2005 style

one morning in September, i walked from my brick shotgun 1 bedroom apartment (with the old school black and white tiled bathroom hung with blue lights), to the Straw Ibis coffeehouse (then the only independent coffeehouse in Logan, Utah).

When i walked up to the counter to order, the barista handed me a cappucino, and said someone had already paid, and i insisted they had mistaken me for someone else.

I found him in the back room

smiling at me over his cup

having driven through the night

to surprise me in the morning.

without warning,

mind you.

the sort of surprise that lets you feel the open space

around your throbbing heart

exhilarating

terrifying

gravity

we walked to the farmers market

where we bought a loaf of bread

dizzy and drunk on each other

with the Wasatch Mountains leaning into the autumn sky overhead

and i dared to think i might live this way

loved by someone who would drive 890 miles through the night

to surprise me for coffee

and who promised he would never

let me hide from myself

 

it is seven years on now,

and just now he surprised me again

2005 style

We don’t touch this gravity

quite so often anymore

i head to work as he comes home, most days

we are bleary eyed after my late nights waitressing

and 3 am wakeups with the babe

and his early mornings headed to work

and worried about money

and the car

and behind on housework

and not sure how we’ll pull it all off,

except for that we take turns being confident there’s a way

and every now and then

one of us remembers to take it back to 2005

and we are Right Here again,

astonished

teary eyed

and grateful enough

to go on for years.

 

On Not Buying.

Been around the block a few times.

This past Thanksgiving, my parents rolled out a gift for Callum, who’s been obsessed with pushing things on wheels for a few months now.  Of course, I recognized it.   It was one of my favorite toys as a kid.

My historian mother did a little research and discovered it had likely been manufactured around 1972.   Unknown children pushed it around during the waning of the Vietnam War, the Energy Crisis, and the Carter administration.  My parents picked it up around 1982, and my siblings and I put it through its paces through the Reagan era and the final years of the Cold War.  By the time Clinton moved into the White House and the United States set off its last nuclear warhead my sister Emma started to get bored with the shopping cart. It ended up in the barn out behind my parents house.

That might have been the last hurrah for the yellow and orange shopping cart.  It was missing two wheels and a handle, and it was cracked seventeen ways to Sunday after a decade and a half in the barn.    My mother couldn’t bear to consign it to the trash though.  She’s the first to admit she has trouble throwing away treasured bits from our childhoods. In that shopping cart there are a hundred stories that only she remembers.

me. c. 1982

Don’t write off the Thanksgiving shopping cart revival off as pure sentimentality just yet.  Sure… sentimentality is part of it. But its something else too.

The day after Thanksgiving, a woman maced other people to gain a competitive advantage in her efforts to buy a discounted xbox. A man in a Target store in West Virginia collapsed in apparent distress and was stepped over by other shoppers who were too deal-focused to lend a hand.  At least they didn’t trample him to death, which inevitably happens every other year or so in the riot-style consumptive-frenzy that stores stage to initiate the holiday shopping season.  The holiday season which is ostensibly about love and warmth and gratitude and other things you can’t put a pricetag on.

While people injured each other in their efforts to purchase the perfect gift to express their love, Callum trucked around our house with a 40-year old shopping cart, held together with glue, pvc pipe, zipties, custom-wood panels, homemade wheels, and a few barbeque skewers.  He likes to fill it up with canned food or small plastic animals, occasionally rubber balls or cars.  He thinks its great.

My Dad and my brother spent hours putting it back together.  “It broke in a different place every time I tried to work on it,” my father grinned.  “But I figured there had to be a way to make it roll again.”  They put their engineering heads together and spent a while wandering through the hardware store.  Its a pretty remarkable custom job, if you look close.

“It probably won’t last two days,” my father laughed.  “But if he has fun with it, who cares.”

