The aging of a kiss.

I was thinking today about the way that teenagers kiss in high school hallways. The boy leans back into the locker and the girl sort of lies on him standing up, and they'll do that until some bald teacher in a bow tie comes along and pries them apart with an ascerbic comment.

Teenagers can spend hours absorbed in kissing.

I don't know what happens along the way, but I think that the fascination dries up. I never see adults drooped against each other in public places, engaged in prolonged sessions of kissing. I don't think we do it much in private either. I think somewhere along the way we become jaded and disenchanted with the simplicity of soft lips.

Half-forgotten memories.

A photo on my parent's living room shelf caught my attention today. I have actually picked it up on several previous occasions to dust it and move it from one spot to another in attempts to impose order on the menagerie of family and friends caged in metal and wood frames. I think that I had not looked at it though. I don't know why I did today.

The photo is half of a photo, in truth. At one time, years ago, it was a photo of my ex-husband and me, sitting on the side of the road somewhere in Arizon or Nevada. We had on funny winter hats that we had purchased at a Walmart in Roswell, New Mexico, along with cheap sunglasses. January in New Mexico is colder than January in Louisiana, and we had packed without this thought to bother us. Somewhere beneath the hats, our ears were cold and red. The sun is high overhead and out of the picture, casting a beige light on the gray mountains slumping down behind us. A river, the Colorado, I think, is just visible. It's nothing more than the leftover thread from a button-sewing project tossed aside without thought. We were on our way to Vegas. We had just visited the Segura Forest in Tucson. We gaped in awe at the stained red cliffs and the endless forest of giant malachite pin cushions. We both felt as if we had stepped onto Mars or some other strange, distant planet.

He was clipped from the photo long ago, and so I sit there alone on the edge of a road overlooking mountains and a scrapped thread river. I smile and squint my eyes behind dark lenses. I've just left a lonely, distant planet of pincushions. And there are so many more ahead of me.

Martyrs, Mothers, Mutterers.

I wince when Fain whines for my mother while I'm trying to snuggle him in my own arms. I admit it. Nothing is more painful than realizing you didn't get your full five years of top-billing on your own kid's matinee sign. I had nearly two solid years as the hot show in town, but now I'm Bette Davis in a Marilyn Monroe movie. Cest la vie. What're you going to do?

On the other hand, it's always been my nature to find the positive, and the positive is relatively clear here. He's in good hands, and I have a measure of independence not granted many single mothers. I could take a month-long trip to the moon, and he's never notice I was gone. So I may as well enjoy the trip.

Here's what I can't stand and what I don't want to become: a martyr mother or a mutterer mother. I don't want to be one of those mothers who resents everything that her kid does if it doesn't revolve around her. I don't want to do a bunch of stuff that my kid doesn't ask me to do and then talk about all the sacrifices I made to do them. I don't want to mutter on and on under my breath or to anyone who'll listen about how my kid doesn't appreciate me despite all that I've done. I just want him to be happy. And I don't mean that I just want him to be happy so long as what makes him happy also makes me happy. I can't stand it when people say that. I want him to be happy even if I think he's a nut for doing whatever it is that he does.

I think that all mothers are at risk of becoming martyrs or mutterers. It goes with the territory. You love this person so much. You suffer to bring him into the world. You sacrifice sleep and food and energy and braincells to keep him alive and happy. Then one day he gets tired of you and that's that. It's enough to make anyone mumble incoherently about belated birthday cards while rocking arhythmically in a corner. But what I've realized after some serious rocking and mumbling this week is that a kid is never going to love his mother the way that his mother loves him. It's just not possible. And really it's not important. It doesn't matter how much my kid loves me, all that matters is how much I love him.

Poindexter.

Someone once told me that I am a Poindexter. He was searching for a polite way to say that I am a nerd. This was in recent years, long since the days of the thick glasses, the gaudy braces, the poodle hair-do. I contemplated the term and decided that it fit.

I remember reading about the Renaissance man in the seventh grade. He was the kind of guy who could write poetry, play a lyre, discuss politics, paint a portrait, and read Latin. He was familiar with ancient history and philosophers. He was fascinated by science and math. He was, in short, a Poindexter, but back in those days people thought that an unquenchable desire to learn was a good thing. I wanted to be a Renaissance man, and there were only two obstacles in my path: namely, the Renaissance is long gone and I'm a woman.

