Uninvited

I heard the door creak open, his momentary silence. Then from the long hallway down I felt the quiet vibrations of his familiar waltz - four small paws rapping nearer, ta-tic, ta-tic, ta-tic, needle nails filing on my hardwood floor. Finally, he arrived. Stood. Licked his chops. He pressed his uninvited nonchalance against the footstep of my uncomfortable writing corner, and I knew exactly why. He cleared his throat and did what I knew he would: nothing. So I acknowledged him with a dull wave. He sharpened his eyes. Still, nothing. So he sharpened them again to crack me.

"What?"

"You know," he slurred like a sly, fat secret, "not everybody is going through some inner-angst crisis of misidentity." The way he enunciated that last word, mis-i-den-ti-ty, drove me mad. I tightened my lips. He rolled his thin muzzle in the air and repositioned himself closer. From the edge of his jaw, through his fox teeth, he slipped out: "You know that darling, right?"

I shrugged. "So?"

"Well alright," he continued, flipping his white-tipped tail back, and then forth, then back again. "I'm just here to give you fair warning, that's all."

"That's all what?" Now I was the one who was staring.

"Just all of this--" he pointed his wet nose towards my laptop. "Well, I suppose I should just have at it. Don't be such a dreary doldrum, darling. Your melancholy search for - what shall I say? meaning? - it's quite the bore, don't you agree? Some of us know quite specifically who we are. Have known for a very, long, time." Then he shivered, like he had caught a chill. "It might all be a waste. That's it. That's all I'm saying." He offered a clever smile like he was imparting advice to save me. Maybe he was.

I stared into my laptop without blinking. All those words, they turned to fuzz. But I maintained, pretended I hadn't heard a word. After a few long certain minutes, he turned himself slowly, traipsed back down the hallway, ta-tic, ta-tic, ta-tic, nuzzling the door open. "Toodles darling! I may be back..." I heard him sing-song as he trailed away.

"Yes, I'm sure you will."

Now I'm left to wonder if what he said was true. Almost surely - it is. But why he always comes to me, I don't know. To convince me, probably. Maybe to convince himself.

I blinked again. The fuzz returned my words. If only he knew the private joy of releasing them. So I picked up at the point where I had been interrupted and resumed writing, for the rest of us.

Where Have I Seen Her Before?

She blind-sided me while I was still in sleepy disarray. She, a mirror morning reflection wearing mismatched pajamas (if an old high school track t-shirt, last year's maternity pants and black socks even qualify as that. "Pajamas" are quite the broad species - Victoria's Secret silky numbers despise their taxonomical cross-contamination with this sort of sad get-up). On her head, a mop of bad highlights that looked something between a half side-ponytail and half ear toupee. Her rough hair hadn't felt a smooth bristle since Sunday. It doesn't help that somehow every hair brush in the house somehow frolics away to that same vanishing world where left socks, barrettes, and scotch tape conspire their pranks (scotch tape to missing item friends: "Did you see that look on her face while she was tearing the whole house apart?! Classic. Oh my god (elbowing left sock) - Look now! She's trying to use blue tack on that present! She's running late! She's sweating a lot! What a trainwreck!") That was yesterday.

At 7:19 this morning, Tuesday wasn't looking any better. Like the camera adds 10 pounds, maybe the mirror adds 10 - I don't know - weird things. Like a big ole age spot. Eyebrow wrinkles. Toothpaste on her shirt collar from the night before. So I stopped for a moment, catching a flicker of something familiar in the mirror. A strange wave came over me, as if I had seen this funny 30s woman, somewhere, once before.

I remember my mom when I was little girl, 7 or 8 maybe, scuffling down the stairs in the cold bone-break of morning - grey crew socks, furry shoe slippers - the ugliest kind, her pastel floral robe hanging about her, a giant drape straight from the curtain rod, tied around her waist like a too big kimono gone wrong. Her hair was boy-cut short, but it still found a wiry way to look like it needed help, and bad. She'd wake my brother and I up: "time to get up, time to get ready for school." And I'd follow her down, Brian behind me, and the three of us would cycle through our morning routine to prepare for another big day of school. After she'd scavenge the cupboards, rearranging everything, she'd find the box, and as soon as she had served my brother and I our delicious bowls of instant oatmeal, she'd scuffle back upstairs to get dressed. As soon as she'd hit stair 3, I'd stand up - bowl and spoon ready - and scurry over to the sink like a quick little mouse to scrape the thick stuff down the garbage disposal. To my credit, I did try it once. I immediately felt like I was choking on a hunk of barbed wire covered in, I guess, oatmeal. So I promised my throat and watery eyeballs: "Never again."

