Hometown.

The breeze was damp and gray today. Dun-colored - gray blue brown - hazel. An almost imperceptible fog, one of those that hangs just above the trees and contemplates becoming a rain cloud for the greater part of the day, waffling, never quite fulfilling itself, blocked out the heat of the sun. On days like this I've noticed that green grows and spreads and breathes. On sunny days, yellow and white blear out the greens. But on these days, these almost wet days, the heavy leaves hang and pant like the tongues of eager puppies. Only the gray branches and bark muzzle them. If I pass close enough, I feel the damp lick of them on my arm.

Fain and I walked up and down Main Street, a street that I once walked up and down with my first crush years ago. I carried Fain on my shoulders, and he grabbed at red berries hanging from holly trees that line the sidewalk. When we got to the town commons, I put him down in the grass. He stopped, surveyed the expansive, shady terrain, and wobbled from tree to tree, picking up leaves and pulling grass up by the roots, squealing, "Mommeeeeeeee."

Stately, old homes line two sides of the commons. Some are Victorian, with intricate lacy carvings decorating the porches. Japanese maples are just beginning to burst with delicate red firecracker leaves on a few lawns. The behemoth Baptist church where I was baptized as a little girl encompasses another side of the commons.

I didn't want to get back in the car and drive home. The air was cool and moist. The leaves were blushing before my eyes. People were walking along the sidewalk, talking, nodding, smiling. I can't help thinking when it feels so wonderful outside that I'm not guaranteed another day like this. And so we kept walking, veering off of Main Street to tour the interior of the tiny historic district.

On one of the streets that is named for a saint, Peter or Patrick or Andrew, there was a Civil War re-enactment with a small camp, men and women in gray and blue uniforms and drab dresses, cannons and muskets. Girls from the local 4-H club were selling Pepsi and hot dogs from a silver trailer. Women were selling home-made jams and butters, baskets, jewelry, and who knows what else at other booths. Fain wandered, unsteady and giggling, from one booth to another and then into a little garden, where he practiced bending to smell flowers.

I thought, I might have gone home and missed this. I might have missed this day. And who knows when I'll have another one like it.

The dilemma posed by Halloween pencils.

A problem only a neurotic could have.

I have these beautiful Halloween pencils that I love now in a way that a grown woman should not love a school supply. They lie in a drawer in my make-shift desk, unsharpened. Sometimes I open the drawer and take one of my favorites out and turn it over in my hands, hold it close to my eyes to take in all the Made in China fancy of it, the cat's gleaming eyes or the delicate lines of a Jack o'Lantern. I'll run my fingers over it to feel where some patterns, like purple metallic tree limbs, are pressed into the wood. And I think then that I should sharpen one and use it, take it to school and make little notes on yellow steno pads with it, draw little stick houses with square windows and squiggly smoke lines pouring out of a lop-sided chimney, that sort of thing. But then I think that if I sharpen it, it'll start to dwindle, and, before long, it'll be gone. Or if I take it to school, I may misplace it, lay it on top of another teacher's grade book and walk off absent-mindedly only to realize my blunder two hours too late.

So they lie there in the drawer, nagging at me in their leaden way. They are pencils and should be used as such, but using them will deplete them. Not using them, deprives them of their meaning. Using them, deprives them of their existence. Do you see what I mean?

This shouldn't be a problem.

World weary.

I've tried to explain depression. Not in general but specifically as it relates to me. It's not easy. In particular because I don't know what it is to other people. Again that barrier, that unknown, that x-factor that is the other mind, lumbers there blocking the view and making a map useless. (Who needs a map when there's a big meteor blocking the road? What good's it do?)

To me, it's weariness. Fatigue. An all-over feeling of having-had-enough. My hair feels made of wet seaweed, twined and tangled with lead chains and barnacled anchors, so that my head is over-encumbered and my neck fragile and bent. My arms ache towards the top as if I've been carrying frozen-solid refrigerators packed with elephants and rhinos and small planets. My eyes feel as if they've been shedding tears for months, filling teacups and mixing bowls and empty terra cotta plant pots, even when I haven't had the energy or the motivation to cry. My chest feels like a rock slide in progress, an eternal sliding into something bottomless and sideless and topless, as if, looking down my gullet, one might see an exact replica of the blackest edges of the universe, racing outward into more blackness.

I just feel beaten.