Now, I'll admit, I'm a limited artist and poet. My political knowledge is not what it should be. And I can only play three chords on a guitar right now. I can speak a little broken Spanish when called upon to do so, and I bought a Teach Yourself French CD that I listen to whenever I have a few spare minutes. I know a couple of Latin phrases that I picked up watching Law and Order, but nothing spectacular. I've managed to store a smattering of historical facts with no attached dates or contexts in water-logged liquor boxes in the far right rear of my brain, and some shabby philosophers mumble about existence and smoke pipes filled with cherry vanilla tobacco in another dingy corner, sitting on crates of old algebra homework and half-read copies of books by Carl Sagan, Edwin Abbot, and Stephen Hawking.

But all things considered, given the nature of the obstructions to my becoming a Renaissance man, I think that I make a damn fine modern day Poindexter.

The Undermining Influence of a Stuffy Nose.

No matter how well-adjusted I may have become (though many will laugh off-hand at the questionable nature of that first sentence segment), a stuffy nose and a sore throat can tear me right back down to my miserable, self-doubting, doomsday inner-cliffdiver.

One day, I breathe pine-scented air through clear nasal passages and laugh coarsely through a glassy smooth trachea. On this day, I will get the job. On this day, I am an incredible woman, gifted seven-fold by all the wonderful charms that can rain down on one incredible woman. I smile at myself under demurely lowered lashes and think, "God, I'm incredible." I laugh at my own almost-too-clever jokes. I amaze myself with my quick wit and provoking intellect. On this day I know that I will find the perfect balance between independence and mad love.

The next day, I notice that the scent of pine tickles my nose and causes me to sneeze. Then I can't breathe at all. My throat itches like someone has stuffed it with pink fiberglass insulation. My heads throbs. And it occurs to me that I will not get the job. That my nose is as awkward as a mountain atop a molehill. That my eyes are dull and watery. That I'm uglier than the guy from Thus Spake Zarathustra. That I have cellulite. And that, where I do not have cellulite, I am too skinny. That I'm not nearly as smart as I think I am. That I'm also not funny or charming. That I am weak and pathetic and that there is no mad love in the world for me. It's all been spent on someone else. Someone more deserving.

I hate head colds.

Immunization.

Tom Waits' Closing Time has been playing in my car for over a month non-stop. I took him out last weekend to listen to Barry White, which I enjoyed, but after a few songs, I began to feel a sort of panic grip at me.

I put in Closing Time to immunize myself against the effects of "Martha." Because she was in my dreams, or, at least, her song was in my dreams. And I felt a visceral tugging at my chest just upon hearing the first few notes. One note, really. I could hear one note and feel like some nefarious priest from the Temple of Doom was reaching bare-handed into my chest and pulling out my still-beating heart. Weird how music can do that.

And it bothered me. I don't care for the feeling of someone groping beneath my ribcage. So I thought that if I listened to the song over and over again, I would eventually become unfeeling.

But that doesn't seem to be the case. Now I feel dependent upon it. Now I feel a sense of betrayal if I dare to remove Mr. Waits from my CD player. As if he is saying, "Could there really be anyone else? For shame."

Weird how music can do that.

Philosophical musings on love.

Shelley wrote a poem called "Love's Philosophy," but it wasn't philosophical. The poem was brief and typically sappy with mush about kissing and so on.

I had gotten excited when I saw the title because I had hoped that I would read the poem and be struck with some definitive philosophy of love, some final word on what it is, what it should feel like, what it wears, how it parts its hair. In other words, I had hoped to know how to spot it. The "real thing," as it were.

My attitude on the subject has changed over the years. I vacillate between several conflicting theories. I even took the time once to analyze every romantic relationship that I had ever been a party to in order to find some clue as to what it all means.

How can it be so desirable and also so frightening? How is it so assured and so confusing? Why are there so many conflicting methods of assessing True Love? And is there even such a thing or is that idea just another ploy of Plato and his capital letters to infuse the world with order and control?

Or controls. Weren't eidos really just a control group in experimental thinking? There is this control version of True Love against which all other variants might be compared.

But I don't know what that control looks like.