Is it silly, to spend hours reconstructing a busted-up forty year old plastic toy?  Maybe.  But my dad is one of those rare people who likes to figure out how to make things work, rather than throw them out.  He keeps scraps of wood neatly organized in the barn, and he’s been recycling supplies since before it was hip.  The base of the cradle he built me is an old wooden campaign sign he brought home from work, and the first floor of our two-story childhood treehouse was an old highway sign.  My father-in-law has the same resourcefulness.  My Gramps did too.  There’s an art in fixing things, and not many people do it anymore.

I don’t want Callum to cling to stuff, but I do want him to understand that there’s plenty of fun to be had in things that aren’t shiny or new.  That a little creativity goes a long way.   That kids in other parts of the world have to scavenge in dumps for food, and have wicked fun soccer games with balls made out of plastic bags stuffed inside other plastic bags.  That Black Friday has nothing to do with Thanksgiving or Gratitude, and that Not Buying someone something can be the most loving act of all.

The Car that Brought You Here Still Runs, Most Days

The poet Richard Hugo, who grew up in this neighborhood when it was still filled with woods, once wrote:

The car that brought you here still runs.
The money you buy lunch with,
no matter where it’s mined, is silver
and the girl who serves your food
is slender and her red hair lights the wall

the lines are from the poem “degrees of grey in phillipsburg”
i sipped espresso earlier and wanted to write my own degrees of grey
the baby loaded canned food into a miniature stroller
and trucked around the house
i thought maybe i’d write after i got some Things done
paid bills, and laughed with the baby as he fed me raisins,
both of us laying on the kitchen floor
talking about birds,
each in our own language.
later i watched a raven alight on a power line in the wind,
then stubbed my toe on a can of tomato paste
scrubbed the diaper bucket
extricated a penny from someone’s tiny cheek
measured our unfinished windows for trim

that night while my husband fed the baby beans and rice
and the rain came down sideways
then paused to let a near full moon glow through wind driven clouds
I heaved opened the garage door
and laid out long pieces of smooth pine on sawhorses
Annie the dog laid by my feet, keeping a close eye on the outside
and i learned how to stain wood.
which turned out to be a much more mindful task than i’d expected
i made mistakes, noticed where i’d applied the stain too heavily
or where the shadow my body threw had fooled me into using too little
i think of my craftsman father while i work,
and Roger Lyons, who built things for his mother in this garage
when they were both old

these boards will become trim around the windows in our bedroom
which is drafty like a barn.
(on cold days we can see our breath before we get out of bed)
Once this piece of land had a barn,
with cows, chickens, pigs, and rabbits.
Annie Lyons raised 6 children in this two bedroom house
which she and her husband purchased at the height of the Great Depression
Maybe she went to church with Richard Hugo’s grandparents,
who raised him
and said little.
Maybe they shopped at the same neighborhood pharmacy
in a brick building that is, most recently, a Cambodian grocery.

i want to write about living in his old neighborhood
and being a waitress whose hair shimmers in the dark of a brewpub
moving in between close tables with a master’s degree
and a grace that she lacks outside of work.
She met ranchers with this kind of grace while doing graduate research in Nevada
men who could shear a sheep without nicking it once,
handling the hundred pound animals like armfuls of silk
who became all knees and scuffed boots in the kitchen.
she is a waitress who ten years ago kept the phone numbers men left
never intending to call a single one of them
just quietly flattered because she never thought anyone would find her beautiful
Now she knows the truth:
every waitress in the history of waitresses
has been loved for the duration of a meal
by lonely hearted diners
who coudln’t help but
“instantly feel a tender regard for her” as Abbey wrote.

I want to write about the timeless poetry of the unrequited waitress crush
and the quiet satisfaction of knowing that someone is a little awed
every time you hoist a tray to your shoulder
and take the stairs
but first i need to wash every dish we own
the baby is wearing soft pajamas with nonslip feet
and stacking blocks while the dog watches with her head cocked.
i am listening to ambient unclassifiable music that claims to be
moody and dynamic instrumental indie rock
or something
ought to drink tea now
but my espresso percolator is calling darkly to me from the burner
stained by a thousand rounds over the heat
handle missing, angular spout pointing toward an empty mug.

the car that brought us here still runs
most days
although the return of the check engine light is as certain as the oncoming fall.

fer MK.

