THE LOST CHILDREN

Two little girls, one fair, one dark,
One alive, one dead, are running hand in hand
Through a sunny house. The two are dressed
In red and white gingham, with puffed sleeves and sashes.
They run away with me. . . But I am happy;
When I wake I feel no sadness, only delight.
That, somewhere, they still are.

It is strange
To carry inside you someone else’s body;
To know it before it’s born;
To see at last that it’s a boy or a girl, and perfect;
To bathe it and dress it; to watch it
Nurse at your breast, till you almost know it
Better than you know yourself—better than it knows itself.
You own it as you made it.
You are the authority upon it.

But as the child learns
To take care of herself, you know her less.
Her accidents, adventures are her own,
You lose track of them. Still, you know more
About her than anyone except her.

Little by little the child in her dies.
You say, ” I have lost a child, but gained a friend.”
You feel youself gradually discarded.
She argues with you or ignores you
Or is kind to you. She who begged to follow you
Anywhere, just so long as it was you,
Finds follow the leader no more fun.
She makes few demands; you are grateful for the few.

The young person who writes once a week
Is the authority upon herself.
She sits in my living room and shows her husband
My albums of her as a child. He enjoys them
And makes fun of them. I look too
And I realize that girl in the matching blue
Mother-and-daughter dress, the fair one carrying
The tin lunch box with the half-pint thermos bottle
Or training her pet duck to go down the slide
Is lost just as the dark one, who is dead, is lost.
But the world in which the two wear their flared coats
And the hats that match, exists so uncannily
That, after I’ve seen its pictures for an hour,
I believe in it: the bandage coming loose
One has in the picture of the other’s birthday
The castles they are building, at the beach for asthma.

I look at them and all the old sure knowledge
Floods over me, when I put the album down
I keep saying inside: ” I did know those children.
I braided those braids. I was driving the car
The day that she stepped in the can of grease
We were taking to the butcher for our ration points.
I know those children. I know all about them.
Where are they?”

I stare at her and try to see some sign
Of the child she was. I can’t believe there isn’t any.
I tell her foolishly, pointing at the picture,
That I keep wondering where she is.
She tells me, “Here I am”
Yes, and the other
Isn’t dead, but has everlasting life. . .

The girl from next door, the borrowed child,
Said to me the other day, “ You like children so much,
Don’t you want to have some of your own?”
I couldn’t believe that she could say it.
I thought: “Surely you can look at me and see them.”

When I see them in my dreams I feel such joy.
If I could dream of them every night!

When I sit and think of my dream of the little girls
It’s as if we were playing hide-and-seek.
The dark one
Looks at me longingly, and disappears;
The fair one stays in sight, just out of reach
No matter where I reach. I am tired
As a mother who’s played all day, some rainy day.
I don’t want to play it anymore, I don’t want to,
But the child keeps on playing, so I play.

Social networking and Keyboard Cat

A friend of mine was trying to convince me to go on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. I thought, lord, no, I already waste enough time on e-mail, my website, this blog, Youtube, and countless other computer-related stuff. Then she got a job via LinkedIn, so I figured why not?

So I get LinkedIn going. I can’t say I find it very interesting or helpful. Then I decide to try Twitter. I watch the tutorial extolling the thrills of how you can share what you’re doing with all your friends. Their example is that you can send a Tweet that you’re mowing the lawn to your friend who is cooking dinner and they can let you know their whereabouts as well. Each Tweet is limited so that you can’t bore anyone for more than 140 characters or so. All I can think is, I don’t want to know stupid stuff like how someone is mowing the lawn and I don’t care to bore anyone with the news that I’m doing it either! I guess I’m also just not succinct enough for Twitter.

The strange thing is that I have received a few messages from “people” who have decided to follow me, none of whom I’d ever heard of. I checked out their accounts and they are apparently nonexistent, perhaps bots or someone hoarding names and contact info in the hope of someday trying to sell us something.

So then I end up on Facebook. At first it was pretty cool; people friended me and these little notes appeared. But there are some problems.

First, I can figure out how Facebook works, but I’m somewhat clueless about what to post, where, and how often. How frequently should I update my page or status or write on people’s walls?

