Random Chirps

• Happy Birthday Annie!
• I think you should visit Steenky Bee. This girl is really awesome. She radiates light and energy in a way that enlivenes me to do the same, and she's funny as all be.
  
• I did not get the job I had interviewed for twice and I wanted so badly. It would have been a pay raise and perfect in many ways, but there was fierce competition and someone else with more niche experience got the job. I'm sad. Blue moon, I see you standin alone...
• We are still beyond broke and don't know every month how we will pay our whole rent. You may think this is very stressful. It is.
• My right boob hurts. I keep thinking about this woman at the school where I used to work (and still sub for). She's got a 2 year old and a 6 month old, and she has reaccurent breast cancer that has spread to her bones. It's her third battle in 2 years. I organized dinners for her that are getting dropped off at the preschool where she picks up her children. Every time my breast hurts, I think about her. If you pray, maybe you could send prayers toward San Diego and a woman named Michelle.
  
• This weather ( incredibly hot and dry like the inside of an oven ) has challenged my idea of myself as strongly against nose-picking.
  
• When 'Footloose' comes on and I'm driving in my car and the sun breaks through the clouds at this slanty angle and the trees are all blowing crazy on the sides of the road and Mr. Curry is next to me and the kids are in the back of the car laughing at me because I'm singing and dancing to this song I feel elevated beyond my circumstances. I feel joy.
• 
  
• If I could make out with Obama and my husband would let me, I'd have to really, really, really consider it
• But I still wouldn't.
• I don't think cursing is a big deal. Like, at all. I think integrity is a big deal. Service is a big deal in our family. Honor. Respect. Love in action. Inner strength. Compassion. But cursing? Nah. As long as we don't sound like we could move in with the Bundy's, it's copacetic. If I spelled that right, I win ten dollars. Sometimes I meet people that have a checklist of behaviors that are offensive, but their very way of interacting in this world is small and coarse. I'd rather be a big hearted hoar than a piggy eyed linguist. But I'm not. A hoar, I mean. Or a linguist either, probably.
  
• I think Obama won that debate, hands down. Last debate, I thought tied. This one, Obama was the consumate gentlemen, and he won my heart along with my vote. ' I think those ads say more about you and your campaign, John, than they do about me. ' OH HELL YES.
• I am completely addicted to those TLC reality shows- Little People, The Duggars, John and Kate Plus Eight. There's something really life affirming about those big families, and something comforting about their normalicies, the quibbling, mistakes, gaffs, and it all ends and envelopes back again in the family fold, love.
  

Blood, Not Funny! (Uh,So Freaking Funny)

Barack Obama Story, or Another Reason To Love This Man

Mary Menth Andersen was 31 years old at the time and had just married Norwegian Dag Andersen. She was looking forward to starting a new life in Åsgårdstrand in Vestfold with him. But first she had to get all of her belongings across to Norway. The date was November 2nd, 1988. At the airport in Miami things were hectic as usual, with long lines at the check-in counters. When it was finally Mary’s turn and she had placed her luggage on the baggage line, she got the message that would crush her bubbling feeling of happiness.

“You’ll have to pay a $103 surcharge if you want to bring both those suitcases to Norway”, the man behind the counter said.

Mary had no money. Her new husband had travelled ahead of her to Norway, and she had no one else to call.

“I was completely desperate and tried to think which of my things I could manage without. But I had already made such a careful selection of my most prized possessions”, says Mary.

Although she explained the situation to the man behind the counter, he showed no signs of mercy.

“I started to cry, tears were pouring down my face and I had no idea what to do.”

Then I heard a gentle and friendly voice behind me saying, “That’s OK, I’ll pay for her.”

Mary turned around to see a tall man whom she had never seen before.

“He had a gentle and kind voice that was still firm and decisive. The first thing I thought was, Who is this man?”

Although this happened 20 years ago, Mary still remembers the authority that radiated from the man.

“He was nicely dressed, fashionably dressed with brown leather shoes, a cotton shirt open at the throat and khaki pants”, says Mary.

She was thrilled to be able to bring both her suitcases to Norway and assured the stranger that he would get his money back. The man wrote his name and address on a piece of paper that he gave to Mary. She thanked him repeatedly. When she finally walked off towards the security checkpoint, he waved goodbye to her.