C and Auntie MK. Nelson BC, Wee4. photocredit Andrea Fuentes-Diaz

hey lady. its raining in Seattle tonight.
The boys are in bed, I’m up late folding laundry, and I suspect you are up too, a few thousand miles south of here. I suspect its quite warm there, and I imagine brightly-colored birds sleeping in the tropical trees nearby, ready to sing to you in the morning to take the edge off that crappy nescafe.

I am remembering when we said goodbye for a while.
Your cheeks were wet
with the warm august tears of leaving the country for a few years,
and i was startled by the weight in my chest

after all
a few years flies by, right?

I thought about this for days, and around the time you winged your way to Quito, I realized:

the weight was the sadness of impending time apart,
soaked with the awe of gratitude,
like a piece of french toast dredged in real maple syrup.
Every part of it heavier for the sweetness.

I knew I’d miss you but I didn’t realize how very much I loved you until I said goodbye. We met as adults, after the college days were behind us, and while work and life kept us from seeing each other as often as we would have liked, we’ve shared some of the defining experiences of our adult lives.
This had not occurred to me until that last moment before you left.

Scattered amongst the Korean Spa trips, camping/weefest/roadtrip shenanigans, brunches and bonfires and innumerable glasses of red wine:
both our weddings. your teaching career. my book manuscript. the birth of my son. and other, smaller things. a snowbound sleepover. a knitting lesson. a fondness for old family pictures. a whole lot of potluck.

As I buckled Callum into the carseat after your going-away party, I flashed on walking down the aisle at my wedding. Amidst 140 people, I spotted you, standing alongside the aisle in a green and white dress, just a few weeks away from your own wedding. We made eye contact, and tears welled up for both of us. I thought back over all the hours we’d spent commiserating over the challenge of planning weddings that felt true to us, searching for vintage dresses and ethical, delicious food, folding paper cranes and comparing the price of kegs and agonizing over how to spend the small amount of savings we had. And now here we were, nestled in the Olympic Mountains, having spent the previous night skinny-dipping in the ice-cold lake and getting warm around a roaring bonfire.
I realized right then that I was happier than I could contain, and the rest of my life had to have some brilliant moments waiting if my heart could expand this wide. I cried for the rest of the ceremony, and I cannot remember that feeling without remembering your face.

A few weeks later, I danced at your wedding, in a pagoda near the Sound. Strings of paper flags fluttered in the wind. You gave us tiny embroidered hankerchiefs, and we ate delectable roasted vegetables. Your party favors—yellow folding paper fans with your motto written along the side—got slipped into our backpacks, and we used them all across India on our honeymoon, which we left for later that night. They were heavensent in monsoon season as we backpacked across the plains, and I looked at those words a thousand times before the fans disentegrated from use.

Sursum Corda.
(Lift up your hearts.)

Before we left your wedding, you gave us hand stitched Neruda,
lines from the poem Andrea read at our wedding.
later that summer, I got to work on your wedding present: retaliatory copycat hand stitched Neruda, lines from the poem Andrea read at your wedding.
These things hang in our homes, now.
Your hand-stitched letters in the hallway in my house in White Center
mine in your home in Quito.

I gave you pregnancy anecdotes to share with your 6th graders for sex ed
you pressed your fingers against my belly a dozen times, but never felt him kick, until that last warm night, sitting around in your sweet Capitol Hill apartment, when he finally put his little heel against your hand, through my stretched out skin. I remember it was a warm-ish night, and the smile spilled across your face, and the light was gold and soft. You told him “Callum, its time to be born! we want to meet you!” which he must have heard, because i went into labor 3 hours later.

before you moved away, I came over to your mostly-emptied apartment and carted away all of your mason jarsfull of grains. At home, I combined my quinoa and vital wheat gluten with yours, but kept your labels instead, so your handwriting is tucked on my shelves. I use your heart-shaped scalloped edge cookie cutter to make up heart-shaped pieces of tofu for my vegan eggs benedict, and I don’t think two years will be long at all.