I also originally thought my Home page, where all the posts and action is happening, was what everyone saw and was disappointed to learn they would only see my Profile page. The Profile page is like going to a party that turns out to be pretty boring, and then you find out that no one has told you that there’s a special VIP room in the club aka Home page, which is where the real action is. But since no one can get to your Home page but you, there isn’t much opportunity to mingle.

And here’s the scary part of Facebook: the number of friends. I have eight friends. I looked up many people from my past, none of whom are on the damn thing. And my eight friends have far more friends than I do.  I’m getting a sense of high school deja vu and it’s somewhat depressing. What if someone you consider a friend doesn’t accept your friend request? Does that mean you have a secret friendship, where one person doesn’t want her other friends to know she’s friends with you? Is a friend who refuses to friend you on Facebook a true friend?

Hmm, maybe it’s time to cue Keyboard Cat.

The concept of Keyboard Cat is utterly brilliant. Usually videos depict someone falling, but to me the real beauty of Keyboard Cat is for her to appear when someone is attempting to accomplish something but just utterly failing, and after several seconds this cat comes to musically usher you off the stage of public scrutiny before you embarrass yourself further.

So maybe it’s time for Keyboard Cat to appear in my Facebook fiasco?

Troublesome words and two Alices

Lightbulb. Or is it light bulb? You’d think a metaphorical one would go off over my head when it comes to remembering if this is one word or two. No matter, back I go to Merriam-webster.com to once again look it up.

I know that I am a bear of little brain, but it’s particularly vexing that there are some words that never seem to find a place in what little brain I have so that I can remember if they’re one word, two words, or hyphenated. Top offenders are words such as panty hose, place mat, seat belt, town house, and soul mate; all seem like they’re begging to be one word, but they’re not—yet, anyway—while backseat, willpower, and chickpeas are and still look strange to me.

There’s little logic to the process: we have cellblock, but cell phone; cleanup, pickup, backup, hookup, even giddyup, but close-up, dress-up, and cover-up, (all nouns); collarbone and breastbone but shoulder blades; dish towel but dishrag; lipstick but lip gloss and lip liner; hair band but headband; icebreaker, ice pack, and ice-skating. I double-dare you to accept my double dare to x-ray yourself and then give me the X-rays. In-box and out-box are both hyphenated, but while I am now online writing this post, I shall soon go off-line and gain a hyphen in the process.

And don’t get me started on the coffee and tea words: coffee cup, coffee table, and coffee shop but coffeemaker and coffeehouse; teahouse, teacup, teapot, and teakettle but tea bag, tea table, and tea party.

Anyway, lightbulb, lightbulb, I shan’t forget it again…sort of like Alice remembering her own name. Here’s a picture of her in the forest where everyone who passes through forgets their names and identities, hence the shy fawn walking with her:

Which brings me to:

I just read a remarkable book, Still Alice by Lisa Genova. I wonder if the author had the above Alice’s experience in mind when she wrote this incredible book about a woman’s journey with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. The ending is more rosy than I expect it is for most patients, but it’s a book you can’t put down and that will stick with you, a must for anyone who enjoyed Oliver Sacks’s The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.

I’ve always said that it will be very hard for anyone to tell if I ever get Alzheimer’s. I get lost stepping out of a subway station and lose things all the time, would lose my own head if it wasn’t firmly attached. Okay, I admit it does float around a little… In fact, I’ve had the very curious experience lately of misplacing and searching for things, and then finding them put away in exactly the sort of place an organized person would have put them.

For instance, I found my CVS card in a little box with my other frequent shopper cards that can’t all fit into my wallet (damn these stupid cards, anyway), not thrown in my handbag or sitting in the dryer after being stuck in my jeans pocket and surviving a trip through both washer and dryer, and a referral from my doctor was filed with my medical stuff rather than buried in the mound where papers go to die on my desk/night table/top of file cabinet.

Maybe I have a sort of reverse Alzheimer’s, in which I start to actually be organized? And in the process, will I lose my current self who can’t find things or get anywhere on time because I’m thinking about irrelevant ephemera and writing about lightbulbs and hyphens?

Trendy Punctuation

I recently found myself in a familiar scenario: editing a book that was filled with em dashes. It made me remember a piece I’d written a few years ago:

Attack of the Mad Dashes

All was not well in Editorial Land. The em dashes were taking over. This seemingly innocuous piece of punctuation was having a field day amongst a multitude of submissions. No other punctuation stood a chance against them.

