here I am with some new friends and wonderful Claremont people, Barbara and Mark Ashworth and Barbara's son...they are also avid fans of the California desert.
It was nice to see a number of poetic friends: Lucia Galloway, a wonderful poet who lives in Claremont; Bruce Williams, another desert poet who teaches at San Antonio Community College in San Dimas; Mike Cluff, another poet-professor who's at Riverside City College, RCC, and my friend/writer Cyrus Emerson, an aspiring audio-novel innovator. I also made a few new friends, and basked in the joy and sublimity of spending an evening with people who enjoy poetry!
and here is the hostess with the mostest, the incomparable Helen Graziano, Claremont poetess laureate....Helen is a standout poet and indefatiguable coordinator of many stellar poetry readings and events in Claremont. She is also a contributor to Phantom Seed.
Thanks, Helen, for inviting me!
And so, another blissful poetic synchronicity, the making sense of what randomly holds me at the edge of abyss - for a night, and through today, the edge smoothed, a salve provided for the "shock and awe" of starting back to teaching fulltime (many more students, many fewer classes,) as well as the ongoing....numb and oft-disoriented coping with "empty nest" and this strange, silent house I find myself in, 21 years of fulltime house-sharing, with the lovely Tarah, of course, and now, the cord's cut, or should I say, yanked out so hard I'm kinda staggering around - staying sober, good girl. Hm, haven't lived alone since I was 23. Then, it was fun, because I was "leaving home" and the quiet, after growing up in a raucous Irish family of 6, still space meant everything, "my own" small house was a real achievement. My 1930's adobe cabin on Nancotta Road, owned by an Australian man named Mr. Brindle, and the namesake of my dog Brindle (who is yet in recovery from his tragic and inexplicable spinal cord injury at a vet hospital, but slowly regaining use of his back legs.) I had pistachio trees and an outdoor adobe brick fire pit on my 3 acres in then-remote Apple Valley, and my friends and I had some terrific parties under the close-neighbor stars....all for $100/month!
Now - the achievements seem so passe, and I often find myself kind of wandering around the house on California Drive, wondering "how did this come about? My mortage is many, many times more multiplied than my first, modest rent. I'm in a designer desert town filled with shopping glitz and the occasional Rolls Royce, in my closeted (stucco-walled-in) 3 BR, 2 BA (at the urging of my former boyfriend Rob, a former realtor who told me just what type of house is most saleable, of course that was before this housing disaster), 2 car garage, pool + hot tub, fully desert landscaped yard....Oh yeah, I moved here for that fulltime job 10 years ago, and much of my decision to move to Palm Desert was based on moving to a place that worked best for Tarah (i.e., grandparent proximity.) This big house? Did I BUY this thing?" A sort of child or young adult, sustained in this newness and oddity by my own adult creation...it seems impossible that I did it: raised Tarah mostly on my own, built a career, bought a house, made a home, edited a desert lit-book. A life. And I had sand dunes, four square ancient miles of them, behind me, inviting long views to Mt. San Jacinto, now obliterated by golf and mansions....all of which has brought me to...some new kind of "here" that I want to run screaming away from! I step back and "see" how closed in I've gotten, that open space has eluded me, and I've always relied on houses that give good porch and wide nature views. Of COURSE I'm stifled here! I'm an open-desert and mountain and desert river and lake (yes, there is (mostly pilfered) water here....canoeing woman!
Realizing everything was filtered through the Tarah daughter/Ruth Mom lens for 21 year, and now that identity and sense of orientation has shifted radically, and a mix of fatigue, satisfaction, and loss, not to mention more than a bit of fear and confusion over how to (re) invent myself as a "single 46 year old woman/adult" person. Walking across the large-tile floors, from one bedroom to the next, they're mostly empty (master BR = furniture stacked in it) and the hallway is way too long. I can't even muster the heart to mop the floors, or tear the dead weeds from the garden. Yeah, one of the palo verde trees fell over and we had to cut it apart and have it hauled away for an outrageous $$ sum, but it's bushing back out again and I don't know wether to let it grow shaggy and weird or keep trimming it back before those sharp limbs get too big to cut w/my modest tree clippers.
My brother John, 48, an unmarried man with no children, who also teaches in Oakland, CA, says, "just enjoy it, now you only have to work and take care of yourself." Well, I say, I don't think I ever really learned how to take care of myself - I've always taken care of Tarah." Not to mention - what IS a single adult life? In one's 40's, not early 20's (I had Tarah at 24.) Anchored by the culmination of college degrees and career creating, and now unachored at the hip, the navel station, but still with the adult baggage, and without the adult-child responsibilities that were a driving force for me for so many years - a reinvention that must involve all parts of development, age, experience, and inexperience. Even the way I interact with people is different now. I feel glimmers of being a confident and professional 46, and shimmers of being an awkward and shy 23. Half my age and then doubled, and confused by it all.
Sometimes I don't know how to drive to the grocery store, which is 2 miles down from my road, without any turns, and Albertson's, bless its familiar-aisled heart (food for one: organic skim milk, fresh orange juice, Thompsons sourdough muffins, fat free mozarella cheese, organic coffee and tea, organic oatmeal and healthy crunch cereal and flaxseed to add, a bit of sliced turkey meat, pre-cooked, thin-crust CA Pizza Kitchen pizzas, salad greens and spinach and broccoli, avocados and grapes and bananas and a stack of tabloid magazines, and oh yeah, bottles of Perrier - this is the simple diet, and I eat at all odd hours now anyway.) What is this? A skillet? What in this drawer? Why these piles of silverware. Too many cups. Dishes only once/week? Weird weird weird. Cooking, other than microwaving, making coffee, pouring milk or juice, and using my toaster oven to make pizza or english muffins, is entirely out of the question. There's a reason I buy pre-made salad mix.
Of course I'm still Tarah's MOM, but I'm a distant figure now, one reachable by phone and for guidance on life's little things (what do you do when you run out of $$ before the next paycheck? I can't get the college classes I wanted. My boyfriend is pissing me off. The cat has ringworm. Black water is coming out of the apartment faucet.) I've become #1 advice dispenser, via cell phone. Sigh, sigh, sigh.
Okay, back to the fun-relief of last Wednesday night! Good vibes....it's all good. I'm learning to be my own mom. "It will all be okay, and it will all work out. Don't worry." At least the washing machine hasn't gone entirely out, tho it doesn't spin the clothes dry enough, and the pool guy, my friend Dave, keeps coming to keep the chlorine floater afloat, and sits to talk with me when I'm available and knows that when I'm not, I'm probably asleep at 1 pm and he doesn't knock, and my water timer is working so everything is getting watered. Shasta demands a doggy bone every morning, but other than that she's completely quiet and keeps to self, sad that HER little boy, Brindle has been gone, and at a loss herself of where to put herself for condolence, other than beneath my bed or curled always at my feet wherever I happen to house-be at the time. And big clouds out the window, I've opened it for view, hint of rain, if 108 degress on 9.11 is hot enough, over the desert mountains, to wring moisture from the sky and bless thunderheads, zig-zag-zig electricity for midnight inspiration. And so I write.
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