Once the goop was safely deposited in its proper place, I'd scamper back across the kitchen floor to my seat with the empty bowl and spoon (alibi: "mmm, I just gobbled it up it was so good mom!"), arms folded in front of me, a sure smirk on my face. ("Cha-ching! I did it again! Life's a thrill! I just threw perfectly good food down the sink and didn't get caught!") After a while, I was like a strolling bank robber on my tenth heist - over-confident, sloppy. I'd start to get up as soon as she turned her back, oatmeal down the drain before she hit stair 2. And always, I sat across from my big brother, a pleasant look of satisfaction on my face and without a bite of breakfast in front of me (I've always destested breakfast foods, for the most part. Belgium waffles and bacon are my exceptions - though, not together) while he, oh Brian - well he'd shake his obedient head in disagreement, eyes glued to his oatmeal in firm refusal to corroborate. Oh Brian. A loyal dog always accepting what was given to him. To this day, I still love this gracious quality about my brother.

After my breakfast crime, I'd run upstairs and quickly get dressed so I could head towards the bathroom to brush my teeth and then stand in the doorway to watch my mom finish getting ready. I'd ask her a question that was eerily similar to the one I had asked her the day before, and the day before that, and -- "What are you doing, Mom?" She would be slapping on blush in a frenzy before we headed out the door. "Putting on my makeup" she'd answer quickly (almost like she was expecting the question. Go figure). Then came my existentialism. "Why?" "To give my cheeks some color" she'd say, sucking in like a fish, rolling the big fluffy brush along her cheekbones, once, twice, three times each. Then on her forehead. Then her eyelids. A few strokes on her neck. And last, along her thin chin line, like a V.

I was adopted when I was two. Me - Korean, heart-shaped face, long thick black hair, thin eyes, big cheeks. My mom - white, a long-face, thin everywhere, short fine brown hair (sometimes it was reddish, other times frosted), pale blue eyes, skinny cheeks. You can assume with confidence that I've never looked anything like my mom. Ever. That includes our chins. I was always jealous of my mom's thin chin. And her scrawny arms. I would pass on her long fingers and flat butt, but her arms and her chin I'd take happily.

When she was finished rubbing blush on everything except her ears, she'd throw the brush into the drawer, whack it closed with her hip like she suddenly remembered we needed to be somewhere, and she'd hurry us along, her hands on my shoulders, steering me like a car - out of the bathroom doorway, down the stairs, out the door, back through the door, "get your lunch Stacey!", out the door again, to the bus stop. On our walk down the block in the brisk fall air, I'd inspect her, curious, like a science project. I'd think to myself: "Wow, she looks pretty...pink. Pretty too. But pink."

Like a distant memory - the foggy kind - I recall that I once made a silent self-declaration - "When I get big, and old, like a mom, I am not going to wear grey socks, or terrible slippers (my mom to me: "so what! they're comfortable and when you get to be my age you don't care what they look like") and I will wake up early enough to apply my makeup carefully, with a little more grace, a little more va-voom!" In a similar proclamation, I went through a phase during middle school when I felt absolutely certain that as soon as I tasted the sweet freedom of adulthood, I would rotate between McDonalds and Taco Bell for every meal, including breakfast (Taco Bell for breakfast, of course, since I don't like breakfast food). Why not, I figured. My mom won't be around to veto. She'd say assuredly as she chopped a big floral arrangement of vegetables at the kitchen sink: "Nope, honey, not tonight. Fast food's okay once in a while, but there's nothing like a home-cooked meal." Well, what did she know anyway, right? She was just my mom. She didn't know me! She didn't own me! Or my thoughts! Or my dreams. I knew what I wanted, who I wanted to be! What I wanted to do! These days, I look in my empty fridge and wonder how my mom got all those delicious dinners to magically appear. One day I'll have to ask her.