I know that as heartbroken as I've ever been, I've never stuck my head in an oven like Sylvia Plath. But then maybe those loves, those heartbreaks, were not real. Maybe they were something else.

At one time, I would have sworn to you that love is strictly speaking just an emotion, like anger or sadness or boredom, and that, as a result, it shouldn't be held to any higher standards than other emotions. No one expects to be angry forever or happy forever or sad forever. Sometimes, in the heat of the moment, you might say so, but you know deep down that all things must pass. Emotions are fleeting and fickle and vaporous. But, for some reason, people believe that love, True Love, that is, will last forever.

I hope, and maybe that's what True Love means. Maybe when we talk about this mysterious thing called love we are talking about a specialized sort of hope.

We are so alone inside of our necessary boundaries, and I suppose it is natural that we would hope that someone might be able to pass into us and to annihilate them. That someone might say just the sort of thing, just the right combination of "alakazam" and "abracadabra" and "open sesame" to split us open.

Forerunner.

I love this story that my Memaw tells about a teacher who came to rural North Carolina during the early 1900s. She found the information in some ancient, yellowed minutes of board meetings.

In the old days, teachers stayed with members of the community. I guess because they were single women and probably couldn't afford a home of their own.

A new teacher was arriving at the train station, and the farmer with whom she would be staying sent his sixteen year old son to collect the woman at the station in their horse-drawn buggy. The woman was youngish, to be sure, and dressed in one of those great, heavy, modest gowns that were the height of Victorian fashion sense.

As she climbed into the buggy, she raised her skirt just enough to expose her ankle, to which nylons, I suppose, and leather ankle boots must have clung rather seductively, peeping out from beneath frilly knickers that hung well below her knee. Nonetheless, she exposed that slim, sensual ankle, looked at the young boy, and said, I imagine, with a sly smirk, "Whadya think of that, kid?"

Needless to say, she was run out of town on a rail for what must have been considered lewd and risque behavior that no doubt contributed to the boy's eventual ruin.

I'd bet good money that she was an English teacher.

Limitless variations.

I love words. I can't remember a time when I didn't. I love the sound of words and the textures of them on paper. I love the rise of black ink on white paper. I love the way they feel in my mouth and also the images that just one word can conjure. I love to write in cursive just for the way that the words feel as they move my hand.

"Ululate" has always conjured an image of a cartoon wolf gobbling up a shopgirl in a pale blue suit. Her lips are pink and parted in shock and consternation. Her eyes are wide and rimmed with defined black lashes.

"Glossolalia" has been and always will be the verbal reincarnation of a kiss.

"Bauble" is always a pearl the size of a toddler's fist.

I often think when I've read something beautiful that there's nothing more to write. That there can't be any unsaid, unwritten beauty left in the world. But then I find some other combination of words that is palpable and genius and full of the love of its creator.

Some stand clearly in my mind. I don't have to write them down to remember them because they become the image in my head. These words become the atoms that describe a thing or a moment. Raymond Chandler was good for these sorts of pearls.

"She smelled the way the Taj Mahal looked by moonlight." ~ The Little Sister.

I see this woman in my mind, and I smell something white and cool and intricate as arabesques.

There's a line in John Gardner's The Sunlight Dialogues when he describes a cellar. "Drafts moved through the dark like fish."

I love authors who consider the prosaic and take the time to give minutiae its own celebrated place. Everything is important. There is no detail that does not contribute to what the world is.

Petite.

I've never thought of myself as petite. I've imagined myself as a beast of burden. I can lift full kegs and heavy trays and large children without straining a muscle. I can reach cans of beans on high shelves, and I can run for long distances. I can do amazing things with my body, and these feats have led me to picture myself as a big brute of a girl.

I got out of the habit of examining myself in mirrors when I was in middle school because I was so dismally plain. Gray braces strapped insidiously to crooked barracuda teeth. Frizzy mouse-colored hair. Glasses the thickness of Coke bottle bottoms. Sallow, dull skin. Forgettable and unremarkable. I remember looking at myself and thinking, "Brown, brown, brown. How can I be this plain?"

Looking in a full-length mirror was completely out of the question. Knobby, raw knees. Scrawny stick legs and arms. A boobless wonder.

