Health & Fitness Tip #18

Find your plum-line.

That's what my yoga teacher keeps telling me.

Apparently, if I can find it, I'll be able to stay upside down forever.

Blooming Cacophony

There are few things I love more about New York City than the deli flowers. It's like living in a giant gorgeous garden where the roses honk, the sunflowers scream, and the daffodils--not wanting to get lost in the sonar shuffle--just stand on the corner nodding their lovely little heads.

The Wake

Even as I stood clinging onto a silver pole and balancing on one leg in the subway, it struck me as absurd: I was changing shoes to go see a dead man; a man had died, and I was changing shoes.

I never know what to say at these things. I read the poem on the program and the cards on the flowers and the photo captions tacked to a felt board, and then I stood in front of the casket. He was painted almost orange, and his suit was blue. I'm sorry, I mumbled to his beautiful daughter-in-law who had given me all the details--the tubes, the surgery, the agreement--while we stood, not smoking, under the awning. There was a time, years ago, when he gave his blessing to his other son to marry me.

The other son, the one I did not marry, didn't show before I, still mumbling, excused myself. Work, I lied and looked back over my shoulder (don't we always?) as I made my way to the train.

Something Old

(Picasso's Old Guitarist)

Last Night's Dream

I was in an SUV with my ex-stepfather. We were driving through the New York streets and hundreds of people were dressed as birds, flapping their huge paper wings and running into the middle of the road. I had to slam on my brakes to avoid hitting them. They squawked and called, and Thorn kept hitting the palm of his hand on the dashboard. Birds, he kept yelling, these damn birds.

How to Cure a Belly Ache

1. Remember the frosting.

2. Read the birthday tribute your dear friend wrote on her blog. (Thanks, Livs.)

3. Sit in the backyard and smell the honeysuckle. And you thought things only bloomed in spring...

Very, Very 33

O Cake!

Birthday cake.
Eat yourself silly cake.
Chocolate cake and carrot cake and yellow cake.
Strawberry cake and pound cake.
Just one more slice cake.
Love me some icing cake.
Laughing cake.
A laugh until you cry cake.
A Patty cake.
Patty cake.

I cake you cake.
I cake you very much cake.
Show me a cake that never caked
and I’ll show you a cake that never was cake.
Roll it up cake.
Roll it up! Roll it up! Throw it in a pan cake.
An even a bad cake is good cake cake.
A shit-eating grin ‘cause I got me a cake cake.
A close my eyes and make me a wish cake.
An oh I ate too much cake and I kinda wanna die cake,
but let me lick the knife,
just let me get that one last little bit of cake.

My Future Husband, The Poet

So, I was clicking mindlessly through email, paying not a lick of attention to the sender when I came upon this jewel:

Plates
Key
Radio
Title

Hmm...I thought, a little poem! I wanted to know what was playing on the radio. What was this "key"? What did it unlock?

Then I looked at the sender: Cody. Hmm...I thought, not a little poem. Actually, Geico has decided to total our car, and this is a list of items we must surrender to them. Apparently, the ole wagon's innards have been rotting away due to a little run-in I had with a horse a few years back.

The thing is, it looked normal enough, beautiful even:

Is there a song called Goodbye Summertime? If so, cue it now.

City Rain

The streets are sopping, and a man is walking very slowly, behind his leash, behind his bulldog. I want to open the window and yell, "Hurry up, you'll get wet!" Instead, I sit here in my office--the window bolted shut--and watch as they make their way down the avenue, so slowly, I think, but when I look up again, they're already gone.

God Says Yes to Me

by Kaylin Haught

I asked God if it was okay to be melodramatic
and she said yes
I asked her if it was okay to be short
and she said it sure is
I asked her if I could wear nail polish
or not wear nail polish
and she said honey
she calls me that sometimes
she said you can do just exactly
what you want to
Thanks God I said
And is it even okay if I don't paragraph
my letters
Sweetcakes God said
who knows where she picked that up
what I'm telling you is
Yes Yes Yes

from The Palm of your Hand, 1995
Tilbury House Publishers

Copyright 1995 by Kaylin Haught.
All rights reserved.

Woman, Bird, Crowbar

This is the view from my desk. There is a naked woman and a red bird. If you look closely, you'll also see a gash in the wall just above the naked woman. It's from the time the yoga studio next door called me and Cody to tell us that we were missing an entire row of bricks. Come on over, they said, and we went. Here, the guy said and handed Cody a crowbar. I bet if you stick this crowbar through that drywall, it'll end up in your apartment. He was right, of course, but it does seem to have been a bad bet on our part.

There are other holes in our walls too. If you take down almost any painting in our home you will see that Cody has sawed a rectangle in the drywall. What are you doing? I kept asking. Looking for bricks, he said.

I sometimes worry that out of some sort of desperation, I've surrendered entirely to metaphor and made all of this up. The walls were only figurative! the therapist would yell. It is in these moments that I go to the paintings, tip them up from the bottom and find great solace that there are indeed holes, that, if necessary, and with nothing but a big ole knife and a platform shoe, I could, in a matter of an hour or so, be doing downward dog.

Weather Forecast: "Abundant Sunshine"

There may have been a more perfect day, but I certainly can't remember it.

Light Coming Through

Roget: "To Pray"

This is Gabe. Gabe likes spaghetti, and spaghetti likes Gabe. I can't tell you how many dark roads I've ridden down with his mother; she sang songs that would break your heart six ways to Sunday; I stared out the window. Today is Gabe's first day of school. It's also (hopefully) his father's last day of chemo. So send a little prayer their way, and if you're not inclined towards prayer, do whatever it is you do when you try to make things right in the world.