And so I am content to let you go for a while.
off to brilliant adventures and unknown challenges teaching near the Equator,
living in a beautiful house with your husband and learning to bake at altitude,
exploring amongst waterfalls and butterflies and chickenbuses.

and instead of ending this rambling note,
I’m just going to start you a package, with the things you say you are missing.
Good Coffee.
Nooch.
Good magazines.
baking soda
and baby pictures.
perhaps you’ll get it around the new year.
xo, darling.

Fellow Waitresses

They are part of our equipment
indispensible as our aprons,
our pens,
our expensive well-made work clogs
and our smiles (mostly real, but often feigned);

:the wrist braces
the tiger balm
the icy hot patches
the band-aids
the ankle braces
and knee braces
and the kingsized bottles of ibuprofen

we share these supplies,
and others
freely with each other whenever someone is in need
we have all been there.

Once, during a busy summer waitressing shift,
I balanced an entire table’s worth of dishes
atop a hard-shell wrist brace,
and waited for the patrons to decide on a dessert.
They insisted I not go away, they simply had to order right then
And while two debated between the sundae and the pie,
one patron asked:
“what’d you do to your wrist?”
“This,” I replied, hefting the plates
by way of indication
and it was clear
he did not quite understand.

We don’t have insurance, generally,*
so we pay the chiropractor, the accupuncturist, the emergency room
out of pocket
and we come to work sick and injured
because we can’t afford not to

We understand this is part of the job
the way my father and his highway department coworkers
understand the danger of speeding cars and distracted drivers

We do what we have to to make a living,
we accept the risks, and do our best to take care.
But when damage is done
we slip through the cracks
invisible to the rest of society
invisible, sometimes, to the very people we serve.

A few weeks ago, one of my father’s coworkers was pinned by a car
while fixing a pedestrian crossing signal.
they took his leg.
Highway workers are killed on the job as often as cops,
but the news cameras rarely show up for their funerals.

I know a woman who waitressed with a broken bone in her foot for months
I knew a woman in her fifties who’d been serving all her life,
and who smoked pot to deal with the chronic pain;
when she spoke up about unfair treatment,
her bosses made her take a random drug test
and sent her home without a job
I know of a waitress with cancer, and a five year old son
it takes a lot of 15% gratuities to cover chemo.
I have known a lot of waitresses.
I have hundreds of stories in my apron pockets
and somehow “Union” is a dirty word
people my age do not say it
people in my industry do not say it

it was not always this way,

and i’ll tell you what

Fellow Waitresses;
Fellow Workers;
I may have a bunch of college degrees,
but my collar is blue,
and i’ve got a Little Red Songbook around here somewhere.

* * * * *

*Full disclosure. I now have health care through my husband’s employer (my infant son and I are insured for the low price of 700$+/month). I also work for what is hands down the fairest, most supportive restaurant I’ve ever encountered in 12 years in the industry. That being said, my experience still leads me to conclude blue-collar workers are getting SCREWED in America. People my age (I’m 30) have little to no concept of the importance or potential power of unions. The Reagan era wrote labor history out of the textbooks, big business and corrupt union leadership gave worker organization a bad name, and right-wing politicians are dismantling the gains of the labor movement bit by bit. Time to think about what Labor Day really means. A lot more than BBQs.

Ever heard of the Seattle Waitress Union Local 240? Headquartered on 2nd Ave downtown, they were once called “the red-hottest unionists in Seattle” by the Seattle Union Record. “Formed on March 23, 1900 by Alice Lord. This all white union was one of the first women’s unions to be chartered by the American Federation of Labor. Under the direction of Alice Lord, the Seattle Waitress’ Union is accredited with establishing the 8 hour work day and 6 hour work week for all female servers. The Seattle Waitress’ Union was also successful in their fight for a state sanctioned minimum wage.” Kept people of color out, which is no good, (pretty standard for unions/suffrage movements at the time), but damn they raised some hell (and wages). And we’ve never heard of them. “Before organizing the girls were compelled to work all the way from ten to fifteen hours per day for from $3 to $6 per week, but now thanks to organization, we are never called upon to work more than ten hours and receive in compensation thereof $8.50 to $10 per week.” (From the Waitress Union newsletter in 1902)

Here’s a little more on Miz Alice Lord:

and some more good hellraising waitress stories.

