Favorite moments (in no particular order) from the wedding weekend. There are many:

Taking Dad's arm right before we were to walk down the aisle. He murmured, "Sweetie you're beautiful," and his eyes filled with tears. He grabbed my hand and kissed it. The first time I got married, I didn't ask either of my parents to walk me down the aisle. I was a feminist and no one was going to give me away. Twenty-two years later, I am still a feminist, but happy and proud to make the walk arm in arm with him.

C playing the processional music for my Dad and stepmother on Thursday night before the wedding when they came over for dinner, along with my sister Emily and her two youngest, Eli and Lucy. Their faces when they heard the song, joyous and reverent.

Telling Eli, age 9, to go pick some ripe figs from the tree outside for Papa.

Lucy, age five, making silly fake glasses for herself out of the pipe cleaners I had put in the goody bags for the flower girls (thank you Carla for giving me the idea to go to Long's Drugs and buy a bunch of activity items to keep young children entertained during a ceremony: crayons, paper, pipe cleaners, stickers, blow-bubbles, etc.)

C and his brothers, three midwestern Protestants, who didn't know from chuppahs having a conference in the backyard about how best to put the thing together, carry it, mount it, etc. Putting their own practical craftsmanship on it.

C sitting with his brothers at the dining room table reminiscing about some of the houses they had lived in--their dad was in the Army, they moved around a fair amount. Jon's face all lit up.

Asking my new brother-in-law Heston to pick me a bouquet to carry down the aisle and expecting a modest little nosegay--he picked an extravagant huge bunch of orange and pink and peach and coral roses.

Flower girl Lucy arriving at the synagogue and announcing she wasn't going to do it. (Actually, this was not my favorite moment, but then she turned it around, nd I love her spirit.)

Seeing my other little niece holding hands with my Little Sister.

Sitting on the closed toilet lid while Nadya, the "beautification lady" curled my hair with a curling iron and pinned it up, and did my make-up, and Angela, looking delicious in a red dress and gold sandals and a gold clutch, took pictures.

Angela, Angela, Angela. Both of C's brothers fell in love with her as everyone always does. The night before the wedding after a massive Chinese banquet, sitting around the kitchen table with her, C, and his brothers, drinking wine and eating chocolate, and she told the joke, "Why don't Southern women go to orgies?" "Too many thank-you notes." (She is Southern.)

Walking down the aisle in my fancy silver-gold shoes from Target and being so overwhelmed I completely forgot to circle C until he reminded me in a whisper. (I was the one who insisted on the circling thing and told him a million times I was going to do it, until I forgot.) I was going to circle him 7 times, as per ritual, but I realized midway through the third or fourth round that I was never going to make it in those shoes, which were stuffed with orthotics, so I stopped.

Carla in the front row: her face.

The faces of everyone in the synagogue and how they rose as I walked down the aisle (I wasn't expecting that,) beaming so much love it brought tears to my eyes. I thought how can I ever take this all in?

Our sweet rabbi. He had asked C and I to prepare words of love for each other and keep them secret, so that when we read them to each other at the ceremony it would be for the first time. C read "You write poems for me and I feel like all I can do for you is keep your floors clean and your windows opening and closing." (He has rehung almost all my old windows.) Rabbi David murmured "That's no small thing."

Looking at the front row to the left and seeing all five flower girls sitting together, passing my bouquet up and down, taking turns holding it.

The kids, the kids, the kids. In many ways, we designed this wedding around the children. There were so many of them, and I wanted it to be fun for them. At the reception afterwards, they grabbed my hands and C's hands, demanded that we dance with them, climbed into our laps, found their way into every photo. They assumed ownership over the beautiful afternoon and I ceded it to them happily. They are love, they are the future, and I remembered from my own childhood how good it felt when all the aunts and uncles and grandparents and everyone got together, how secure I felt, knowing there were many laps to hold me, many hands to steady me or open a juice bottle, cut a piece of cake, stroke my back when I got tired. I know it is a fantasy about extended family and tribe and village; I know the reality is that when we are together for too long the cracks start to show, and there are cracks, every family has them, but I can't help feeling like this is how it's supposed to be, a village.

A lot of the marrying that took place on Sunday was between C and my family (and in another subtler way, perhaps between me and his brothers.) The marriage between C and I is already there, it's intimate, it's been in process for a while. Planning the wedding and carrying it off has quickened and deepened that process; the truth is we will be marrying each other for years and years to come, please God. My Dad said at the toasts that the more he gets to know C the more he loves them, and that alone was worth all the work and money and stress of putting the wedding together.