If (sadly) somewhere between the lattes and the cabs, the ink pens and the spin classes, you've forgotten what that thing you do is, you can always consult your thesaurus:

Roget's New Millennium™ Thesaurus
Main Entry: pray
Part of Speech: verb
Definition: plead
Synonyms:
adjure, appeal, ask, do a little dance, beseech, brace, call your mom, commune with, crave, write a poem, cry for, entreat, take a long walk with an old friend, implore, importune, slice zucchini lengthwise, invocate, invoke, wash the dishes in soapy water, petition, recite, wish your stepmother the most wonderful birthday ever (Happy birthday, Linda!), request, flap your wings, say, solicit, sue, love, supplicate, urge.

Hickory Daily Record

It's been a while since I made the front page of my hometown newspaper:

Finally, I did it again:

Read the full story here.

Seventh Grade

There are occasions in teaching when a student walks in and you know just by looking at her that she's smarter than you--not just capable of one day acquiring the knowledge that you've spent thirty-some-odd years gathering, but that's she's surpassed it, and likely that she surpassed it in, say, seventh grade. Such was the case of Courtney Chatellier. Last fall, Starbucks in hand, she stepped into my classroom. You're Courtney, I said, and she wasn't even fazed by my psychic abilities. Anyway, Courtney just had two essays that she wrote in my class published in NYU's Mercer Street. My favorite of the essays is about how we're all in seventh grade, how we're all walking down the halls clutching our bathroom passes and staring into classrooms; we live every moment simultaneously, as Courtney puts it:

We are creation and destruction at once, we are change and mutation, we are the skin cells of our twelve-year old noses and the domino effect of all the particles in ourselves that we rattle around and knock together in all the restless fidgeting before class starts. Tense falls apart, lies limp on the page like a word you've repeated so many times it turns into unsignified gibberish. We are what we were and what we will be. You and I are in seventh grade on the day the world possibly ends, the same day it endures into infinity when all of our atoms, star-like, are nothing but the resonance of every body that ever existed.

In honor of Courtney, here's a picture of me in seventh grade:

Can't you hear the lockers banging shut? Can't you see Clint Eliot hiding behind the tree getting ready to dump me? Ah, but the pen...even then it saved me.

Health & Fitness Tip #17

Don't rely on magic.

Between the nachos and the Kentucky pie, I had somehow convinced myself that at any moment a magical bride gene would kick in, and I'd be noshing on steamed veggies and tilapia with glee. The gene failed me folks, and today staring down the barrel of squeezing into a white dress in seventy-two days, there's a new sheriff in town. Yes. It's true. I pulled out the measuring spoons: exactly one cup of Special K wetted with exactly one half cup of skim milk.

Reminds me a bit of a man I once dated who, for breakfast, would allow me (what seemed at the time) only four Cheerios and an eyedropper-full of milk. You'd be amazed how little we truly need, he told me. I never was.

Longing #808

Sometimes I long for a driveway that curves around, a driveway that, in the late morning after having eaten fresh berries with a touch of brown sugar and cream, I can wander up with a stack of fresh envelopes--the deep blue ink barely dry--and there at the end of the driveway, a mailbox. I'd work the jaw of it open, place the notes inside and lift the red flag.


Of course, all of that would lead to the next longing: walking back up the driveway in the afternoon, opening the mailbox and finding it not empty but with a letter. Filled with good news. From you.

Something Borrowed

Looks like rain.

If I knew this woman, I'd borrow one of her umbrellas.

Sexy UPS Men

I once knew a woman who was in love with her UPS man. From what seemed like dawn till dusk, she and her little tow-headed son would sit on her porch waiting for the truck to make its way around the bend. I couldn't for the life of me understand the impulse that compelled her--and approximately 700,000 other American women--to order deliverables in hopes of simply seeing that man in brown.

Today, though, as I sit waiting for packages and desparately cranking my neck towards the window every thirty seconds or so, I think it might have more to do with guarantees than with love. How nice to know that he has to show up, how nice to know that if he doesn't you can simply call the number on the website, how nice to know that when he does finally arrive he won't be empty-handed. Lemme tell you people, one of these:

is worth a whole boatload of these:

Call for Recipes

My college friend, Elisabeth over at littlemissmel, sent me an email today asking for recipes; I'm completely terrified. Here's a woman I shared a boyfriend with (We love you, Fred Welch!); a woman I haven't laid eyes on in years but who looks more and more beautiful (and thinner!) in every internet photo I see; a woman who has a child and a husband and a heckuva sense of humor. So how do I send her a recipe that doesn't completely betray the woman I (want to) have become?

Do I confess that all of my recipes come out of the Weight Watchers Slow Good cookbook? Do I, say, let the email get lost in "the wedding shuffle" and simply not respond? Do I send the recipe for the beloved "Peanutbutter Stuff" (seemingly equal parts: peanut butter, syrup, sugar and butter; stir; chill) that I was raised on? Or do I own up to it all and write the email that admits that most nights we eat out, and the ones we don't, I (out of some caloric penance) un-thaw a piece of Sam's tilapia, throw it on aluminum foil with salt, pepper and olive oil and call it a night?

O, dear readers, although I sometimes pretend you don't exist (alas...a holdover from my poetry days!), I need you now. Send recipes. Anything. Maybe even everything. And dad, I'll be waiting for the hot dog casserole recipe--the ingredients of which, as instructed by my therapist, I blocked out.

Something Auld

Listen to my papa's tunes here: my papa's tunes.

Health & Fitness Tip #16