There have been times when it was particularly scary and slippery, and I felt like a cat trying to keep from sliding into a swimming pool on a rainy day. I could feel my imaginary claws scrambling for something to jag. I ran through lists in my mind of people who I could call. Lists. I would tick off names and make an excuse for each person. Why I shouldn't bother him. Why she doesn't need the hassle. And I would lie on my stomach on the floor or on the bed or on the sofa and sink.

I've been organizing lately. Ordering Fain's Dr. Seuss books and Curious George. Filing and deleting emails. Clicking through folders and documents, determining the relative value of each, disposing. Alphabetizing. Numbering. And that always scares me a little. I recognize it now as an attempt to quell chaos. And chaos is the state of my skull when depression starts to seep into it. Depression is algebra. Too many numbers and symbols that start to swirl and become senseless. Depression is balancing a checkbook without a calculator, knowing that you've overspent and that there is no income to cover the overdraft.

By train.

I've begun thinking about the future, avoiding the long stretches of it during which I will be working and focusing, instead, on the sorts of adventures that Fain and I will have during the summer vacations. After all, the promise of an extended summer vacation is the real reason most teachers keep at it. Let's face it. The light in one child's eyes may be enough to keep me from walking out in the middle of the day, but it's not enough to keep me coming back week after week. Especially when the light flickers and is often replaced with dull apathy. Especially when 89 other pairs of eyes are looking at me with the sort of light that is the reflection of a mob leader's torch gleaming on a well-polished pitchfork.

So, I imagine the trips that Fain and I will take during the halcyon days of July and August. Hot, but halcyon.

First, I think, we'll travel along the Eastern seaboard, stopping in D.C., Boston, New York, and any other great, bustling cities that cluster the culture and excitement of the American story into compact fortresses of stately brownstones and steel skyscrapers. We'll eat pizza at all the Rays' parlors in New York. We'll gape at the airplanes in the Air and Space Museum in D.C. We'll find Franklin's old haunts in the cobblestone ways of Boston.

Then, we'll waylay ourselves in the green meadows of Pennsylvania and watch black-and-white cows munch and loll in the heat of the afternoon. We'll canoe through calm lake waters in Maine, picnic beneath towering evergreens on soft fallen needles. We'll ride bicycles through apple orchards in Vermont perhaps, and we'll watch grimy, graceful fishing boats sail out into pink mornings in Maryland.

Halloween pencils.

This may seem random, but I've recently developed an obsession with pencils.

I haven't written with pencils in years, and I generally swear by black ink alone. (Blue ink seems passive-aggressive to me somehow, as do blue suits.) I have complained on numerous occasions about the smudginess and dinginess of gray lead scribbling, and I swore that I would not accept papers written in pencil.

However, due to my ever-steadier plummet away from deplorably-written essays that shouldn't qualify as essays and towards the inevitable neatness and efficiency of the cold, impersonal Scantron exam, I have found myself more and more often turning to old Number 2.

In so doing, I have begun to marvel at the variety of the Number 2 pencil.

Of course, there's always the reliable goldenrod traditional with the green metallic "No. 2" imprinted in the wood towards the pinkish-orange eraser. I like those. They seem firm and steady and reliable. No nonsense pencils. And I can always find one lying around in a pile of dust and lollipop wrappers under a student's desk when I need one.

But then there are a plethora of fancier pencils from which to choose. Some advertise local insurance companies or Mexican restaurants. Others are decorated with pink Japanese kitten-girls or spiralling flame-red dragons.

I have a leaf-green pencil that reads "Eat Healthy" in bold black Courier font. It reminds me that I should add broccoli and snow peas to my meals more often.

I have a white pencil with a little American flag on it. I don't remember what it advertises, but it reminds me of pencils that my Grandad used to bring home in his shirt pocket, from the textile mill where he worked when I was a little girl.

I have a red pencil that reads "Dragons, Dreams and Magic" in silver curlicues that I picked up at the library in June when Fain and I went to the summer reading festival. Fain cried when MacGruff the Crime Dog approached him, and we had to make an escape like a couple of howling criminals. I don't let kids borrow that one because it has taken on some sort of significance that I can't explain due to the fact that it hinges entirely on my neuroses. I thought that I'd lost it once and I nearly crumbled like shavings pouring out of an old metal pencil sharpener.

Today I bought a bag of Halloween pencils. I picked through them when I got them home, admiring the black one with metallic green alien heads and the lime green one with black cats and orange jack-o-lanterns. I felt a giddy pleasure holding each one, examining the glittering owl eyes and the cartoon ghosts, a pleasure that I guess a 30 year old shouldn't feel anymore, a pleasure that can really only be attributed to my general weirdness.