The piece of paper said ‘Barack Obama’ and his address in Kansas, which is the state where his mother comes from. Mary carried the slip of paper around in her wallet for years, before it was thrown out.

“He was my knight in shining armor”, says Mary, smiling.

She paid the $103 back to Obama the day after she arrived in Norway. At that time he had just finished his job as a poorly paid community worker* in Chicago, and had started his law studies at prestigious Harvard university.

In the spring of 2006 Mary’s parents had heard that Obama was considering a run for president, but that he had still not decided. They chose to write a letter in which they told him that he would receive their votes. At the same time, they thanked Obama for helping their daughter 18 years earlier.

In a letter to Mary’s parents dated May 4th, 2006 and stamped ‘United States Senate, Washington DC’, Barack Obama writes**: ‘I want to thank you for the lovely things you wrote about me and for reminding me of what happened at Miami airport. I’m happy I could help back then, and I’m delighted to hear that your daughter is happy in Norway. Please send her my best wishes. Sincerely, Barack Obama, United States senator’.

The parents sent the letter on to Mary.

This week VG met her and her husband in the café that she runs with her friend Lisbeth Tollefsrud in Åsgårdstrand.

“It’s amazing to think that the man who helped me 20 years ago may now become the next US president”, says Mary delightedly.

She has already voted for Obama. She recently donated 100 dollars to his campaign. She often tells the story from Miami airport, both when race issues are raised and when the conversation turns to the presidential elections.

“I sincerely hope the Americans will see reason and understand that Obama means change”, says Mary.

Stigmata, Mind Body Connection

Mr. Curry has no work today, so we are both home. He's eating Organic Maple Oatmeal and I'm here, clacking away. I take Zoloft for anxiety and have been feeling a little dull lately. It makes me sad to feel a little dulled, but not. even. close. to as sad as I feel when I'm panicking. * I tried natural methods, I really, really really did. They didn't work well enough. *And that's nooo good for a Mommy of three, nietha. I have been incredibly anxious since childhood, because of the state of my family. There were a few good years, Mom tells me, but I only have glimpses of them, that always resolutely remind me of the way sunlight slips in and out of the clouds on an overcast day. Mostly I remember the sadness and the lonliness and the fear. I feel terrible about this for my Mother. Every single good memory I have revolves around her, and I can't imagine how hard it must be to have both of your children remember their childhood with such sadness.
I love my Mother.

It's amazing how much the body/mind connection has influenced my life. My parents took me to see some wildly inappropriate movies at the drive-in growing up, and one of them revolved around a young nun who had convinced herself that Christ had impregnated her at the nunnery, when indeed a man had raped her. She bled from her hands and feet. On the way home I asked about this. I was eight? Maybe nine? My parents explained stigmata to me, how a person's own will and mind creates the bleeding of Christ from their ankles, hands or feet, how some believe stigmata is a sign of God's hand.

Well I was fascinated. Dumbstruck with awe and horror. Not only did I have to deal with what was brutal, I could create brutality with my own mind? Did this mean that if i was afraid of something, I could make it real?

I have thought about this ever since.



My anxiety has created a whole host of physical symptoms at times, ranging from tics to pain, from cold and hot patches of skin to a numb crawling of the nerves. Telling the difference between anxiety and a real symptom is impossible, especially since I do have endometriosis and hypothyroidism, both of which are autoimmune and come with a host of symptoms. I seem to have a particular genius for this kind of creation: I can fall asleep thinking of a toothache and wake up with throbbing molars. I can worry I'm pregnant and my breasts swell and throb. A young hypochondriac wrote a book about this phenom, and an article here at Salon.com.

On the other hand, I can use this power for good. When I was in the 5th grade, we had moved back from Jackson, Mississippi to San Diego, and I attended school in Pacific Beach, not knowing anyone, intimidated. However, I decided firmly that not only would I be the most popular girl at school that year, I would get straight A's.
Guess what happened? I was the most popular girl, and I got straight A's.

