one seeing how I am when I come home and hounding me about it, has made me more reclusive. Instead of opening up and becoming part of a larger community, I hole up and shrink into my own four walls and mental corners. My attitude is less, "Be with people," like it was in college -- another time when I experienced a lot of stretching, flux, and pain, and then I didn't turn to everyone for help and talk about things ad nauseum, but I did spend all my time with people, just being in company, and the surrounding was healing -- than it is, "I'll get over it." I don't even really cry much anymore. I just sit there, force myself to go through the daily routines, and wait for it to blow over.

I suppose I should try to learn something new, however. The smallness of my own system of dealing with these times of pain is suffocating.

Eliot, as always, says it best:

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
Not lost, but required, pointing to the agony
Of death and birth.

You say I am repeating
Something I have said before. I shall say it again.
Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.

~from East Coker

So maybe I'll get there.

my mate

A couple of months ago, my beloved mate (pronounced "MA-tay," for those unfamiliar with Spanish) "gourd" -- actually a cup of palo santo wood -- a gift from a friend who'd made a missions trip to Bolivia, cracked. This was due to gross negligence on my part: I, who had so carefully oiled it after each use, allowed it to sit for three days with wet mate leaves in the bowl. I paid the price.

Very sad. And being under severe budget constraints, I decided to wait awhile before getting a new one. I waited so long I almost forgot about my beloved beverage...until I read on Rica's blog how much she enjoyed her mate in the mornings. And then I could almost taste the mate dulce hot on my tongue, and almost cried from wanting it so badly.

It was she who introduced it to me in college -- most of our other friends made faces and rinsed their mouths out, declaring that it "tasted like the woods." Being a self-declared wood-nymph (and known to a few of the people who would later become my good friends as the weird Tree Girl -- I could be seen, from time to time, gathering leaves, collecting twigs, and, yes, throwing my arms around a few of my favorite campus boles -- on the lonely days when hugs were scarce, squeezing a slender tree tight was an excellent substitute), I eagerly tried this taste of the woods, and fell in love with the strong, sweet flavor that she'd brought with her from her childhood years in Argentina. Her family brought me a palo santo gourd and bombilla (the metal straw with a perforated end through which you drink the water) from Argentina when they visited one Christmas, and I admittedly enjoyed carrying the accoutrements with me on late-night study sessions, because the pot-bellied gourd and the loosely ground, dark green tea look like preparations for a marijuana bong blast.

I sighed sadly when my first gourd cracked a year or so later, ordered a new one, without the traditional shape, online, and jumped up and down like a giddy child when Shelley brought back the more authentic one from Bolivia. I was never able to throw any of my old ones away. They've become holders for pens and whatnot. And the Bolivian gourd has lived in quiet destitution at the corner of the sink since its death at the end of May.

My new one arrived today. Luchenne was sitting on the porch with me when the mailman arrived; I was on the phone with Jen, recounting my sister's latest escapade (Luchenne was laughing her head off in appreciation and disbelief), and when I saw the little cube-shaped box I squealed, "Is that for Sarah?!" The surly mailman actually sounded a little less surly when he handed it over, and I tore the tape apart with my keys while Jen waited and Luchenne demanded to know what it was.

"This is a cup for drinking a tea I like from South America," I said.

"South America?" she said. "How does it work?"

I showed her. She expressed interest in trying it out. As I explained the tea and how it tasted and how the gourd and the bombilla work, she shook her head and looked at me.

"Sarah, you need a man," she said. "You need someone older. None of this twenties shit. You need some nice man in his forties. Someone knows how to treat a woman. No more of these boys." And she shook her head again and patted me on the shoulder and went upstairs.

Well, I'm taking her advice with a heavy grain of salt, of course; this is the woman about whom I've called the police a few times to intervene regarding her own relationship. And I don't know that age makes a man. But I do agree that I need more than what the past few years have been giving me, or whom I've been choosing from them. Although I'm not sure why my South American tea should be a catalyst for this particular train of thought...but then, I'm not sure what catalyzes many of her trains of thought. She's complex.