Instead of looking in mirrors, I created an imagined body and face for myself. This other pretend me was a composite of beautiful models and actresses that I admired. I got through each day by the sheer force of my ability to imagine myself as someone else.

Even when I looked in the mirror, I saw past myself. I looked at my own image the way that I looked at those Magic 3D Posters that were popular at the time. I screwed up my eyes and blotted myself out.

There are moments when I see myself through someone else's eyes though. Caught off guard, watching someone look at me, I catch a glimpse of myself reflected in their eyes. What a surprise to see that I'm a petite woman. Not bony anymore, though not fleshy either. Muscular as I always knew I must be, but muscular in a lean way. Nice lady-like legs. A narrow waist and narrow ankles. Nice long arms. Not bad to look at. Still brown, yes, but different shades and textures of brown.

I still don't match my insides, I think. I don't look as strong as I feel. I look fragile. And that surprises me and makes me want to care for myself more. My poor petite frame isn't as mean and tough as I am. And it isn't ugly or plain. It's just what it is. And I suppose what comes as a surprise to me is that I am a woman. All those years that I didn't look at myself, I grew and became a real live woman. Imagine that.

Horses versus Tigers.

Adam was another Lucky's patron, a Polish merchant marine who had been a little boy during the September Campaign. When I knew him, he was short and round and red-faced. He was quick-tempered, pounding his fist on the bar at the least mention of warfare or occupations or Communism or China. He had lived in the U.S. since the 60s or 70s, but his accent was still sharp and pointed, making words that seemed like fierce black birds.

Adam told me about the Polish September Campaign that began World War II. The Germans and Russians had shaken hands, secretly, under a table somewhere, on the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, by which they would conquer and divide Europe. Poland must have seemed like a natural starting point, being situated like a fat rope between the two new pals eager for a game of tug 'o' war.

Adam's uncle, along with most of the other men in the village, took to arms when the German Tigers growled and pawed their way over the horizon. But they had no tanks of their own, and their weapons were antique and pitiable. They wore their military uniforms if they had them. They rode their horses into the fray, if they had them.

I imagined this as Adam described the scene, fist pumping and upsetting his beer.

The German Tigers, fierce, lumbering, mechanical beasts, bombarding farmland with mortar shells, invincible, unmanly, hard and cruel. They inch forward, leaving lumpy trails of mud behind them. Soft German men hidden inside the metal hide. Smoke clouds stack higher and higher to either side.

Children like Adam hidden under beds or peeping through windows.

Polish uncles and fathers straddling the backs of strong, dark horses, manes thrown back, lips curled, eyes streaming from the smoke, hooves startling at the sound of mortar. The men in their clean uniforms, polished, gleaming honors, perhaps feathers, chests broad and brave, boots shining and black, eyes squinting and fearless, muskets raised. Or standing in work clothes, in clothes stained with soil and sweat, chins raised, jaws set.

What a sight it must have been for a boy spying from the cover of gingham curtains. How heroic they must have seemed. And how sad and comic. How sad and comic that they stood their, pitting horses against Tigers.

Any day above ground is a good day.

I heard a lot of interesting things while tending bar at Lucky's Lounge in New Orleans. If you don't know the place, it's a dark, solitary bar on St. Charles. Lucky's doesn't have the flavor or character that a dive bar should have. Neither does it have the style or customers that a non-dive bar should have. It is almost entirely soul-less. I considered the AC, the TV, and the relative quiet payment enough. Tips were short-coming. But I gleaned a few fascinating stories from the occasional patron.

"Any day above ground is a good day."

Old Jerry said that to me. He was a scrawny, raw-boned geezer who came in every morning for a Bud. He made his rounds to every bar within walking distance of his secret abode. He hobbled along the sidewalk, leaning on his cane, hand on his toothpick thigh. He took the stairs gradually, stopping on each one, pausing. He wasn't as old as he looked, which is often the case in New Orleans.

He had served in the Air Force as a younger man. He was stationed for a while in Greenland where he chased polar bears across great plains of ice in a tiny airplane. He served two back-to-back tours of duty in Vietnam as a foot soldier.

Once he took a trip to Florida and didn't tell any of his regular bartenders. A rumor began that he was dead. I was saddened by the news. I enjoyed his grumpy humor.