The fact that I have somehow managed to ramble on line after line about Number 2 pencils after days of not having anything to write about or to say just confirms that in my mind.

Still waiting to hear from you, pirate.

Friends.

I went out with adults other than my parents tonight for the first time since I moved back to North Carolina. I've been here since May, and I haven't made any friends yet. I guess tonight was a start. But, in truth, it made me more nostalgic than anything.

Making new friends forces me to think of the friends that I miss, the friends that I didn't have to make, the friends that just happened.

And it used to be that way for me. I was funny and charming, and friends just fell in my lap out of the sky. That was back in my drinking days. I'm funnier when I'm drunk. Sober, I'm just awkward.

I have these friends, these friends who are not many in number but who are mine and valuable and important. And they're all so far away, and it seems to be that way always.

Consequently, I sit and reminisce and wish that I could play one more game of pool at the Balcony with this one or eat one more golden-battered octobus ball on a brick wall with another.

And bowling and chatting and whatever with friends that I'm trying to make doesn't seem as natural.

An artful life.

Molly and I were lounging at a small iron table on the sidewalk outside of Igor's on St. Charles. The sky was deep indigo blue, heading for nightfall, dipping into the creases and crevices of the giant oak arms that stretched out across the street and the neutral ground. We were stuffed with red steak and green salad from Houston's. Bryan paid for our dinner, and we had enough money left to buy a couple of drinks. I thought it was considerate of him to send us out on the town while he worked in the dark bar at the Buddha Belly, smoke-clogged and doused with drunks.

So she and I were there, enjoying the sounds of people passing and talking and hollering at one another, the music of the jukebox, the clink of glasses, watching the beaded tourists age as they waited for the streetcar to arrive, feeling the warm evening air settle down into the cracked, weedy concrete, nestle between our toes, pearl along the sides of our cold glasses. The night was soft and calm and beautiful, and Molly and I talked about life.

We talked about living a life that is artful. Not about living like an artist from a French film - cursing, smoking, whacking off our ears to woo dispassionate lovers - but about living a life that somehow becomes art. An artist considers each stroke. Each color, each nuance, each unadulterated white space, each noun, each adjective, each gesture is considered, has a meaning, moves towards the creation of something moving.

I go through so much of life quickly, without noticing the details, without considering the shading and the texture that I add with my actions and words. Whether I like it or not, my life is my masterpiece. It's the same for everyone. But I shake my head over my creation and tell myself that I'm not a real artist, that I have no real talent, that my contribution is not as valuable as a true genius. I forget that art is in the intent, the feeling that the artist has as she is working. Artists don't create for money or for fame. Artists create for love. To be an artist of life, I only really have to love it, to savor it, and to contribute. I have to move and speak with purpose. I have to want to create beauty and meaning where there is none.

Winding sheets of wind.

I took Fain to the park this morning. September has begun to make itself known. Countless yellow leaves were strewn by the roadsides like dirt-dimmed doubloons along St. Charles. I can't help but think it. But there are no beads in the trees here. Maybe the beaded trees are gone from New Orleans, too.

The weather is calming. I've forgotten how much I enjoy the fall. I've forgotten the way that the wind feels in September - like a worn cotton sheet, cool and clinging. It presses and insinuates and is a seductive force all its own. It is a breath more than any other wind. It is solid and soft and yielding. There is nothing harsh in it.

Fain walked on his own for a while, hands up slightly to balance himself, imitating the feel of mother's hand holding his. He squeals and laughs and intentionally falls just for the novelty of it. He shouts at the ducks, calling them by baby names, attempting to befriend them and then frightening them away. He eats their bread and then tosses some into the water. He seems thrilled by the changed weather, too. After a while, he wants me to hold him and walk with him the way that I did when he was a newborn. He puts his chubby, light arms around my neck and pats my back softly with his tiny hands. He rests his cheek on my shoulder, and I don't want to move because I'm afraid I'll disrupt him. I want him to stay this way forever, loving and gentle and warm. My little safe haven. I could have walked like that forever.

I stopped and spoke to a young boy named Chris who was fishing. He commented on the weather with a smile. He said that he hoped it was so nice all day. A good day to be outside, he said. He said that he lived nearby, that the river ran behind his house, that he loved to go fishing when he had the time. He told me that he'd only caught a fat eel today, but that he thought it was a prank. Eels, he reported to me, don't usually inhabit the lake. I told him that I didn't know eels lived anywhere other than oceans and aquariums. He, ten or so, smiled wisely and nodded his head. He had thought the same thing, he assured me. But he's caught several in the river. Fresh-water eels. I wished him the best of luck. He said bye-bye to the baby. A nice boy. The kind of boy that reminds me of Mayberry, that I wonder at, that I hope will remain so friendly and apparently guileless. The kind of boy that makes the blue skies seem more real and the day seem more like a true holiday.