But it's lovely to have my mate back. I made a huge carafe of hot water as soon as I got upstairs, and the mate dulce was delicious.

Rica, I don't know if I've ever thanked you properly for introducing me to mate, but I say it here: Thank you. It's become an intrinsic part of who I am, the way coffee and books and writing are an intrinsic part of who I am. And I owe that bit to you.

all quiet on the western front

For now.

The drama has been hilarious. Last week my neighbor across the hall's niece moved in for awhile. The niece immediately earned the title Crazy Girl. And that was no cute-ism or affectionate dub. The girl was spun-out nuts. Schizophrenic, delusional, psychotic. Exactly the sort of person I worked with at the Center for the Homeless. She had no concept of personal space. Her eyes rolled when she talked. Nothing she said made sense; she made word sandwiches and changed her name four times within the first two minutes of meeting me and asked me to babysit her kids and offered to pay me a thousand dollars she clearly didn't have and made up all sorts of stories about being a student at Notre Dame. She ordered me to make her coffee, talked back to her aunt, and told me she was sweet. I calmly refused to do anything she asked. She kept changing tacks to try to get me to comply with her. I calmly kept refusing, told her to go upstairs so I could talk to her Aunt Lu, and told my neighbor the girl needed help and where she could take her.

Crazy Girl was around for a couple more days. Anytime her aunt was around she was pretty much under control; she was so out of it she had to be led around by the hand. But when my neighbor was gone, things got out of hand. The music would be turned up so loud I could hear it in my living room with my TV turned up; when I knocked on her door I had to shout at the top of my lungs so she could hear who it was that was knocking, and then she opened the door without a stitch of clothes on. I shouted at her to turn down the music. She glared at me but did what I told her.

Then my downstairs neighbor Tracy's car was broken into and her stereo stolen; the next-door neighbor's garage also suffered a break-in. My car, weirdly, was left alone. No one has ever bothered any of the cars in that back lot.

I left for Chicago the next day, and left my car at the airport; I figured it was safer there. When I came back and dragged my suitcase up the stairs, I noticed there was powder all over the stairs and at the top of the landing. My neighbor Luchenne opened her door when she heard me coming up.

"Oh, it's you," she said. She looked and sounded exhausted.

"What happened here?" I asked.

"I'll talk to you," she said, and went back inside.

I saw Tracy later that afternoon, who said, "The crazy girl set off the fire extinguisher in the hall this morning. Luchenne done called the police on her and they took her away. It was crazy. Every time you go away somethin' weird happens."

So I called the AL, who promised to replace the now-empty fire extinguisher. I mean, sometimes there's no smoke and no fire, but let's put it out anyway! Lu told me Crazy Girl will probably get ninety days for it, so she won't be coming back.

"She was botherin' you anyway," Lu said. "When I hear she have her music up so loud you was complainin', I told her, 'Girl, you got to go. Sarah never knocked on my door about nothin'. You don't bother her.'"

And then I stepped out yesterday to apply for my passport, get a new cell phone (I think I'm in love), head to campus to read on the grass for awhile, and go to the Vine for some drinks with Joan, and the AL called me to ask if I knew anything about the police visit to the house that afternoon to intervene in a fight between Lu and her boyfriend.

"Never a dull moment," I said. "I wasn't home."

So this morning I found broken glass all over the porch, and there's still fire extinguisher powder all over the inside stairs. The place is turning into a dump. I tell these stories to people who live in nice high rises and watch them shudder. But I think it's kind of funny. I never feel personally threatened by any of it -- my car is untouched every morning, I keep out of people's way and stay on everyone's good side and maintain appropriate boundaries, and I have old Betsy standing guard under my bed. And it makes for good stories.

the way home

On the train ride home from Chicago I pulled out Volume I of A History of Women and settled down to enjoy some quiet reading. It was slightly depressing to be headed back to South Bend, even though I was eager to see Simon again, and my ankle was aching, and the train was practically empty, so I was looking forward to losing myself in the oblivion of a book.