So, at 7:19 this morning, she looked at me, reflected back towards me, standing in my sad excuse for pajamas, from somewhere like a distant morning past. And in that blind-sided mirror moment, disheveled, running late, makeup-less, one unpacked lunch waiting for me in the kitchen, one kid shouting for oatmeal (my mini-me daughter, well - all except for that) and the other smaller kid - for a sucker, I stood, staring at her from head to toe. And I just laughed. Loudly. Because it hit me - I looked about as old as I remembered my mother looked young, back in those bathroom doorway days when motherhood was synonymous with dry hands and unfashionable clothes. And wouldn't you know that in that moment, for the first time in my life, and hers as well, I was beginning to look just like my mother.

How's your novel coming along?

I asked her.

She shot a smile. "Well."

"Well," I said.

"Procrastination

never looked so poetic."

To William Carlos Williams

so what depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed in rain
water

beside the white
chickens?

I Can Be a Mother Poem

I can be a mother poem.
Afixed tentacles to dripping life
Off countertops.
From teardrop eyes.
Pain that does not know tomorrow.
Only tiny sadness
Without me.
A mother poem.

They sing me into song.
Roll me off a new day's tongue.
"I will" never talked so funny.
Twisted in drawl when he's never been south.
And she, she painted her ocean

Deep sparkly purple because she said
It matched my eyes.
I cried because her eyes match mine
And all that swims below.

She swam away. Turned blank sky orange.
Ran right back to show me
Her color invention.
A poem of this world that did not exist
Until she did.

They fit me into their every sensory world.
Tell me, "Teach."
Ask me, "Stay."
Sometimes I cry, "I can't."
They laugh and don't believe me.

They write my lines with their feet.
Courage with their hands.
Inside their mittens, warm and winter.
So very, very small.
They cling, hang, wrap, and sleep
Daytime dreams and nightlight slumber
To the beat, beat, beat of this
Mother poem.

Her Autumn Season

Old autumn sways inside her cool wool sky. Her branches cross. Fiddle like fingerprints circling their blessings. They know how to root a heart in place.

Through her eyes brown driftwood appear like two kind pieces, floating by, barely remembering their miles or the trunk which grew them.

But she is filled of old sweet bones, memories seeping like sugar maple sap: every quiet held sunrise, when she rocked sound back to sleep, year after year, against the softening cotton of her nightgown. Plumes of old familiar recipes lifted out with hot oven mittens around a family of hands: reaching, working, taking, giving back. Cupboard winters lined with glass garden rows in a dark cement basement. Every season - lengthening. Yet, every season - enough. Because she told them so.

Hope is always greater than loss. Life sounds like laughter and looks like prayer. This she reminded them, humming her wisdom. Dancing her mistakes.

Summer driveways beneath a dusk blanket. Awaiting the engine switch of life departing. Then another, then another. Her long porch listened deeply for a day's return. She knew the good ones always come back. And did they ever.

She laughed wildly, lived preciously. Made them each a life of matter with her bare knuckles and compassion. Tied so many shoestrings of love together that they buried themselves under her, came up breathlessly to try and love the same. When they couldn't, she loved them greater. So they would remember how.

They watched as her faith created patterns of circles inside their generations. Her smile was an everyday reminder that she did not live to prove it.

Her driftwood eyes float over and over, like seasons. October breezes scatter her across a thin riverbank. Still, her old sweet bones. They hold much more than her autumn expression. They have been carving her own way back. Into a thick trunk, to its deep roots. Into every changing leaf, falling. Into every last leaf to come.

Ode to the Apple

There's no doubt that living breathing legends exit the earth the same way the rest of us do. Some, painfully, some painlessly. Perhaps what is left unsaid, greater than what is left undone, becomes the more painful element of loss, for the one who is going and for the ones who remain, because we're remarkably aware that saying something actually costs us nothing - except, perhaps, a swallow of our pride, a bit of forgiveness, one long fell swoop of acceptance, maybe; and in that case, no one can ever quite be sure what muddles below on either side of life's coin except those left holding their tongues. I don't know. I don't have enough experience with loss to know much about anything, really.

