Yes, it has been a hot minute since my last post. I could flood you with excuses, talk about how busy life has been, list everything’s that’s happened. Independence Day. Heat waves. Toxic wildfire smoke. Performing in Calumet. Two Republican senators meeting their ends. (Sorry, Mitch isn’t sucking down margaritas at a cushy rehab facility.) War crimes against Iran. Billionaires getting richer. Teaching my summer class for the university. The pigeon lady from Home Alone 2 dying.
I’m easily distracted these days. I have good intentions to write blog posts, new poems, a novella. Make a dent in the stack of books I want to read. Finish art projects. Grade student papers. Edit my new poetry manuscript. So many plans, so little time.
Marie Howe writes about childhood games . . .
The Game
by: Marie Howe
And on certain nights,
maybe once or twice a year,
I’d carry the baby down
and all the kids would come
all nine of us together,
and we’d build a town in the basement
from boxes and blankets and overturned chairs.
And some lived under the pool table
or in the bathroom or the boiler room
or in the toy cupboard under the stairs,
and you could be a man or a woman
a husband or a wife or a child, and we bustled around
like a day in the village until
one of us turned off the lights, switch
by switch, and slowly it became night
and the people slept.
Our parents were upstairs with company or
not fighting, and one of us—it was usually
a boy—became the Town Crier,
and he walked around our little sleeping
population and tolled the hours with his voice,
and this was the game.
Nine o’clock and all is well, he’d say,
walking like a constable we must have seen
in a movie. And what we called an hour passed.
Ten o’clock and all is well.
And maybe somebody stirred in her sleep
or a grown up baby cried and was comforted.
Eleven o’clock and all is well.
Twelve o’clock. One o’clock. Two o’clock . . .
and it went on like that through the night we made up
until we could pretend it was morning.
This poem has so much truth in it. As kids, we dream of growing up—all those freedoms of adulthood. As adults, we dream of times gone by—childhoods filled with water balloon fights and school crushes and eternal summer vacations. The grass is always greener in someone else’s backyard. Younger people don’t get this until they become older people. (How many times have I heard young people in my life, after working their first full-time job, saying to me after a couple of weeks, “Man, being an adult sucks!”?)
Yes, human beings rarely enjoy the present. We look ahead all the time. Oh, if I can just finish this poem, I’ll be happy! Oh, I can’t wait for my vacation in six months! Oh, I live for weekends! Oh, I’m going to start enjoying life once I retire! It seems like the future is always better and brighter.
On the flip side, adults always look back wistfully on their childhoods. There’s a reason why books like Little House on the Prairie and movies like The Breakfast Club and A Christmas Story are so popular. They tap into that current of nostalgia that runs through all our veins. True or not, we believe things were simpler and easier in the past.
My mother, in the last years of her life, lived in the past. Her eyesight was bad. Her hearing wasn’t much better. She couldn’t remember who I was sometimes, and other times she would tell me stories about her girlhood in Detroit. After my father died, she frequently asked about his whereabouts. If we reminded her that Dad had died, her face crumpled with confusion and sadness as she experienced his loss anew. The past became Mom’s happy place, where grief didn’t exist and joy was just a trip to Dairy Queen away.
Of course, that’s all bullshit. There was still racism and misogyny and homophobia and Ronald Reagan in the past. And I think we (current residents of the United States) can vouch for that fact that the future holds no promises of sunshine or low gas prices or peace. All we really have is the present, in all its current fucked-upness. Worrying about tomorrow is about as useful as a wildfire smoke tariff on Canada..
Here are things I celebrate about today: blue sky, dinner and drinks with friends, chocolate, a puppy kiss, and warm pajamas.
Saint Marty wrote a poem about his mother for tonight , , ,
Someplace Happy
by: Martin Achatz
after she lost her husband she didn’t
remember kept asking
when he was coming home accused him
of staying out late drinking with his pals
from the Elks club or even worse
holing up at hunting camp while she
slaved at home took care of their nine kids
they are all grown now two dead
one with Down’s syndrome & Alzheimer’s
why would you draw someone back from
someplace happy with all her loves
still around and she can still remember
how to make the good tapioca from the pearls
without having to con sult the box
why why why why would you want
to lure Dorothy back from Oz or
Max back from the wild rum pus
with all the wild things isn’t it bet ter
if she just keeps wearing those ruby shoes
eating emer ald macarons know ing
Auntie Em is still there wait ing for her
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