Then one day he showed up, doddering up the stairs, leaning on his cane. He shuffled to the bar, put his hands on the sticky top, and peered from beneath the rim of his mesh farmer hat.

"What?" he said with a surly, ratty grimace.

"I thought you were dead," I said, popping the top off of a cold Bud and pushing it at him.

"Yeah. I heard the same thing. It ain't true."

Backyard safari.

Fain has re-introduced me to a number of interesting pasttimes in the last few months. I suppose, in truth, I've been introducing him to pasttimes, but I would have completely forgotten about them if he hadn't come along to remind me.

We have a bug hut and a butterfly net, and he watches as I stumble ineffectually after my ethereal quarry. Those butterflies are quicker and cleverer than you might think. I haven't caught one yet. I have captured several neon grasshoppers with bulging eyes and hairy talons. I can't help feeling like a big game hunter on a much smaller scale. But imagine if a grasshopper were as large as a lion! To be perfectly frank, the lunging monsters frighten me, but I stare danger and fear in the eye and laugh if it will amuse my little raja.

Mimicking animals is also quite a lot of fun. I'll hop all over the front yard in a dramatic modernist interpretation of a cricket or flap my arms and caw like a grackle. The act of appearing insane to anyone but a toddler is liberating. As long as that one little person is laughing, the rest of the world be damned.

Drawing with over-sized crayons is another wonderful pasttime that I'd forgotten. Yesterday I drew a blue bird, a red dog, a boat, and a self-potrait. They all exhibited a dismal lack of talent in the arts, and yet they made me feel good all the same.

Another thing that I've remembered while watching Fain learn to stand and walk is that half the fun is in falling or in that titillating moment just before the fall, the wavering, the thrill of trying.

I hold that in my mind as I practice guitar. I play the same two chords over and over again. I tell myself that there's no rush because the point is the thrill of trying. Not some final objective. Not an A+. I enjoy the sound of those two chords. I take the time to hear the subtlety of their tones, the slight bending of the sound waves as I travel from one chord to the other. I force myself to quit worrying about whether I will be able to move my fingers adequately and just practice, accepting that inherent in the term "practice" is the idea of "not perfect."

Perfect variant.

A retailer of diamonds calls a variation in the crystalline universe of coal a flaw or an imperfection.

A scientist might refer instead to a variation.

What is perfect? Or imperfect? Where did these ideas come from?

I love authors who pay loving tribute to the imperfections of humans.

"And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human." Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

Or,

"Around God's throne there may be choirs and companies of angels, cherubim and seraphim, rising tier above tier, but not for one of them all does the soul cry aloud. Only perhaps for a little human woman full of sin, that it once loved." Olive Schreiner.

I love that we love one another, not in spite of our imperfections, our variations, but because of them. To a mother, the birthmark on her child's fat thigh, an imperfection of pigmentation, is the most beautiful sight in the world. This little flaw sets her child apart from all others. To a woman in love, an angry red scar on her lover is a thing of beauty because it makes him who he is.

Without imperfections, without variations, we would be the same person, multiplied into infinity. Perfect people would be automatons, responding perfectly to one another in the certainty that the response would be reciprocated perfectly. There would be no passionate kisses after passionate arguments. There would be no wiping away of tears, no grins of foolishness.

We are perfect. The inventor of imperfection was mistaken. We were made to be exactly what we are, and we are perfectly made. As perfect as a diamond with a variant of lightning cutting through its brilliance. As perfect as a birthmark. As perfect as a scar.

Imperfect spheres without meaning.

Last night I watched a program about the stone spheres of Costa Rica. The hosts were disproving myths surrounding these mysterious relics of some ancient era. For example, contrary to popular belief, the spheres are not perfectly round though they appear to be. Also, they could have been made by a primitive culture with limited stone tools. Neither the magi of Atlantis nor the superior beings of Ursa Major were necessary accomplices in the feat.

The question of the meaning of the stones arose on several occasions. What do they mean? Are they religious? Are they philosophical? Do they represent the great circle of life and death? A distant world? The music of the spheres?

