The Size of Heaven

When I think of heaven, I think of Mama Heaton. I don't know where anybody else goes when they die, but when I close my eyes and picture it: it's just her, taking up the whole sky, her skirt pulling at her knees and her lap full of string bean strings.

Today in yoga we had to hold our arms up in a V for eleven minutes. I was almost sure I would die, and of course I will, but I kept thinking I will die of holding my arms in the air, and then I started begging. Okay, Mama Heaton, I begged, please, please hold my arms up for me. I'll do all the dishes and fill up your ice water and I won't talk smart. I'll just be really nice to everybody, be pretty is as pretty does and say yes ma'am and no ma'am, and please Mama Heaton, please, please with sugar on top, I'll never ask you for anything else, please. And then the eleven minutes were up.

If she were alive, today she would celebrate what I can only imagone would be her thousandth birthday. In 1983, I took a bus with her from Hickory, North Carolina to Rapid City, South Dakota; it was a long bus ride. In 1987, we all went to a Shogun in southern Virginia for her birthday. In 1973, she wore black to my parents' wedding.

I can't believe she's been dead for almost twenty years. I can still remember feeling the heat from her leg when we'd sit all summer night at the tent revival. In yoga, when we close our eyes in meditation, the dark I see is the Price-is-Right glow of her room.

Memory can be vexing. With Mama Heaton it is so large and bodily that it almost overwhelms me. It strikes me now that I can't remember the sound of her voice; it's as if the voice was too disembodied to last. I can, though, remember her smell, and I remember it so completely that sitting here, all these miles and years later, my throat closes, like she's right here, lifting my fingers one by one. Please Mama Heaton, I say, just let me write today, just one more sentence, Mama Heaton, just one more phrase.

A Field Guide to the North American Family

image by Deborah Bohnert

This just in: new bits on an online journal. (My) thumb-sized stories paired with (other people's) bizarre photographs. See it now: here.

Health & Fitness Tip #19

Viactiv caramels are not candies. Do not treat them as such.

In French, it just means egg

It thrills me when people use the term 'oeuf' to signify mild despair; as in, "Oeuf," she said while reaching for the towel, "Seems I've spilled a spot of coffee."

A Call for Particulars

I'm often amazed by how little we know each other. Here I am with my blue pitcher of hot water, a Moroccan stew sitting in the slow-cooker, but across town friends are stuffing pinatas and flying back from Prague, debating the names of bones and buckling in their kids. Whadya do this weekend? we ask and shrug. Not too much. Just hung out.

I guess with Cody in London right now, I'm craving particulars. I'm used to getting his day while he hoses off the back patio and waters the plants, smokes a cigarette and lights the grill.

But the house is awfully quiet this morning. I want the mundane. Some one tell me what you ate for breakfast or about how you had to dig a splinter out with tweezers; tell me about the new dryer sheets and how good they smell or how you're just amazed that they slice the pickles so you can just lay them right on the sandwich; just tell me something. Please?

Something Old

Speaking of little dollies...

Once upon a time my parents were married. No, not just married, married-married, married to each other. Once upon a time my parents were married to each other. They laughed; they loved; I think some things were thrown; they called it quits.

I'm guessing mom was packing some Honda to the gills, and we were getting ready to hit the road, but she has this wonderful story, a story that still makes her cry. I was very young, doll-size maybe, and just as we were about to pull away, dad spoke. You have to understand we were all so young: mom maybe not even 19; dad not much older.

Pointing to me, this is what he said: "She's not a doll, Mary. You can't just put her on a shelf and take her down when you want to play. You have to always love her." When mom tells the story her voice cracks on "shelf," and it feels like all the windows in the world are rolled up tight.

I guess what breaks my heart the most is thinking of the two of them--just kids--standing in the heat of the summer made hotter by the running engine, and him telling her this, and her memorizing it--learning it by heart, as they say--and carrying it with her all these years. "You can't just put her," she'll repeat, and every time, her voice wavering, "on a shelf," she'll say. Then the engine hums, and we're on the road, and maybe she looks back but maybe she doesn't, and we're heading somewhere--fast--but we won't know where till we get there.

Something Blue

Ah the moon...
(and just one moon, by the way, until the wedding day).

To Carry a Pencil

A student in one of my classes, a young man from Korea, wrote a lovely composition about having chased David Beckham down for an autograph. The student, breathless but so pleased to finally be in the company of his hero, stood waiting. Beckham agreed to the autograph and asked for a pen, but the student was empty-handed. He had nothing. He remembered the sun beating down hot and heavy as he called out to anyone who passed in hopes of finding a pen, but eventually, he had to walk away, still empty-handed.

And so today in class, I read aloud a tiny story from Paul Auster's The Red Notebook. In it, an eight year-old Auster stands in front of Willie Mays begging for an autograph only to find that he, too, is pencil-less. Auster claims that he hasn't left home without a pencil since and that this is what made him a writer. What fascinates me is that as I read the story the students started reaching for their pens. By the end of it--by the time Auster announces himself a writer--they all sat, quite straight-backed I like to think now, their pens poised, ready, indeed, to write, to write as if their lives--or at very least their memorabilia--depended on it.

126,459,362:

Approximate number of seconds since my last cigarette.

Talk about Luck!