The dashes had skewered the semicolons. Clobbered the commas. Eradicated the ellipses. And were, in general, inserting themselves ad nauseum into poetry and prose that didn’t even need the extra punctuation.

“Nobody remembers me anymore,” whispered the ellipsis

“No wonder,” said the semicolon. “You always were so wishy-washy. On the other hand, I am an extremely relevant mark, and I’m going to waste. Writers rarely use me, even when I’m needed. The number of sentence fragments and comma splices is ridiculous.”

“Now don’t go insulting me,” said the comma. “I’m easy to understand, and, besides, you don’t need a ridiculous keyboard shortcut to type any of us.”

Back at the computer, one valiant editor was cracking under the relentless dash barrage. “Here’s a hyphen that’s obviously meant to be an em dash,” she said. “Here’s one story that must have a dash in every other sentence. Surely there must be another way to emphasize a word or phrase. Stop! Stop!”

But the dashes kept coming.

 

Not only are dashes still tres chic, but ellipses are no longer sitting in the corner and sighing over how no one remembers them. Dashes and ellipses are everywhere, while the colon and semicolon have been sent into semiretirement. The New York Times even ran a wonderful article on the semicolon called “Celebrating the Semicolon in a Most Unlikely Location.”

I think people like dashes and ellipses because they can be used in place of a comma, semicolon, or colon, and while they might not be the best choice, they’re usually not technically incorrect, either. They’re sort of like non-rule-based punctuation. Although many writers are apparently unable to understand the simple concept that the em dash is used to indicate an abrupt stop or interruption, while ellipses are for trailing speech or thoughts.

But don’t get me started on the en dash…. (Note use of four-point ellipsis for trailing thoughts that are a complete sentence.)

Of Ireland, Iceland, and Inkheart

A good friend of mine wrote to tell me that she has obtained her Irish citizenship and is planning to move to Ireland for a year or two to see how it goes. Let’s just say she is living my dream. Sigh.

I have never been to Ireland, and it is one of those places I’ve always wanted to go to, along with other countries that start with “I,” such as Italy, India, Indonesia, Israel, and Iceland, the latter of which has been somewhat of a fascination of mine for years. For some reason it just stirs something within me, this feeling that it’s my destiny to go there. I think I’m drawn mostly to the strange landscape, the sagas, and the folklore. The other day I had a very vivid dream that I was in Iceland, and when I woke up, I thought, if not now, then when? Now that the economy has tanked, perhaps it’s actually affordable… Then again, I also had a vivid dream that I was planning a trip to the moon, but when I woke up I realized it was based on the second episode of Doctor Who Season 3 in which the Judoon transport the hospital the Doctor and Martha Jones are in to the moon.

But penny scribblers like me can’t exactly afford taking off to another country to have an adventure. The best they can do for now is poke around and find books and videos and pretend. I unearthed this trailer for an Icelandic movie called Huldufolk 102.

According to folklore, the huldufolk came into being when Eve was washing her many children (I’ve also heard the same story starring Lilith instead of Eve). When God arrived (although, hey, isn’t God everywhere?), she hid the yet unwashed kids. God inspected the clean ones, then asked Eve if she had any others. Out of fear, she denied her existence, so God then declared: “What man hides from God, God will hide from man.” So I’m definitely ready to go to Iceland and meet them, or maybe shrink and live in a rock.

Or am I too much like Meggie’s aunt from Inkheart, someone who would rather read about adventures than have them? Anyway, I saw the movie yesterday. Don’t listen to those spoilsport movie reviewer naysayers; the acting is impressive, the sets and special effects are good, and the script is tight. I loved it, so did my son, and apparently so did the rest of the audience–they applauded afterward.

Oh, Those Brits!

I’ve been aware of the differences between British and American English from about the time I started reading. For some reason we had a number of British children’s books, mostly those written by E. Nesbit, when I was little. I remember being very indignant one time when my second-grade teacher marked “colour” and “favour” wrong on my spelling test. I knew those words were right, after all, I had seen them in books! You’d think the teacher would have had enough of a brain to say, Hmm, apparently this child has come across some British spellings! But apparently not.

