Reflections on a Wintry Storm

It doesn't feel like the desert. I was out this evening, getting take-out from Panda Express - mixed vegetables, noodles, and some kind of firey chicken dish, and somehow I ended up with three eggrolls - two veggie and one chicken - and I admit that I took a total of eight pairs of chopsticks in different colored packs. I have been dieting lately, living on pots of lentils and rice, on blueberries and nuts, and, well, chopsticks just work better with that and in this part of town (the entire region, I daresay) I can't think of a single place to buy chopsticks legitimately. Ah, it's just light pieces of bamboo, and very "go green" and low carbon-footprint, as well. Cheaper than running the dishwasher with a full rack of knives and forks. So there. And my headlights flashed, as I pulled into a parking spot, on the white contact lenses of a dark figure in a black hoody, waiting for the bus. Nouveau vampire, I suppose, in the town of the bourgeoise and very few in betweens. My friend, who's gone along for the ride with me, says, "don't look at that guy. Don't act scared." I laugh. I'm not. Either.

Dark night. Too cold, too damp. Wet streets. It doesn't feel like what should already be well into our desert winter "spring." Our sense of spring usually begins in late January, and by late February, flowers are starting to singe, days are creeping towards 90 degrees, and nights are fragrant with orange blossoms and a warm, dry balm. The big, 10-day-long Indian Wells tennis tournament, just a mile or two from my house and an early leg of the international tennis tour that leads to Forest Lawn and Wimbledon, is ready to go. That, along with things like the Bob Hope Golf Classic at PGA West, minus Mr. Woods this year, are our sort of local versions of the Olympics. I catch a real chill while pumping gas, a damp, cold, mountain wind heavy with moisture and the smell of nearby snow. A maroon Rolls Royce pulls in beside me while my friend runs into the mini mart to get dark chocolate Raisinettes. My 2005 Toyota Rav-4, flush with 105,000 miles and lots of off-roading experience, desperately needs to be cleaned. I emptied the trash earlier today, but there is a gob of melted chocolate on one of the rugs, and chunks of dirt from one of my many recent hikes on the floor. Time. I'm still looking for my 1099-R tax form for the 403(b) lump sum distribution I took out a few months ago (long story you don't want to hear) so I can get my 2009 tax return back, and it's a minor miracle that my fridge is clean but I still haven't written a new poem in days, or is it months?

And so in this odd dislocate, when I'm actually thinking of using the fireplace again, a night when the dogs will pretend to be invisible so I don't put them outside, I glue myself to the computer. To watch CNN news and youtube and weather channel videos and stories on the freaky spate of earthquakes and tsunamis and snowmaggedons that continue to plague. Mudslide on a Portugese Island, snow in San Antonio. First 8.8 earthquake in my lifetime, first all-California-coast tsunami warnings, 2 feet of snow smothering New York City. I've done a lot of starting at the computer screen in the last few days, on a sort of anticlimactic fatigue low. I took a day off work this past week and slept. Today, I was due at a poetry festival in North Hollywood, but woke up to rain and instantly fell back asleep until noon.

And I found myself almost malfunctioning while teaching Thursday's English 1A. Vaguely wandering into an adjacent classroom to find an erasable marker to write on the board with while my students wrote sample thesis statements and topic sentences for essay #1: argue for or against the good of the Internet. The other teacher....we exchange names..."oh, YOU're Ruth Nolan, with that new book, right? I've heard about you...." I promise to bring him one, he's a new adjunct recently graduated from the UCR MFA program. Of course this feels good! I realize I've been talking to him for five minutes, and roam back into my class and my students are laughing good naturedly at my obvious....spaciness. We're on good terms, me and them, fortunately, they know I am funny, as in entertaining in my teaching in a good way, I'm always getting them to laugh, so this is part of the program...right? The blissful way to higher education. Always.

So I, using youtube to find commercials to help my students identify the various persuasive appeals to teach them how this argument stuff works. How manipulated most of them have been, by our one-two visual-sales pitch punch since the day they were born. Or maybe the day after. ME, the no-TV-in-my-home defender since the day I left my parents' home at 17, am formally....addicted? Consumed by? Dependent on? All of the above? On my Internet connection. I may be a tragedy junkie, tears coming to me as I view scenes from Chile - and think back on those from Haiti posted just weeks ago - and shudder to hear the tsunami sirens in Hawaii, where I visited a month and a half ago. Or I may just be human, concerned about the tragedies occurring in the world, just like I am so deeply affected by my college students' plights, with our school a budget-hungry mess and none of us knowing where the cuts are going to bite in more deep than they already have, who is going to steer this storm-pitched boat across the moody and imposing sea to the next uknown shore. Navigating without the technologies we've always know, or the cash.