At one of the first stops, however, a woman and a small child took the seat in front of me. I helped the mother heave her suitcase onto the rack over my head, and huddled back down to read, thinking, Great. Little kid equals loud, high-pitched, and squealing.

And not exactly the ideal serendipitous train ride partner. You meet John Cusack on the train, you know? That's what you dream about. You're sitting there alone, reading your book, happy but a little lonely, with that slightly sad twist to your quiet smile as you occasionally look out the window, and this sweet, kind, good man sits in front of you and notices you and starts talking to you.

Not a little girl. But as I glanced up at her with her forehead pressed against the glass I couldn't help but catch my breath at how cute she was. Tiny, perfectly formed, with cappuccino-colored skin and curly-frizzy hair escaping from its ponytail to ring around her neck and huge liquid brown eyes like a deer's. She turned her head and saw me and I grinned and ducked my head, and I heard her giggle.

So we started playing peek-a-boo. One doesn't talk to strangers, so we didn't talk. She just popped her head in the gap between the curve of the seat and the window, and I would mock-shriek and cover my face and hide, and she would duck down and smother her laughter. She whispered to her mom that she was playing peek-a-boo with the lady "that helped you with your suitcase." A really articulate little girl. When I got lost in my book again, she would tap on the window glass or scratch at the seat to get my attention, and the game would begin again.

After awhile we both tired of playing, and then, no longer strangers in the complete sense, we started talking. She remarked about how we were going backward. I learned that her favorite number is four, that she is four, and that her favorite color is green ("So is mine!" I said). I learned that she was going to visit her mother's friend Kelly, and that they had four stops to go. I learned that it was her first time on the train. "Are you having fun?" I asked. She smiled and nodded. I asked her what interesting things she saw out the window. She liked the semi truck full of coal, and the tall purple flowers growing between the railroad tracks and the highway. I pointed out an electric power plant. She pointed out the number 8 on a street sign at one of the stops.

Sometimes we both got shy, and then she'd play peek-a-boo again, or, increasingly, wave at me, stretching her hand halfway between the seats and waggling her fingers. I would do the same in reply. Conscious, perhaps, of the unwritten rule that if you don't talk to strangers, you never touch them, we never quite made contact. I never learned her name, and she never asked for mine. But as we approached her stop, she half-whispered that she wished I were going to visit her mom's friend, too.

We arrived at her destination, and I helped her mother lift her luggage down, and then the little girl popped her head over the back of the seat and said, "We're getting off the train now. Bye-bye." "Bye!" I said. "Have fun visiting your mom's friend!"

And she hopped down into the aisle wearing her little plastic backpack, and went bobbing off, and I went back to "The Sexual Philosophies of Plato and Aristotle," feeling sad that she was gone, and praying silently for her protection and blessing as she grows up.

I'll take a beautiful, well-behaved, precious little child over a John Cusack for a random meeting on the train any day. In real life John Cusack will turn out to have a girlfriend, or a wife, or no job, or two girlfriends, or be a jerk, or pushy, or creepy. You can't go wrong with a good kid.

all things go

Tuesday I took the train to Chicago to visit Jess -- not without some trepidation; I hate trains (they harken me back to the Longest Train Ride Ever with John in college, when we spent twelve hours from Pittsburgh to New Jersey with nothing but unaccepted credit cards and a scant bag of molasses cookies, which I have never been able to eat since), and am unsure of myself in any form of transportation that is not my Henrietta; call me a suburbs girl, or a country mouse, if you will. And my last visit to Chicago was exhausting, strained, and not much fun. But I went with the anticipation of seeing a new yet already good friend, and renewing my appreciation of my second favorite city next to Pittsburgh.