Just down the path, two men were fishing together and watching over two young, dark-haired children, a boy and a girl. They ooh-ed and ah-ed over Fain, cupped his chubby cheeks in their little hands, smiled for the camera, and talked about ways that we might spend the day - fishing, swimming, playing hide-and-seek. They were disappointed when I said that we'd have to go home to eat lunch. But they waved us off, running behind us for a ways to catch all of the kisses that Fain blew at them.

I felt a profound sense of peace. Maybe only children, sweet children playing innocent games, can restore that to a grown-up who has been watching the news for too many days.

Fain in New Orleans. Fall 2004.

Pumpkins in the French Market. Fall 2003.

Amber oaks, swollen pumpkins, scarecrows, and other pleasanter things.

September. I'm glad it's September. I love the fall. I love the caramel-apple smell of it, the leaf-smoke scent, the mulch and wet-brown dirt envelopment of the senses.

I am secretly hunting for a pumpkin farm to visit with my little boy.

I can see the white farmhouse, like the ones in picture books that I read as a little girl. It stands with perfect posture, alone, a fringe of green pines and maroon and golden oaks and elms and maples off in the distance - orange leaves spring out like wild hairs, glow against the deep cornflower sky. Brown soil furrows surround the house off and away to the distant treeline. Orange pumpkins, fat and heavy, droop, loll, sag and slump into thickets of green and spiralling vines. Someone somewhere is baking a pie thick with cinnamon and nutmeg and brown sugar. I imagine it is Mrs. Brown, the farmer's white-haired wife. And she will have warm apple cider ready to serve in brown mugs. The apples come from an orchard several dirt roads away, dirt roads lined with Queen Anne's lace and black-eyed Susans and purple coneflower in the spring. Now they are lined with green-golden grasses, crackling and sharp. There are puppies and kittens scattered under withering forsythia bushes, pricked by holly and yelping or rolling over to display chubby bellies. And somewhere, amidst the ticklish scents, the carefree pups, the distant dark wood, there is a pumpkin waiting for my baby and me. If we take the whole weekend, some perfect weekend, we'll find it there and forget about everything else. We'll allow ourselves to believe for a moment that this was why we were put on earth.

In search of the Maltese pirate.

If anyone who reads this is a friend of the guy (well, I somehow assume guy rather than gal) who calls himself "the Maltese pirate," could you let me know how he (or she, as the case may be) is? I'm sure he must be cranky, what with no having never gotten his cigarette stash to adequate levels, but I do hope that that is his only woe.

Guilty.

I have no idea where my guilt comes from, but it follows me into every area of my life. I remember it even when I was a kid. Global guilt. Global depression. As if I, even at ten, could have somehow prevented poverty and illness. As if I, single-handedly, could have righted the injustices of the world. And, rather than so doing, I played on monkey-bars and prayed for boys to notice me. As a result, children starved and were beaten and countries went to war. And there I was smiling heedlessly.

It's stupid and it's also crazy. I should have gotten over that sort of personal fable years ago, but it clings. I must be telling myself stories in bed at night.

I feel guilty when my students fail my class because they didn't do any of the work that I assigned to them.

I feel guilty when I send them to chill-out because they throw books at me or curse at me.

I feel guilty when I hear middle-class white folks who've never even seen a ghetto wonder why impoverished black folks don't just leave if it's so bad.

I feel guilty when I see rag-tag bands of black mothers and children and uncles and aunties in stained t-shirts and soaked jeans huddled together along the sides of dilapidated interstates, hungry and lacking even the roach-infested, drug-ridden, destitute shelter of the Magnolia projects.

I feel guilty when I hear white folks and black folks commiserate together about the problems presented by Mexicans taking jobs that don't even pay minimum wage.

There's nothing that I can do about these things. Technically, I bear no responsibility for any of them. And yet I feel responsible. I feel like I haven't done my job well enough, I've lacked guts or compassion or energy. I've been selfish or cruel or tight-lipped.

I just feel guilty about the state of the world. I feel guilty about the cruelty that we shower onto each other. I feel guilty that I can't be a Ghandi or a King or a Christ or a bodhisattva.

