My mental circus, inside and out.

This morning, in the little botanical woods, a whitetail doe.  Emma spooked her, and she crashed around trying to find a place to go.  She must have forded the river to get into the woods, which is surrounded on the other three sides by a high fence.   Somehow, crossing asphalt and pavement, probably at night, she had found this small place.  An adventuresome type who likes solitude.  We know her. 

Emma had a reluctant date last weekend.  She knew  that this person , a German, was not for her, but he persisted until she agreed to coffee. And she had to laugh when tonight she received an email from the German saying that they were not a good match because he didn't share her like of "Hispanic culture" and did not want to travel in that part of the world.   This was probably intended as a preemptive strike and certainly one of the stranger reasons Emma has heard, just dismissing an entire region of the planet, even a whole continent brushed off with the wave of a hand.  Human views are so laughable sometimes. . even often.  "I think I will not like the color blue today."

Posted by: EmmaPele at May 31, 2007 09:26 | link | comments (1)

the violin

This is how utopian Emma's neighborhood is.  After a long day of work, struggling with non-English speaking students, Emma comes home to find that the power has cascaded off, probably because everyone has turned on their air conditioners in this first really hot day of summer.  This is a good thing.  There is nothing electrically powered, including computers and televisions and stoves, that Emma really feels like dealing with anyway.  She lounges on her blue tie-dyed futon on the sun porch, reading Will Self's The Book of Dave, studying her daughter's latest work of art pinned to a board out here, talking to her son about the brilliance of The Sopranos and other media events,  eating a sandwich, watching the squirrels, the cardinals, the wasps, the tall trees on the perimeter of her property, which is not so far away, 25 feet maybe?  Suddenly, she hears music.  A violin.  It sounds good but not really professional.  She thinks, "Has my son (the only person in the house at the moment) suddenly learned how to play the fiddle?  Her mind is hazy, befuddled from the heat and two glasses of white wine.  It sounds country, folk, like something you'd hear at a contra dance.  There is clapping, maybe three people at most. She realizes that here, at dusk, someone is playing music in a backyard, close by, maybe the yard across the way.  She calls her son down.  "I think we are having an impromptu concert."  "Yes," her son says, "I see him through the pine tree there, just his elbow, can you see it?"  Yes, a man, an elbow.   He seems to be walking by himself, in his backyard, playing the violin.  Who is clapping? The other neighbors?  "It sounds like the soundtrack for the Civil War," her son says, "Like, the Battle at Gettysburg."  He's right.  It is like a soundtrack for a Ken Burns's film, except that this neighborhood, so quiet, without any war in its immediate experience, or any experience, more like a John Cheever story, with the suburban man suddenly bounding across the lawns to swim in every pool.

Posted by: EmmaPele at May 25, 2007 08:56 | link | comments (2)

It is easy to feel, on May mornings, that one is already in "the beatific vision" as Allan Watts put it. Flash enlightenment is a heck of a lot harder in March when the cold is wearing everyone down and it seems sensible to wear black all the time.  Now we have to feel grateful for every cold, snowy day since we can take it as a sign the global warming has not yet reached apocalypse.   This is a place where we will always have water, we think--lakes, rivers. Max gets up in the middle of the night.  Scared, he says.  Scared that something will bite him.   There is that moment of childhood consciousness when everyone realizes that the universe (and many of the beings in it) can feed you one minute and take a bite out of you the next.   In May, you can easily say, as you sit out on the porch listening to the not-yet-extinct song birds, this is the teaching, this is the dharma.

Posted by: EmmaPele at May 23, 2007 18:52 | link | comments

Of all the stories and perspectives that CNN could be contributing to the national and global dialogue, it has as one of its headlines:  "Legless chihuahua puppies seek home."  Another is "Blame devil for baby in microwave."  It's like a farm town paper, full of witches and two-headed calves!  American seems to be returning to the pre-rational state of a Shirley Jackson story.  (Its hold on rationality was always tenuous at best, anyway.)  Now the subterraneon pre-rational fears and anxieties are erupting on a national level, which, at one time, filtered out these kinds of discourses about scary Boo and the children of the corn which were left to cinema.  What has happened to the news?!  What has happened to us?!

Posted by: EmmaPele at May 21, 2007 19:45 | link | comments (2)

Emma walks downtown with her little family to the art fair, and they wear Max out with face painting, turtle petting, crown making, and bagpipe watching.  So Max and his uncle take the bus back while Emma wheels the stroller back home.  Thing is, Max has left his baby doll in the stroller.  Emma keeps wondering why she is getting these funny looks, until a kid goes by and says, "Strollin' your baby home, eh?" Snicker snicker.  And Emma figures out, oh my God, people think I'm some kind of crazy person pushing a naked baby doll around in a stroller.   Emma thinks this is delightful.

Posted by: EmmaPele at May 20, 2007 09:31 | link | comments (1)