It occured to me as I watched that perhaps the sphere-makers just liked making spheres. That simple. Maybe one of them, we'll call him Ug, began thumping away at a big hunk of stone after a long day of hunting and gathering to let off a little steam. After a while, the stone took on a pleasant spherical shape. Ug thought, "Hey, that looks nice. And I feel better. Maybe I'll make some more." His friends were struck by Ug's beatific face as he scrubbed away the pock marked surface with a piece of sandstone, and they decided that they'd give it a try. "Besides," Ub said, "Spheres look nice."

Why do we always assume that people must mean something grand and profound? Maybe the ancient goddess-worshippers of Mesopotamia didn't worship goddesses at all. Maybe they just liked fat ladies, so they carved little statues of naked fat ladies in their spare time. Like primitive Penthouse.

Wild horses.

"The beach," in my mind, has always been equivalent to corporate surf shops the size of jet hangars filled with g-strings and banana hammocks, coconut oil, and water wings. Homogenous gray wood condominiums block the ocean view. Gargantuan private beach homes are marvels of modern architecture designed to block out the sunrise that might otherwise reach the poor schmoes staying across the sand-strewn road in the trailor park.

Tourists are unfortunate this way. We see what we expect to see. And if we're in a rush, on a two day holiday, we don't see much at all.

Maybe it's not just tourists. Maybe, feeling so sure that we know what's out there, what's composing the world as we know it, we've quit looking. We've settled for the McDonald's, the Bert's Surf Shops, the strip malls because they're easier to appreciate than the complexity of nature, the unexpected, the chaotic, the time-consuming.

In one day, my whole idea of the beach changed. I don't even want to call it the "beach" anymore because that word has become sick with plastic connotations. Let's call it the seaside. The shore. Something more beautiful.

Our friends' home was in the thick of a maritime forest. The area was choked with cedars, live oaks, pines, sweet gums, and myrtle. Every inch of ground was shaded and mild and soft with grasses called St. Augustine and Bermuda and centipede and pennywort. The steeply sloping hill, tailored with wooden stairs and decks, slid down into a canal with shadowy waters where the boats waited. I can't describe it. The air was moist and gentle and sweet. Salt seasoned the breezes that came from the sound.

I've never fallen in love with a place before. I've loved places, but I've never fallen in love with one. The way that you fall in love with a person. I felt something say, "This is the place." The way I might say about a person, "This is the one."

We went out on a boat, floating through the canal past houses and children and cats and dogs, the same as you might find on a gravelly road in the mountains. We passed cardinals and bluejays and mallards and chickadees and doves. Fish slapped the surface of the water.

The canal dispensed us into the sound, broad and gray and misty. We passed under bridges and beside decks. We passed storefronts and restaurants and gas stations and hotels just like you might pass on a paved Main Street, but the street was wide and watery and hid traffic of another kind - flounders and dolphins and crabs. We passed a boat covered by a canvas where someone was rocked to sleep by waves. We passed islands where russet horses grazed on sea grass. Wild horses. Paces from picnickers.

I thought: some people do this every day. For some people, the world is filled with wild horses, leaping dolphins, sleep induced by waves, bonsai sculpted by the wind. I want to be one of those people. I want this world.

Croatan.

I can't pass the sign for Croatan without wondering what happened to the lost colonists.

I wish 

Gray. 

The canal. 

Music molecules and Seurat.

Sound is a vibration of air molecules. From the source of the sound comes a tidal wave of motion, as molecules crash into one another in a widening circle. One molecule jostles the next which jostles the next and then the next until it bounces up against someone's eardrum.

The molecules are invisible points pushing through time and space. Air molecules. Air molecules. Nothing. Isn't air nothing?

And then they pound on the door to the brain - the eardrum. The gong that lets the brain know a visitor has arrived.

But the eardrum, in fact the whole ear, including the juicy earlobe, is made of molecules as well.

I always imagined myself more as a Matisse. Matisse when he painted the strange sienna dancers and musicians. They were neatly outlined, separated from their backgrounds.

But, in fact, I am a Seurat. A tightly packed universe of molecules, a pointilist portrait. There is no real outline. The only thing that keeps me from bursting out into a trillion free-floating molecules, mixing wildly with the music molecules and the whisper molecules and the paintbrush molecules and the textbook molecules, the only thing that keeps me together is the basic xenophobic nature of my molecules, shivering together, bearing in on one another, keeping me in a neat little bundle of me molecules. But music molecules slip through the door nonetheless.