Anyway, the latest book I was editing had to be Americanized. I have to say that I liked some of the Briticisms better than their American counterparts. Here are some of my favorites. Feel free to add to your vocabulary:

Alice band: headband
chat-up line: pickup line
chinwag: conversation
dustbin: garbage can
bobbly: those bally things that form on sweaters
bun fight: formal party (lots of women with hair in buns)
double-barrelled surname: hyphenated last name
made redundant: fired
winkle: draw out with effort

Yes, you have to hand it to the Brits for actually having a noun to describe sweater balls (for lack of an American term) or to coin “winkle,” referring to prying a winkle from its shell. And being “made redundant” sounds much less insulting than being “fired” (although you can also be “sacked”). I think it’s a shame that we don’t say “whilst” and have removed the s from forwards, backwards, and towards. However, I must admit I find “zits” more fitting than “spots.”

special ed parent…and the olympics

Is there anyone who isn’t overwhelmed by the awesomeness of Michael Phelps? How amazing is it to watch Olympic history, to know that we will probably never see the like of him again? Aside from his swimming prowess, I’ve learned that Michael has ADHD. Like my son, he struggled in school and needed behavior modification techniques to manage his outbursts. When I told my son, his face lit up. It’s difficult sometimes to get through to him, so it was like seeing a ray of hope. I could have done a victory lap around the pool or, more realistically, a happy dance around the room.

And I have to say I’m thrilled to see how well the U.S. women did in gymnastics. I think what I appreciate is that they look like women, not girls. Even Shawn Johnson, tiny as she is, looks athletic, not like a nine-year-old girl. There’s been a lot of second-guessing over the ages of some of the Chinese gymnasts. My feeling is that it’s not age that’s so important, it’s that these athletes should at least be allowed to reach whatever height their DNA had in mind and go through puberty, for chrissakes. I don’t care if an athlete is fourteen as long as she bears a resemblance to what a typical fourteen-year-old is supposed to look like. It doesn’t do these girls or their bodies any good to be under such stress that they don’t grow or develop normally. And after all, the sport is called women’s gymnastics, not girls’.

But, hey, even “girls” is better than “babes,” which is what the women are starting to look like. As my daughter put it: “Have you noticed the beach volleyball guys look like gangstas and the women like hos?” We were stumped when we tried to name one event where the women’s butt cheeks weren’t popping out of their bathing suits, leotards, short-shorts, what have you, while the men are clad in baggy shirts and bike shorts. The only answer we could come up with was swimming, now that everyone’s wearing those high-tech full-body suits.

Trauma Teen

My daughter is sixteen, and she hates me. People tell me it’s just her age and she’ll get over it and come around, but it’s hard to believe at the moment. Everything I do is wrong. I actually expect her to pick up after herself, do something useful and productive once in a while, get out of bed before noon, don’t pick on her brother, who is five years younger and has so many more problems than she ever did, and actually earn her own money (gasp!) rather than bitch about all the things she doesn’t have, but it’s all a waste of time. I don’t know why I even bother breathing in air and formulating words and moving my mouth–what a waste of energy.

Lately I must admit my entire family is driving me nuts. I know living alone can be hard, but sometimes when everyone’s around, I must fight the desire to close my eyes and imagine myself far, far away.

I am listening to Chopin’s Nocturnes. How beautiful, how full of love and longing and tears. They seem like the songs of middle age, when you realize life is just getting through the days, surviving the disappointment, trying to grasp any bit of beauty you can because Death is hovering by your side, not taking you yet, but the time is drawing nearer.

I’ve also been reading Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” What a marvelous piece of writing. People are capable of great but also terrible things when they band together.

It reminds me of the opening ceremonies for the Beijing Olympics, all those dancers moving as one organism. Interesting piece on the subject in the New York Times, about the difference between individualistic and collective societies.In China, a little girl is told she should be proud that her singing was used even though another little girl lip-synced to her voice because she was supposedly cuter and therefore more worthy of representing the motherland. Is this the direction of the future–the end of Western cultural dominance in favor of something else? It’s all very Borglike (i.e. Star Trek).

Perhaps we can feel less alone when we are part of collective, self-sacrificing whole.

Special Ed Parent from Hell

If I am invisible, my son is not. That would be too easy. That’s because he is weird. And I mean, obviously different. He technically has ADHD and an autism spectrum disorder. He is kind, polite, interesting, but just a little off in his vocal inflection, body language, and facial expression. It’s very subtle, but the other kids KNOW. They can sniff it out, like the nasty little birds of prey so many of them are.