The earth died screaming.

My neuroses have not been on the upswing. Lately, I've felt that my head is wrapped in a green, Bram Stoker sort of fog. I'm a little frightened. Phobic, I mean. Not reasonably frightened, but frightened in general. I feel that I went to bed with a world that I could hope to one day understand, and I woke on a hostile alien planet with no star chart or memory of the bus ride.

I used to walk down the street and look people, especially people that I perceived as a threat, directly in the eye to show my fearlessness. Lately, I don't want to look at anyone because I'm afraid that they might be vicious and cruel - a rapist or a murderer or a torturer. I know that it sounds crazy, but it's creeping over me.

My mind has always leaned towards the absurd. My thoughts have always been a little unsettled, especially on certain days. I mean, some days are better than others and some days I'm morose and some days I'm overwhelmed with radical hope. But some days my mind leans more towards the absurd.

Yesterday I passed the television in the media center at the school. It was tuned to a news station and the little ticker at the bottom was spurting news. I stopped to watch the images of New Orleans, tired, depressed, and I noticed that the ticker read: Al-Qaeda claiming responsibility for... And I honestly thought for a moment that Al-Qaeda was going to claim responsibility for Hurricane Katrina. How absurd is that? I shook my head and felt a little like I did when Fain had been home from the hospital for a couple of weeks. I hadn't slept in weeks for his crying and nursing at night, and the world became an unfamiliar, shifting place. I felt like things might be connected in some obvious way that I can't perceive. I felt a little disheveled and confused. I felt dizzy when I got home and sunken. I feel a little frightened and confused by the world today.

The day you once refused.

I feel fatigued. Tired is not the word, quite. Not sleepy. My eyes feel like swollen prunes and my muscles are staticky. (Nothing compared to the refugees of New Orleans. A sympathetic pain with the faces and bodies that made up the settings of the most memorable days of my life.) I couldn't sleep later than I had, and so I finally watched the news. And, again, I found myself crying.

Early in the week, I cried for fear. I cried for friends that I hadn't heard from. I cried anxiously. I tried not to cry and felt my eyes begin to ache and my head.

As the week wore on, I cried for people that I barely knew. I cried for familiar strangers whose names I did not know; whose names, therefore, I will never find on a survivors list. I cried for frail old Bill, who left his poor wife after a month of marriage to spend his lottery winnings with a hooker in Biloxi, who returned to find that his wife had died, who spent the next decade of his life gazing tragically into cheap beers and attempting to re-imagine her last days, imagine himself there with her, who was alone and sad, who may or may not have been swallowed up in the waters and the fires this week. I cried for Miss Linda, the foul-mouthed cleaning-lady, who put curses on her lover when her husband was released from prison. I cried for neighbors whose lives remained closed from me. I cried for the dark woman who once sat across from me on the streetcar, whispering to an invisible ear, smiling vacantly. I cried for the old black man who sat outside the laundromat on Prytania, who always asked how I felt, who always seemed to remember the exact day of my arrival, who always made that little block seem like a home.

Today, I cried for the city, as I watched the aerial views, as I listened to Harry Connick, Jr. sing "Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans?" I thought about Molly's last visit and our tourist-traipsing through the French Quarter. I said that I wanted to see the things that I'd always meant to see. We waved umbrellas in a silly little second line. We listened to a tiny black lady belt out "Wild Woman's Blues." We drank champagne at the Carousel Bar, dizzying with the steady spin, watching the street outside pass and then disappear, re-appear and pass again. I thought about Jack and I on my birthday in Bourbon Street bars, reminiscing and laughing and then, when I'd had too much, crying on his shoulder again.

I had to put parts of the poem "Boundaries" on this site because, again, it has become a mantra. The line "a mirror, a summer, a street" passes through my mind over and over again like a ticker on an all-news channel. Pacheco once felt the way that I have felt so many times. I imagine that's why the poem repeats itself and brings me comfort. It's not optimistic, but it's sympathetic and compassionate.

Lines from Pacheco's "Boundaries."

All that you have loved, they told me, is now dead.
And I can't describe it quite,
but there's something in time
that has sailed away forever.
There are faces now I'll never
see in my mind again;
and perhaps there's a mirror, a summer, a street
that already go under the echo of one more futile shade.

All you have lost, they concluded, is your own.
Your sole estate, your memory, your name.
You won't have, now, the day
you once refused.
Time
has left you on the shore
of this night
and perhaps
a fleeting light
will drown the silence.