The train was packed due to Taste of Chicago, but I had anticipated the possibility of unsavory seatmates, and to that end brought along a Scary Feminist Book which I placidly read the whole way, and which guaranteed my uninterrupted solitude. There's nothing like a girl calmly turning the pages of A History of Women to rebuff a guy's potential advances, especially when the essay titles, written on the side of every page, run along the lines of "Feminine Models of the Ancient World," "What is a Goddess?" and "The Sexual Philosophies of Plato and Aristotle." Very handy.

The trip was a blast. Aside from my bad ankle deciding to act up, in a city where walking is the easiest means of getting from A to B, there were no hitches or hang ups, and all of Jess's friends are splendid and hospitable. We had a massive picnic with enough food to feed half the city in Millenium Park, where we hung out, laughed, talked (the girls exchanged stories of dating disappointments and howled our heads off), set off sparklers, and then headed to the river to watch the marvelous fireworks display.

July 4th was a day of wandering around the city, riding the El, sampling some of the cafes (one of them, the Bourgeois Pig, has sandwiches named after literary works), and talking, talking, talking. Fantastic. About men, the church, the faith, growing up, family, hopes for the future, friends, life, movies, favorite actors. Jess is hilarious, and a great conversationalist. We were joined for dinner by her friend Taylor, and spent the evening at his apartment introducing Jess to the wonders of Buffy.

All in all, a great visit. Exactly what I needed -- time away, a refreshing couple of days somewhere new yet a little familiar, with a sister in Christ.

getting back

Does the road wind up-hill all the way?
Yes, to the very end.
Will the day's journey take the whole long day?
From morn to night, my friend.

~Christina Rossetti, from "Up-hill"


Ahhhh, vacation. I'm -- terrifically -- glad to have it. It kicked off Saturday with a visit from The Science Girl, and a day bebopping around downtown South Bend (DTSB, as we locals call it), hitting the Chicory Cafe for lunch, pummeling the used bookstores (well, I pummeled them; Jess was a model of discipline :), and relaxing at Fiddler's for dinner. I had a marvelous time talking, shooting the breeze, venting frustrations, sharing joys from our journeys, and hanging out (thanks, Jess!). I also made a significant addition to my essay collection, which I'm very excited about.

After she left I went to St. Patrick's Park for the annual South Bend Symphony concert and fireworks display with Meg & Phillip & Co., where I had the interesting experience of bumping into a couple of old coworkers from my last job. Funny. The fireworks were great, minus the cheesy radio 4th of July music blaring through them; I prefer the silence broken only by the booms, screams, and whistles of the fireworks themselves. But still, a nice display.

Yesterday I did absolutely nothing but sleep. Today what I should have been doing was cleaning my nastified apartment; what I actually did was rearrange my bookshelves. I've been adding to my library over the past year without making more room for the newcomers, with the result of little piles of books lying all over the place. So today I heaved books onto top shelves, carted spillovers from living room to hallway, and allowed the grown library to expand.

The result? Wonderful! There's nothing quite like the quiet, even-lined order of hundreds of books surrounding you to make you feel at peace. And of course I'm loving to feast my eyes on the newest additions: Four out of a five-volume set of A History of Women (I ordered the missing one online), The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf, A Return to Modesty by Wendy Shalit, Women Warriors (about mythological and historical female fighters), and two books on Jungian interpretations of the feminine in fairy tales by Marie Louise von Franz. Ahhhh. (I mean, I may have vastly mellowed out since college, but I can't get away from my roots, now can I?)

And tomorrow is going to be a fly around, clean the house in a blaze of hurry sort of morning, before I catch the train to visit The Science Girl! I'm hoping I can do the housecleaning quickly, because I usually do better with a deadline hanging over my head.

I've been dragging around in a fuzz of lethargy the past couple of weeks, barely able to do anything productive. But I'm hoping that lots of rest and vacation will fix that. It's time to get back on the horse.