I like kids, I really do. I usually prefer their company to adults, in a totally platonic, nonpedophile kind of way so get your minds out of the gutter! But since he was about eight I’ve felt like our lives have become more and more Lord of the Flies. How do the kids know how to behave like such survival of the fittest, we’d better weed out the weak DNA or we’re doomed as a species alpha-males and -females? Easy. They learn from their moronic parents who think that their children must be friends only with kids who are destined for success, meaning good grades, athletic, or popular, preferably all three. Freaks, dorks and other misfits need not apply. So my son has no friends, aside from another ADHD type boy who’s already been suspended for writing in a notebook the names of the kids he’d like to see dead. That’s not good, say school officials. Never mind once questioning why he’d like to see these kids snuff it. Meaning, hey, guys, maybe he’s actually being bullied! Maybe kids are mean to him! Why not ask them and maybe, just maybe, get them to stop?

But even Notebook Boy has been keeping his distance. Or maybe his parents are telling him to keep his distance because better to be a future homicidal maniac than a weirdo dork kid who can’t pay attention in school but can tell you the title of every episode of Doctor Who from Season One (with Christopher Eccleston) to Season 4 (David Tennant, and can you believe they wiped out Donna Noble’s memory? More on that later).

Oh, and there’s also his friend ADHD Girl, but Girl is the opposite of my Boy. Where he is withdrawn and spacy, she is talkative and in your face. Where he is analytical but has no common sense, she is sensible but doesn’t have an analytical cell in her body. But at least they both like Lego.

My son is eleven and just had his last two baby teeth pulled. The permanent teeth were pushing and poking through the side of his gums, and those baby teeth wouldn’t budge. So the dentist said they had to go and out they came. We brought them home and my son put them under his pillow for the Tooth Fairy. Yup, still believes in the Tooth Fairy. And Santa Claus. I drop hints that maybe they’re not real, and it’s not so bad because people who love you and are willing to go through all this crap to make you happy are and isn’t that lovely, but he’s not letting go. I’m not sure if he really doesn’t get it or just doesn’t want to.

So I took my last two Sacajawea golden dollars procured specially from the bank for just such occasions and put them under his pillow. And I am very sad that this is the last time I’ll ever do this, ever. Unless of course the dentist was mistaken and overlooked another baby tooth.

After trying Adderall, Dexedrine and Metadate, I finally fulfilled a prescription for Strattera. It’s our last hope for a drug fix to help bring him into the real world. Can’t say I blame him, though. Why join the real world when you can live in your own head?

The Big Debut

Well, here I am, doing what I’d vowed I’d never do: start a blog. I never understood the point of blogs. Why read someone blah-blahing on and on about their pathetic little life when you can read a book or newspaper or something actually worth reading?

So here are my reasons: one, my friend, an avowed technophobe and Luddite, is having trouble getting a book deal. Publishers are interested in her book proposal but she’s just a lowly writer, not an expert, so no deal.

But wait, I tell her. If you have a blog, you have prestige, street cred–you’re an expert! You’re somebody! I should know, because I’ve edited books written by bloggers who do nothing else. But they have a blog, so that means they exist, sort of like “I blog, therefore I am.”

So we are going to make big money blogging. Yeah, right…when pigs fly!

Which makes me think of Pigasus. For those of you who don’t know, Pigasus was invented by Ruth Plumly Thompson, the writer who took over the Oz books after L. Frank Baum died. Pigasus was, for those of you who haven’t figured it out yet, a pig with wings. And when you rode on his back, you spoke in verse. I was looking for an image of him from the Oz books when I found out Steinbeck apparently invented his own Pigasus and used him as his own personal stamp to symbolize “earthbound but aspiring.” Coincidence or copyright infringement: you decide. Here’s Steinbeck’s pig. I wish I had the Oz Pigasus to show as well.

But I digress. Since I mentioned she is not into learning any type of technology, I told her I would try blogging and report on how easy or frustrating it is.

My second reason to blog is because I used to write in a journal, but I’ve noticed my prying teenage daughter looking in it too many times. So I figure perhaps it makes more sense to hide in plain sight, so to speak.

I guess my third reason is that I am convinced that I am one of the world’s Invisible People, or those who are there but other people, those more substantial types, barely notice us. So this blog should prove that once and for all.