Circus Circus Hotel Casino, Reno + Vegas and a Slinky T-Shirt

Ruth and baby Tarah wearing Irish sweater + Ruth and Tarah high school graduation party

So I realize she's doing the same thing I was doing at her age, and that is getting her own place to live. And she turns 21 on Tuesday. I'm going shopping for some bling for her, and maybe for me, too, and having a surprise party for her at her workplace-doctor's office next week (ice cream cake, same kind I had at her baby shower 21 Julys ago) and a nice dinner with the grandparents at Wally's Desert Turtle, a classic 50's place in Rancho Mirage. Lovely stuff. And I had to borrow $350from her in cash because I lost my ATM card last week, and she's parked her Lexus on the street overnight because her and Alex are out and about in his Camaro, and I'm putting together issue #3 of Phantom Seed literary magazine. Life in a shimmer world of mirage, we are so Palm Springs. I'm mom and I drive a modest Toyota RAV4. I do have a classic 1989 Nissan Pulsar T-Top that's parked in driveway next to the missing palo verde tree, with a cover on it, but it needs a battery.

OK, who writes about this stuff? I am starting to understand the idea of mid-life-crisis in its full blows.....this isn't a temporary hitch, it's a knockout in a glaring boxing ring, and, how did I get here? I'm only 46, and I feel 23. So, when did all this life procession itself by? I'm contracting images of trapeze artists and sword-swallowing strong men, baby elephants in pink skirts and a full bar that revolves on a kiddy merry-go-round.....the idea of "circus" of the absurd drives itself into the garage of my head. What hugely outgrown outfit is this costume of a three bedroom, two-bath, two-car-garage, swimming pool + jacuzzi house falling around my ankles? Weight has poured off of me in recent months, and the ceiling caves in. I'm the star of a one-woman-disintegration in slo-mo, happening too-fast. A wire slinky, uncoiling apart and together back and forth descending the stairs. The old kind, from when I was a kid. And when the wires got ever so slightly bent, the slinky wouldn't work anymore. And the wiring harness in that RAV4 was chewed through by a big rat that got under my engine hood a few years ago. Cost $6,000 mostly covered by AAA.


Tarah in Kaui, Hawaii at age 13

I am reeling from this sense of a sledgehammer coming down on my head. Whoa, whoa, whoa. I'm so single my teeth hurt. I'm so alone in this house the dog has now appropriated the wicker couch where my star blanket and panda bear live. My abandoned bed by night, the sleeping couch by day. I'm so single I'm digging up old coffee cups from a 1989 stopover in Las Vegas (Apple Valley to Zion National Park) to remember when she was a wee little thing. I'm so single I'm listening to the New York Dolls at full blast on a crappy PC speaker. I'm so single I'm abandoning my rubber bands. I'm so single I have my shiva deity parked at my left wrist. I'm so single a dusty printer is staring me down. I'm so single I might go buy a bitch on a rope soap set for one and a small bottle of marijuana-infused shampoo. It's time to go visit my cool, always-humorous and humor-finding D.J. and rockstar guitar and bassist brother Jerry, who lives in Silver Lake, L.A. and drives a smooth Mercedes. He'll ferret me around town to clubs and fun things and music scenes and help me get my mojo back, and he'll laugh at the wildest stories I tell, he's only 15 months younger than me and we always were close as kids.

I'm so single I don't remember how to hang shower curtains, and so single I think the overhead fluourescent lighting in her vintage 1960 Palm Desert Country Club micro-apartment is cool. I'm so single I'm weeping gratefully that she is only 2 miles down the road. I'm on the other end of golf from her. Wildly swinging at a solo game I don't know how to play and have long resisted learning, all stubborn ten tennis years I've spent here (I used to be a tournament player as a teen/young adult, so that stuff is easy for me,) a tiny white ball bending in an arc towards the sun, and then out of site, the idea of finding the hole, a blackhearted joke of the lonely desert soul, nevermind the basket of yellow-green tennis balls parked in the garage, waiting to be hit into precise square courts, that's one game I know how to win. As if it mattered, my most-valuable-varsity-tennis-player trophy sitting on a shelf. Long before Tarah was born. We're not in high school anymore. Neither is she. Singlehood, a lightweight paperback book waiting to be put into script.


Tarah wearing the Slinky t-shirt + Mom, Catalina Island camping trip....Tarah high school graduation, 17, in 2006

My daughter, and most memorable recent lovers, are blue eyed with blonde hair. Except for Tarah's dad, black & brown and tall, stunningly handsome guy of Sioux Indian ancestry, former Army Ranger. A picture of him at 23 melts my eyes into summer ice cream, shirt off, red beret at perfect asshole tilt, and cold-blooded stare. I've gotta find those pictures he self-took of us in the desert back in the day, both of us holding AK 47's and bullet belts draped around my chest and waist, and the ubiqitous 12-pack of beer perched on a rock behind us...he runs a good sweatlodge and has good tattoos, he lives in Denver. I have been a superb mom. Even today, on moving day. I thought she'd take more furniture from her room but she doesn't want the dresser or bed. She did come back to do a load of towels and raid the cupboard: chicken soup, a box of couscous (I raised her eating exceptionally well) and other things I'll never realize are missing, I'm sure.

At least (or most) I have my writing career, they all say. Shit, I was never one of those late 80's, big-haired, reebok-wearing, Jane Fonda aerobic wannabes (though I did once do a gym workout to songs by the Pet Shop Boys with my friend Suzy, who had just had a breast enlargement.) No malls for us, just river rafting, camping, hiking, trips to Hawaii and Ireland, New York and the east coast.....and all kinds of museums and poetry readings, of course. She did the coolest kid things, like posh private schools and trips to Disneyland in limos with rich girflriends, ASB and proms, she was the only grandkid on both sides for years and all the expensive presents under the Xmas tree from childless aunts and uncles were for her, she even had her own pony in the backyard at one time! How might one such as I feel such angst, so independent I hiked remote desert peaks while 6 months pregnant, by myself, stayed on the mountain bike till my 8th month, and ventured to carry Tarah to the top of Mt. San Jacinto in a kiddy backpack at 15 months? "When she is out of high school, I get to do what I want!!!!"

To paraphrase my writer-friend Mary Sojourner, writing of one of her own perilous life passages, it's a bit like traversing one of the too-tight lava tubes that lace the underground around Flagstaff, Arizona, where we both lived in the mid 1990's (she helped me with my master's thesis of poetry, "Negotiating With Testosterone), walls sharp and unyielding but no other way through, and blacker than dark. Gloves, gloves, I need gloves. And new brake pads. Oh, forgot, my friend Mike just did the front brakes on the Toyota the other night, just in time. Now what, now what.


Tarah and some of the hands that fed, or ate....