The problem is that I am full of fear. It ebbs, it flows, sometimes I feel I have won, but it lurks in my cells. My family history is one of brilliant alcoholic manic-depressive anxiety ridden men and women who have great accomplishments ( My Grandfather Ethridge was the Supreme Court Judge in Mississippi, for example, and wrote THIS ) but serious mental undoings. There is schizophrenia on BOTH sides of my family. Take this soup and mix in a scary childhood- and you get Me.

I like to think I've done an amazing job with this history. I found a therapist who saved my life, and saw her for years. I worked DAMN HARD, let me be sure to say, I hurt badly and struggled and made mistakes, but I never gave up. I had my son, and I knew the road ahead of me was hard, but I had to make it my own.

However, the fear lurks. I have a stronghold of weapons against it, most of all, greatest of all, Love. Not the idea of love, the actuality of it- Mr. Curry, holding me through hours of panic years ago, my daughter, falling asleep with her hand in her brother's, Dakota whispering to me in the late hours in his bed 'Mom I always know I"ll be OK, because you always believe in me. If you believe in me, I'll never give up' , Mr. Curry, changing diapers, walking crying babies, forcing himself to listen to his exhausted and frustrated wife at night when he should be sleeping, all the years of our marriage, the day in and day out of never. giving. up.

What we get from that struggle to rise above is pictures like the ones in the last post. We get the breath and smile and eyes of our children rising in front of our eyes when the skies go dark and that dull, sharp pain or hollowness threatens to consume: I know these are the things that will comfort and staid me in any darkness, illness or death....

I am hungry for information on the mind body connection; I want to know how to control my mind. There is a fantastic book, ' The Body Never Lies ' that is all about this, written by, I think, a British woman who is famous for her theories. She uses examples of famous men and women who suffered during childhood and then were very ill in adulthood, or died from their illness, as proof of her theory that holding down emotion, forcing forgiveness, muting pain, creates disease.

I am looking to create life.

So here's to the praying (to a God I don't know is there or not), the exercise, the writing, the reading, the healthy eating, the vitamens, the talk therapy, the day to day doings, all that I gather to my chest, press into my body, to clear the past from my cells and create a mind-body at peace at last.

San Diego Sunday, Life is Beautiful

Today is so beautiful. The light hangs over everything like a watercolor, spilling into the kitchen, where our Sunday began...

Evan spent the night ( Evan * Lola * Dakota ) He turns 14 Today! Dakota and Evan have been friends since 5th grade. We love you Evan!



Mr. Curry is not feeling well today. His back hurts. But he still sits for a picture :)


Out front, Kagome is watching....

Bodie checks in with her.


Kagome, Harry and Hagrid meet. They are wondering what the kids are doing...

because Dakota is tearing up and down the street on his bike,

while Lola and Evan hide out and throw rubble at him.

Bodie, Wolfgang and Harry Potter observe.


Lola takes a break to check the mail.

We take a trip down the street to our local Starbucks, for a delicious birthday treat.


Grandma Mary picks up Lola Moon for some ' special time ' and buggling. It's funny because Nie Nie's page refers to their family's snuggles as 'mugging', while in our family, it's always been
'buggling'. Whatever your family calls it, it's all about Love

The History of Us, Part One

Mr. Curry and I fell in love over years and years. When we first met-

I was madly in love with someone else. Or so I thought. The love of my life had to start subversively, like everything else. I was enthralled with my first love, who we'll call J. J and I had met at seventeen, both being mangled by the respective horrors in our households, and we clung to each other's hearts and bodies as only those who are drowning can. We fell as only those who are without wings can fall, into each other with a desperation fueled by young lust and a short lifetime of sorrow.

J's family was disintigrating rapidly. His mother was grossly obese, hooked to a home oxegen machine, two pack a day smoker, bacon and cake eater, pill popper, drinker, a childhood victim of molest by an Uncle. His father was overweight, prostate cancer survivor, bearded and farsighted, furious. We would know he was home every day from the sound of the door slamming and ' GODDAMNIT! ' or maybe ' WHAT THE FUCK!! ' The problem would be a full trash can, a backpack in his way...entering his home, with his children, who he had failed to protect from neither his wife nor himself. J's siblings were both curled inward as tightly as crabs, pinchers out.

I was no happier, no safer, only my family's problems and pain were smoothed cleaner, harder to see underneath the starched white sheets, the floors kept so clean, the furniture polished. My mother was a very good housekeeper.