It's been a whirlwind past few months. For me personally, for those around me, for the world, as we all know. My book launch, several launches, that is: at the Riverside library on December 5th - UCR-Palm Desert on January 29th - again at the Riverside library on a warm February 13 for UCR Writers Week - and the talk I gave for our College of the Desert campus recently, to which only three people came, one of them my loyal and good friend Jean Waggoner, who I've taught with for the past ten years. Mind pinioned with the weight of trying to live up to the book's scope and delivery: upcoming lectures at the La Quinta, Corona, and Palm Springs libraries, as well as a slot on a panel of writers and my friend and mentor Malcolm, who's moderating, at the upcoming Western Wilderness Conference 2010 in Berkeley. Papers I need to fill out for that. Exciting news from Heyday that the California Voices reading with me and two famous authors is a "go" for this May - and that little voice in my head, how did I get to this? Can I step into these new shoes? Or should I run for the open desert with my North Face two person backpacking tent, a few gallons of water, and my boots, and disappear until I can breathe again?

Back to the stuff that seems more within my "normal" realm. Scraping together a few readers and workshop leaders for the 2010 brand new Joshua Tree Writers workshop, which I'm coordinating for the UCR CA Museum of Photography photo shoot, Dry Waterfall, (I think that's the correct name) this April. Need to return a phone call to my friend Susan Sorrells in Shoshone, CA to coordinate books sales at the Shoshone Museum, where she's the curator. And so on. A mixed miasma of weather, new patterns, and the ups and downs, I'm learning, of my pursuit of the fulltime writers life. One day I'm featured in the press, and the next I'm cuddled on the couch at home with the dogs, wondering if I should buy new straps and take my canoe down to the Salton Sea, go snowshoeing on top of the tram. Call my friend Cyrus in Ashland, Oregon (which I do tonight) or do the easy thing: jump on the mountain bike and take a long cruise around town. Like I did yesterday near sunset. I got on Tarah's mountain bike - my choice, one of three sets of wheels I have - and rode 6 miles to my favorite city park art bench, a tribute to Spain and all good things Spanish, laid in mosaic tile on a corner near a field that leads to UCR-Palm Desert campus on one side, and a high-end RV park on the other - and sit near the mosaic head of Salvador Dali, my favorite piece. Lean the bike against one low wall, run my fingers over the large smooth tile that constitutes the better half of Christopher Columbus' beard, wishing he'd never been, and having a much-anticipated, hour long therapy session with my doctor, who lives in Riverside.

Watching the sun go down, sketching the near-full-moon with my imagination, sensing the train that rumbles nearby, between the rows tamarisk trees planted on each side of the Southern Pacific Railroad, adjacent to Interstate 10. Trees that aren't native here, and are a nuisance, sending deep roots far into the water table that can't be entirely cut out. Trees that always grow back. Like my own uneasy feel for the increasingly unstable world we are all in. Is it too much mirror-effect with instant visual coverage via this Internet? Has it always been this way, or is the world closing in on itself insansely?

Trim it all back and see a clear day, a world that makes sense. Look around. The sky is different than it used to be. Or maybe I just didn't experience winter back then. Or it's just another fluke wet cold winter, like, say, in 1933. Before I was born. And then, log online, and read an article that says tsunami warning canceled in Japan, and then realize that was posted LAST night, and that was for a 7.0 quake that struck off the coast Friday, click again, and here it is, yes, the udpate, a 9 foot wave expected to hit the Japanese coast tonight, from the Chilean earthquake, and now I'm getting Haiti and Chile confused in the footage and I'm not sure where to send the 10 bags of clothes I have marked for giveaway in my garage or sure which bike I'll ride next time I slide out, to get away from the house, the piles of student papers waiting to be read, the piles of desert book promotional materials and places that want me to read at waiting to be addressed.

I know my top priority is returning my newly-married daughter's three phone calls from just a little while ago, urgently waiting to be fed, and she was here the other night, a little drunk and crying for her favorite teddy bear, Curly, that she's had since she was a little girl, and hugging tightly to her chest the tiny pink Dior bear her aunt Mary gave to me at Tarah's baby shower before T was born, back in the designer 80's when everyone was rich. The one with a little rattle inside its soft exterior. Me, finding a calm within this ongoing mother-daughter storm, and helping Tarah to her car, hugging her, wiping her tears, and gently telling her to go home, to her apartment two miles away, where Alex would be sure to be waiting for her and tuck her into bed, something I can't do anymore.

How I didn't cry, eludes me. But those pictures of Chile today, and the shivery fear of what an 8.8 quake must have felt like, still traumatized by childhood memory of the 6.4 in Sylmar when I was a little kid, my God, that one was like a train running through my room - Chile must have been a three minute nuclear bomb. And this rain, filling in for what chokes deep inside of me. The desert, not what it usually is, and in my garden I can't tell the weeds from the nasturtiums and lettuce and watermelon and carrots I've planted, just have to let them all go and wait for a drier day. A day without pelting rain and wind, a day that relinquishes uncertainty to calm.

Time...for hot cranberry tea and reading the tabloids, maybe watching black and white LA noir film clips from the 40's on youtube on my beloved laptop, rubbing Brindle on his big, warm ears and scratching beneath his mug, where he can't scratch with his hind legs anymore, because of the spinal cord injury and temporary paralysis that broke my heart last August. On top of all these breaks, these breaks, with what I once thought I was so sure of. One day you're on the Pacific Plate, the next, on the Continental Shelf, and where I am now, somewhere in between drifting on an old, ancient sea floor. In, this new type of desert. Goodnight to all. Sleep well.