Check out UNITE HERE Local 8′s website to learn about labor struggles affecting fo and beverage and hospitality workers in Seattle.

moon

Sometimes it is possible
to be too tired
to notice a perfect crescent moon
slung over the treetops
in the cornflower blue july evening sky
rising up from the windows
of the metro bus
that is running late
and you and everyone else
just want to get home
because it is after ten
and your feet hurt
and you miss your baby

tired, but not too tired,
i stare at the bright sliver as the bus surges up and down dark Seattle hills
knotting my apron strings around my finger,
remembering a song my mother used to sing around the campfire
i see the moon
the moon sees me
the moon sees the one
i long to see

i wonder if anyone else on the bus is staring at it
but when i look around,
everyone seems to be gazing
doggedly ahead
like they aren’t sure they’ll ever get home
some are nodding off against the windows

when i step off the bus in our neighborhood
someone whistles from smoking area
of the bar on the corner
and i walk purposefully out of the streetlight glow
and into the quiet, warm dark of our neighborhood

this one goes out to you, Mama-san

having now presided over one myself,
i have some idea of the work that goes into a birth-day
the twenty-some hour marathon of labor
the exhaustion and the intention,
the way the outside world disappears
the astonishment of discovering
just
how
strong
you are…
the moment in which you usher an entirely new person into the light
and the inkling you begin to have
as you figure out how to care for that very small body
that you will be tied together
long after the cord is severed
in ways you cannot begin to understand.

Thanks, Ma… for all your hard work,
30 years ago today.

Instead of revising chapter VI,

I am staring at an
Outrageous poppy
Which is the perfect shade of orange,
dusted with black pollen and ruffled like a hippie girl’s skirt,
twirling out of the narrow neck of a blue glass bottle
which is, of course, the ideal shade of translucent cornflower blue

the door is slightly open
and the sound of falling water repeats
itself
a lazy june breeze keeps the leaves in motion in the yard
under Grey skies so bright they make the back of my eyes ache

Grandma and Grandpa have the baby
And now that I’m not constrained to writing in his naptime
I am unhinged

killing ants and noticing how contentment smells

This morning,
i filled up the baby’s tub,
and he splashed
while i rubbed honeysuckle soap into bubbles on his sweet head
bundled him into a tiny blue bathrobe,
and got ready for work.

One of the waitresses called in sick
and the lunch crowd was thick and steady
there’s something about having 9 tables
constantly turning
thats a lot like being a mom
you can’t think of all the things you have to do
if you do you’ll cry
you just do what’s right in front of you
and if you’re good
food gets eaten while its hot
and messes get cleaned up
and everyone’s relatively happy.

After work, Ryan dropped the baby off
and went to see a soccer match
C and i drove to the market
having made good money at the restaurant
i decided to pick out a few starts from the racks out front
more strawberries
peas and beans
and spicy salad mix
grabbed a bag of compost too,
and C and I trailed the rich odor of compost all around the grocery store.

toss a bag of toilet paper, and a new sponge into the cart
select red chard, carrots, and yams to make into baby food
remember i am out of coffee beans
C bounces in the cart, and trills and grunts
we pick out his free piece of fruit (hurray co-ops)
a ripe d’anjou pear
i hold it out for him to examine
and he smashes his face against it
gouging out tiny chunks with his two wee teeth
which reminds me to buy
homeopathic teething medicine.