J. and I swirled around and around each other like small, futile tornadoes, driven like snow flurries into the wild. I wanted anything Wild, but not Dark. The difference was clear to me. The drug dealers in their twenties who lived in the town close to me, the ones who invited me and my fifteen year old girlfriends over for boozing and drugging, the ones who stabbed each other for no reason at all, these men were Dark. I knew Dark, it was in my father's face. It was in the corners of our house at night, bleeding into the middle like a ruptured organ. Dark was in my grandfather's mental illness, his assurance that the owner of Yogurt Heaven was working for the CIA. Wild was different. Wild was something beautiful, something free, something caught up in the open spaces of canyon trembling under the wind,
the sky spreading open in the Ocotilla desert- Wild was what I felt with J. He was not Dark. He was innocent, sweet, despite his heavy metal posters and black leather jacket, despite his long hair and tight Levi's, despite his family, he was not Dark. I was safe with him.

Safe, but not protected. He wouldn't hurt me, but he couldn't stop anything that did.
Very slowly, over years, I realized that J was not only Wild, but muted. He had sacrificed dearly to stay innocent. He had dulled his senses, closed down his eyes, ears, mouth, spoke less and less, mumbled, twitched like a hare caught in a trap in his sleep. He had given up growing up to stay clean inside, to not burn alive in the miserable life of his mother ( who he loved dearly ) beating him with a wooden spoon or his father drinking in the study, or watching his younger sister sit terrified and immobilized with fear when Mom fell down the stairs and burst her head open on the linoleum.

I wanted protection from my pain, my family, my Father, and as I realized how stunted J had let himself become, I grew furious. The fury was terror. I had fooled myself into thinking I was not alone, and I wasn't alone but I was alone in the fight. J had given up, and he was happy to lay still and quiet with me, breathing each other's air, trying to stay safe. I wanted more than that. I wanted to live.

****

survivable loss

no small divorce, your passing eye
your sweet lip depression or fine clean
smile all gone from me,
gone now for four years and so many
days, gone in the fast forward of
family videos, my children smiling,
laughing, learning to count and
count on.

one by one the clippings have fallen past-
my father, my grandparents, all of them,
and my sister now,vague in limbo,
cast to charcoal sketchings
that blur when the eye focuses in.

i am cast in the shadows for you, sadly
meshed with the prick memories of your terrors
and they were mine, too, but i was there,
witness, and possibly the way my hair falls
or the octave of my voice brings you back there in a way
that just can't be survived.

this is what he took along, in his ever growing bag
of horrors: children, innocence, laughter, trust,
and the good root structure between sisters,
yanked upwards and slit at the throat,
if roots had throats,
and we did.

ours did.

i think of you when she smiles or he shrugs,
i think of you when the predictable reminders
tap, but more, i feel your absence in an unsteady
gait or reaching out that has no body to reach
towards, then i pause strangely and recall
my sister, feel downwards in a compulsive check
for roots gone four years now, and so many
days.

it's a survivable loss. not a death. not a
fatal illness. a mysterious foreboding, it is
the prickle on the back of my neck, the shadows
that hang in the clouds and blink like wide eyes,
the howling of dogs at night, it is a long time
waiting, it is a slow growing doubt, it is a poison
that i drank the day you left.

it spills through my veins and drips out the loose
end roots that dangle harmlessly, drip drip dripping
out into my heart and swelling the damaged thing,
pressing against the rib cage and causing a strange
cut of pain, a sharp stab, a vomit, the occasional
crying jag.

i move forward as i should,
without you.

Maggie M.E.

Her Name Was Lola

" To see her is to love her / And love her but forever: / For nature made her what she is / And never made anither! "



" In those days, as a little child, I was living in Paradise, and had no need of the arts, that are at best only a shadow of Paradise "

" Happy those early days! When I / Shined in my angel infancy. "

I Contradict Myself? Very well, I Contradict Myself

I'm 33.

Soon, I'll be 34- in November, because I am a Scorpio, and fit the hard shell of one, as well as the soft meat inside. I am anxious but mindful, desperate but constantly reassured, lonely but loved, adrift but bound, a conflux of thoughts, emotions, past, future, child, woman- in short, a writer.