But there's something strangely affective about Steve Jobs' death. Maybe it's because the artifacts of his life's contributions blink alive vibrantly, metamorphically, inside our pockets, inside our strung together world, inside our habits. There's literally a physical connection a billion people have around the world to a man's inner genius. Granted, great people die everyday; most of us have no close personal affection to the late Tocqueville, or Edison, or King, despite the dents they too made on the universe. And maybe the lesson of Jobs' death is of no greater value than anyone else's. Thinking of an angel like Mattie Stepanek, a messenger of God's love, and then thinking of Steve Jobs, I wonder - maybe less of life is about how many people we reach and more of it is about how deeply we reach just a few. The judgment isn't ours to make, either way. But undeniably, every messenger needs a medium; Jobs built us a few pretty damn good ones. Yet, we cannot quite commemorate the death of someone who built an unmatched empire of innovation with a missing pillar of philanthropy and believe that the worth of his life means more than that of the man, and woman, and child who passed away the very second after he did.

Still, I find it's just too stirring a moment to not reflect upon - to watch possibility die and live at the very same time. One man does not stop the world; the world does not stop for one man. No matter how powerful, rich, bad, good, or transformative. We're each just a blink of God's eyelashes. Ideas will flower, change will come, innovation will burst through the seams of our world, for good and awful, and by faith, neighborhood, and humanity, people will persist and resist the nature of history - that it is both controlled by us and controlled by no one. It is the complex, simple design of God no one has figured out. And definitely, not by Steve Jobs, or else he would have controlled his fate, I can assume, for a little while longer.

This is just a rambling, really, to maybe arrive at the emotive estimation that we cannot all have the same impact on the world like Jobs did. But in terms of making a dent on the future universe, I think it causes me to pause, longer, to redefine where my universe is, and who lives in it. What needs to be done, what needs to be said? Undoubtedly, we all have something more to say, so, what is it? Maybe I think of Jobs as one of those unbridled folk who said what he needed to say, and loud enough for the outer limits of his own small part of the universe to hear him. From a distant ariel view, you could say we all just get one long day, one fat chance, to do just that. Jobs was 56, Mattie was 13, I am 30, so I guess not being able to find the time or overcome the fear are just terribly lazy excuses for not living like we're going to die at some moment between now and then.

In my recent unpredictable oddities, I wrote a short jingle for Apple on my way to Mystic, CT (seriously, who thought I'd accidentally join the ranks of Uncle Jesse/Uncle Joey). Maybe it's because we had just been given an iPad, our first Apple device, a few days prior, and maybe the funny joy I felt for owning a small piece of the spectacle made me do it. Maybe because those dang catchy tunes of theirs stick the roof of our daily hum like peanut butter, so I thought maybe I'd try humming my own, and then, teaching it to my kids so I could hear the funny sound of someone singing your song. I don't really know, but anyways, I think it's only appropriate to throw it out into the universe, because, why the hell not.


Ode to the Apple

Circle your dancing finger with mine
'round the world seven times c'mon and play
Shout to the clouds "Open up the orange sky
the day ain't done there's something more we want to say"

We say, Hey hey hey, hey hey hey,
Love love love
Hey hey hey, hey hey hey, LOVE

We say, Hey hey hey, hey hey hey,
Love love love
We all got something more to say

Peel back our wings we're all kind of strange things
Who fly and try the hocus pocus of our dreams
You might float there and I may be here
But we'll find each other somewhere in the air

Then say, Hey hey hey, hey hey hey
Love love love
Hey hey hey, hey hey hey, LOVE

We say, Hey hey hey, hey hey hey,
Love love love
We all got something more to say
We all got something more to say.

photograph

A timeless beckoning to
abandon all this for a while.
Follow its faint glow and come -
live inside, here, with our eyelashes
stopped.

The matter of before and after
press no hard weight on this
a delicate specimen
its breath spliced from air and a moment.

Yes, come to this discrete in-between
pausing what is before it nearly never happened.
Gold fleck of wing turned inside out.
A firefly struck fleeing, flashing its small life inside the dark.
There - and there - and there.

Intricacy distilled from gravel night
by itself in a dusty container punctured, pixelated
just in case. Just in case.

Maybe it will under this curious lamp, here.
Our two eyes twist open, cup remnants of life, gently.
We press our funny hope inside to feel
fire come alive.
Fluttering shadows bring: joy, tears, love, forgiveness.

And we discover after all this still time
its original wonder yearning
through holes and years
to be kept again. And again, and again.
Even, there. Whoever that may be.

Tiny flicker of fortune.
A firefly never flees from what it knows:
to be held it must be captured.