We giggle at each other
and i kiss his cheeks a dozen times in succession
and look over the things in the cart behind him
Think:
if the me of 3 years ago saw me now,
i would covet my life
even in the waitressing clothes.
its a nice feeling
contentment so tangible i can smell it
in the compost and the pear juice
running down his chin

At home,
i stand in the doorway clutching the baby and the groceries
as the dogs surge past me,
bumping against
waitressing bag and breast pump bag, dangling heavy from my left elbow
and baby’s swim bag and diaper bag dangling from my right
C fusses and squirms,
realize just how much housework i need to do
dirty laundry is at critical mass
and there are ants everywhere
i don’t know why

But i put the sad baby in the backpack
and smash about a thousand of them
noticing that when i smash some
others run for cover
and i deduce they are screaming at each other
in tiny ant voices
i feel like an American General
convinced of my mission and
too far up the chain of command to hear the sounds of carnage
thus-
relatively unmoved by the death

When the counters are relatively free of ants,
I peel 5 carrots and put them into the oven with 2 yams
and dice and start steaming the red chard
thaw out some of Grandma’s applesauce to mix in

wash dishes
feed the dogs
listen to Radiohead
C cheers up, blowing bubbles
and eating plum bananna brown rice
its begun to rain outside and when i go outside in it
it smells like spring
comforting,
after a relentless winter that won’t give way,
here it is a week past mother’s day

Make myself a big bowl of miso bok choy salad
with some spicy tofu and fresh tomato

Assata hears a sound and barks
Callum thinks this is hilarious
and barks back
while offering Annie his apricot
laughing hysterically when she licks it
and then putting it back in his own mouth.
Both of these are new tricks.
Later, while I fill up 14 tiny jars with
chard Grandma’s Applesauce garnet yams carrots brown rice and flax oil,
he pushes his little blue car industriously around the floor
cloth diaper bulging around his tiny butt through striped pajamas

By the time he falls asleep on my chest,
honeysuckle scented hair beneath my chin
I’ve got the babyfood stowed in the freezer
Laundry still undone, but oh well
and the smell of two rain-damp dogs is mingling with the honeysuckle
i decide that if contentment has a smell,
it is something like today
the smell of work clothes, compost and unwashed dogs, mingling with
the smell of pear juice and honeysuckle baby shampoo

good ancestors and revenge fantasies

the baby finally goes down,
tiny bananna-hands curled against sweet yam cheeks
skin glowing with the rare-as-of-late may sunlight spilling in through the orange curtains
i slip out
perc espresso

and sit here at the red table
trying to empty my head
and be still
so I can write with efficacy
about Big Picture Things

a frame fell off the wall in the early hours of the morning
and an old black and white image drifted to the floor
after the crash
now i sit here staring at it
my great-grandmother Minnie, and her parents, Louis and Hannah
my great-great grandfather has his arms crossed
and a quizzical look on his narrow, handsome face
his wife looks gentle, and tired
and his daughter stands behind them both
with a white hat
and dark curls
and a face squared with resolve
over her scalloped lace collar
ankles crossed
in the shadows underneath the gilded bench her parents are sitting on

I think: these are good Ancestors.
Beautiful, Resourceful, Gentle, Resolved
And I’d better get to work before the babe wakes up.

good ancestors. Louis, Minnie, and Hannah

decide to make calzones for dinner before my husband leaves town for a conference
and I reach back through time,
to pull homemade pizza dough and sauce out of the freezer
that I made and placed there earlier in the winter
the freezer crystals sting my fingers
which are covered with cuts, lately.

put my good writing song
on repeat
think about making my sister a mix for her travels in Europe
but the cd drive isn’t working
And I’d better get to work before the nap ends

I scoop small mushy lumps of softly browning banana off the floor
and rub my fingers across the roughness on the table
where his sticky fingers spread fruit and yams an hour ago
and I neglected to wipe the table before it dried
because he was rubbing his eyes
with his food-covered hands
and i was focused on
that

Everyone is celebrating because we’ve been told Osama bin Laden is dead
which apparently entitles us
to feel like Americans in the Right again
…a feeling that went stale years ago
no wonder people are excited.
they think it means justice
or the end of something
but to me
it is just one more
revenge fantasy
my friends retaliate against the frat party
peppering the internet with Martin Luther King
darkness cannot drive out darkness
and even though we’re accused of misquoting
I cling to those words

I try to engage with a dilemma in the manuscript:
writing about “common sense” in a way devoid of academic pretension
ha. ha. ha.
I land here instead