I just found out a story of mine was nominated for "Best of the Web 2007," so now, sipping on hot tea and googling "internet gods that I can thank for such victories," I've come upon this:
If you're even mildly delighted by this image, you might also enjoy my story; "Luck," it's called. Read it here.

My Irish Twin of a Brother

Today the clocks shift. My Irish twin of a brother leaves me to be 33 on my own.

He is afraid; he is very, very afraid:

You've got to understand. I share a mind with this man.
When he is struck, I feel pain.
When I hear a joke in New York, he breaks into laughter in Pennsylvania.
When, thousands of miles away, he stirs up fried potatoes with rosemary, my mouth waters.

Fashionable from the earliest age, this is the guy who taught me how to swing a bat.

Sure, there were some anger management problems...
but ultimately, he cleaned up quite nicely:

Through bad haircuts and invisible casts:

Through unbearable homework and many degrees:

even when we've had nothing, we've had each other.

O, my brother, my hero!

To you the happiest of all birthdays!
(and the birds say:
and many more!!!)

Holy Cow

Gulp.

I just realized I'm getting married in thirty-six days.

Something Borrowed

From Virginia Woolf, one of my favorite paragraphs in the world; watch closely as our dear Clarissa mends a tear in a favourite dress:

"Quiet descended on her, calm, content, as her needle, drawing the silk smoothly to its gentle pause, collected the green folds together and attached them, very lightly, to the belt. So on a summer's day waves collect, overbalance and fall; and the whole world seems to be saying "that is all" more and more ponderously, until even the heart in the body which lies in the sun on the beach says too, That is all. Fear no more, says the heart. Fear no more, says the heart, committing its burden to some sea, which sighs collectively for all sorrows, and renews, begins, collects, lets fall. And the body alone listens to the passing bee; the wave breaking; the dog barking, far away barking and barking."

O Eve

All day I've been thinking of apples--not the waxy kind in the supermarket bins but the little ruddy crab apples that littered our neighbor's yard. They were sour and mal-formed, and if you took the dare, not just to bite it but to swallow it, you were sure to end up moaning and groaning. I sometimes wonder if life would have been different had it been a real apple tree, say, Golden Delicious or Granny Apple, Pink Lady or Red Rome. Imagine getting the dare to bite and feeling the juice run down your chin; imagine a whole yard of gnawed-to-the-cores and sweet-smelling goodness; imagine wanting pie and already having that which will fill it.

Six Years Later

Invisible Things

For months, I have been walking around with an invisible hat, well, not a hat exactly but a cat, no, a cat's not quite right either; it is actually a cast. For months, I have been walking around with an invisible cast.

A few people--most of whom know me extraordinarily well--can see it. I didn't even realize your arm was broken! they say. Ha! Ha! I say.

And then there are the others, the ones who don't know me as well, but who can clearly see I'm holding my arm funny, carting it around like the lanky loop of a grade-school y. Is it broken? they ask. Broken? I answer.

Maybe I should have gotten a real cast, all plaster and goo and a sling to hold it. That way, years ago, you could have written something on it, something to the effect of "I WUZ HERE," and today, right at this very moment, I could look down at it--the red Sharpee bleeding at the edges; the heart almost not even a heart anymore--and I could wonder where you got to.

Oh, you who "wuz here," where are you now?

A Fly on the Plane

In 11C, and there was a fly, buzzing and whirring, and the woman next to me was telling me that to stay home with your children is to answer a higher calling and that poetry that does not rhyme is not poetry. I kept pointing at my magazine. I want to read, I told her. I'm sorry, I said and ordered water with no ice. My husband will be fat from all the pizza, she told me, and it hung in the air, the silence very real. I turned the page of my magazine. After a bit, the fly landed on her hand; it seemed a long minute before she swatted it away.

Something New

Two (2) black uni-ball Vision Elite ink pens

Three (3) manila folders (though I miss being little and calling them vanilla)

One (1) tale about a hummingbird's heart

One (1) pair fancy shoes

One fine first day of school

Longing #94

This morning all I want is a long road and blue sky, and I just want to drive and drive with the windows down, and the Diet Coke sweating in the cup holder, and the trees flying by, and maybe I'll get somewhere but maybe I'll end up in the middle of nowhere and that will be fine by me.

Something Blue

Today's News

There are some days when the news just speaks to you, when you nod your head, and you're like, oh yeah, I knew that was coming. Take for example: Club: Andy Dick Groped, Offended, Urinated.

(from: Billboardpublicitywire.com)

Read the whole story at cnn.com, but let me tell you, I was once (terrifyingly) groped by Andy Dick in an Austin elevator. Not exactly the brush with fame I spent my high school days dreaming of.

Then there's another story which I love because it's fall, and fall means football, and football means somebody's got to win and it's not always who you think it'll be. Flashback to me as an eight year-old when my only dreams are to go to Appalachian State University, marry the lifeguard, move to Myrtle Beach and become a ballerina. Now look: Upset for the Ages Appalachian State Stuns No. 5 Michigan.

Imagine how much fun I might've had watching that game with my fellow Mountaineer alums!

And finally, Four Tickets Hit $330 Million Jackpot. This is where I'd like to tell you I was one of them and that the first four responders to this post will go to bed with a cool quarter milsky tucked under your pillow. This morning: a poor rambler; tonight: a wealthy rover!

Alas! It ain't happening, looks like I'm going to have to resort back to the Great Space Coaster news of my youth, because, after all, "No news is good news with Gary G-news."