Or maybe I need to specify: a fiction writer. It doesn't seem that writers of other ilk are as strange and overwhelmingly embattled and sensitive as writers of fiction and poetry are. A guy that studies Amazon kuckoberries all year isn't going to be dredging the ghosts of his past up every day in a beautiful and stressful mess of writing fiction. Every time I create a character, I feel the store of life I have in my mind stirring, whispering, rising just enough to give layers of meaning and truth to the character, but not so much that fiction becomes memoir.

Sometimes I am not sure if writing is slowly saving me or slowly killing me. Maybe both. Maybe like many great events and experiences, the contradictions form the whole.

My children and my husband put up with my writerly inclinations- and these things, let me assure you, are not affects I have put on to match some literary ideal, but simply the way I have been since I can remember. I have written since I was five, and always, always known I would be a writer. My painful and lonely childhood was gist for the mill, and par for the course with writers. It's rare to read or hear of a great fiction writer who had a lovely childhood, but certainly not unheard of. John Irving, I believe, had a 'nice' childhood, although he never knew his real father and when he finally found him, in adulthood, he had died. Irving's book, Until I Found You, was driven by this father hunger, this mystery. Most everything I write is driven by mystery. I think the infinite mystery of life is it's singular most compelling characteristic. Everything most wonderful is alternatively most elusive. Love? What is this? A feeling, an idea, a commitment, a lie, a way of life- there are as many ideas about what love is as there are people experiencing it. A good biochemist will probably tell you love is the simple evolutionary fact of survival. ( I think I just named my next poem. )

My sweet Mr. Curry is a huge reader (something I Love, Love about him and I find endlessly entertaining how surprised people always are to find that my blue collar mover of a husband is an avid reader) and so appreciates what I do...to some degree. He doesn't 'appreciate' it the way another writer does, but by appreciate I really mean respect. He respects that there is something fundamentally important to me about writing, and he doesn't have to get it. He gets me. This includes occasional bouts of panic or panic attacks, a nasty and abusive childhood, hours and hours writing and reading, a tendency to take seriously our time with the children but not, say, keeping the car clean, an almost transparant and painful love for all people, all the time, just for existing (which is NOT cool in this day and age, and highly suspect) but also a wild and hungry sexuality, (yay marriage!) a sharp and interested mind, an endlessly loving heart.

At 33, I'm working on my second fiction novel, entitled Agitate My Heart. This novel, like children, came along when it felt like it, and not when it was convenient for us. Half way through, it has taken countless hours of writing, headaches, late nights, research, reading, and conversing to get here, and there are however many hours left until I am done. Writing this novel has happened alongside these events:

The death of both of my grandparents, after two years of their rapid decline and our caretaking and loving.

Two surgeries for me.

One surgery for Mr. Curry.

Moving.

Car crash. Car totalled. Walk to work. Listen to daughter complain endlessly.

Panic attacks, evaluation, recognition, reintigration. Relief.

Three children, two dogs and four cats later, I'm still birthing this baby. I love the novel, and hate the tedium of how I work. Everyone works differently. I tend to work like Ms. Anne Lamott, who is quite vocal about what a bitch writing is for her, and how the radio station Mind Fuck plays in her head a lot when she's working.

Right- write. Mind Fuck because the ghosts come calling, and mine are scary. Scary and mean, and real.

I face my past as a woman. I have only recognized myself as a woman in the last few years, even though I had my first baby at 19. Still talking about childhood trauma is not currently in style, it's boomeranging (or boomer-aging) from talk therapy to shut up and deal, and reality is somewhere in between. Abuse never leaves us. It never goes away. But it can be successfully integrated into a new and beautiful life, if it is acknowledged. My work acknowledges my past, and sometimes writing my book is harder than when my Father called a few weeks ago, after not talking to him for 9 years, and said in his Southern voice ' Mahgggay'

In November I will be 34, and I am thinking about how OLD I am, and how impossibly YOUNG.
This is the true contradiction of our lives, and we wear it internally and externally. I am partly made of that child crying herself to sleep, and partly that young girl birthing her first baby without a clue how she would manage, and partly this 33 year old woman mother and wife who has written words almost every day of her life, and never runs out of things to say.

Clearly. ;)