The beautiful tables, decorated so simply and elegantly by Beth and Leo with a single orchi8d as the centerpiece. They did that completely free of my input and at the last minute--Leo called me just two days before the wedding asking, "What can I do?" and I asked, "Could you dress up the space a little?" He went down to the synagogue on his own initiative and then went to town with Beth. We just walked down and saw everything laid out and perfect.

C wearing the tallis and yarmulke I gave him the first Chanukah we were together along with a homemade card that said "Welcome to my tribe."

My Little Sister, with her beautiful soft black curly hair, holding me by the hand and asking me to introduce her to my nieces and my cousin's kids. I asked if she would go with my cousin Lizzie and she could sense how good Liz is with kids, how kind and creative and she took her hand. Later, the five flower girls played together as if they had known each other for years.

C dancing with me in public, and having fun. At the end I whispered "Dip me," and he did. Then he danced with my stepmother, with various friends, with flower girls, and with me again. I think he danced even more than I did.

There's more and more and more, but this is a good starter list. Here are a couple of photos two taken by Edith and some others by Angela. Unfortunately, we have yet to get a good full-frontal of C, man of mystery, because he was always in motion.

A commentator was kind enough to write in and point out that the link I had included in my last post directing people to Leave Them Laughing, the documentary about Carla, no longer works, and that this is the correct link: http://magicalflutefilms.com/index.php?page=current-production

Please check it out. It's an extraordinary documentary, and the promo is a good chunk of material that really gives you a sense of the whole movie and a sense of Carla.

Meanwhile, back here we're in a wrestling match with the house and garden, trying to get everything ready for family who will be arriving--gulp!--Thursday. In that spirit we did a major dump run on Thursday and Friday, renting a moving truck and collecting all the old dead sofas that were moldering away in the patio, ditto old chairs, crappy falling-apart dressers and ancient TVs left behind by former housemate-tenants who shall remain nameless, and old lumber and bricks and cardboard boxes from the in-law remodel that ended this April (was it only April? It feels like so much longer.)

So we rented this van and then we schlepped everything into it using a hand-truck and a little red wagon and a wooden dolly that C had constructed himself, and it took a long time and made my back and feet hurt, but C was indefatigable and finally everything was loaded. Then we drove it all to the dump and stood at the lip of the truck and heaved all that shit onto the great stinking American trash-heap.

As I was moving old boards in the backyard, I uncovered a nest...of kittens. The black and white feral cat who jumps our back fence and hangs around scavenging from the compost pile, and maybe catching mice and birds, had given birth to her babies in the shadowing shelter of those boards. I startled her when I moved them; she sprang away and glared at me as I peeped at her babies. C even picked one up--their eyes weren't even open yet--and she hissed at him and bared her teeth. if looks could kill, he'd be six feet under right now.

He put the kitty back and we brought out a little saucer of half and half and then contributed some food from Dede's stash. Later, he went out and bought a special formula for nursing mothers, and he's fed them about four times or five times a day since then.

"We're not going to adopt them," he assured me.

"Uh-huh," I said.

He's the cat person in the relationship. I like cats okay and Dede and I get along fine, but she's daddy's girl and he is her total love slave. She climbs up his chest and licks his nose; when he hasn't shaved for a day or two she rubs against his chin and exfoliates herself.

I had my Little Sister on Saturday and told her the story of the kitties and of course she was entranced and wanted to see them. We stood at a respectful distance while the mama cat regarded us warily. I asked my Little Sister if she wanted to name them. At first she called the mother cat Blackie, then she changed it to Mommy. Then she called it the name of her granny and the two black kittens she named after her real big sister and me. The black and white kitty she gave her own name.

Myself, I'd like to name the kitties after the Three Sisters in the Chekhov play: Olga, and Masha, and Irina. But what about the mother? She's black and white and reminds me of one of those cookies with chocolate and white icing, so I guess I would call her Cookie. But she's wild, so that would be Wild Cookie.

There's still a thousand things to do to get ready, but we do something every day: buy presents for the ring-bearers, weed the garden, vacuum. C designed and sewed the chuppah using fabric I brought back from malawi mingled with some material he used to make curtains. My dad woke us up this morning, asking what was the weather like, what clothes should he bring? I told him it could be anything from 50 degrees to 90 degrees, bring everything. He's as excited as a young boy about this wedding.

Where to begin? How about with the documentary about my friend Carla Zilbersmith, called Leave Them Laughing. You can go to www.leavethemlaughing.com to see the demo; it's very moving and gives a beautiful portrait of Carla, her humor, her amazing voice, her grace and grit and honesty.

I think the filmmaker, John Zaritsky "gets" Carla in all her many-facetedness. He and the producer, Montana Berg, have dived deep into this project. They haven't shied away from the pain, the bawdy humor, or the unexpected joys of the journey. This film is a labor of love. It's a poem. He needs money to finish it, so if you have any, please check out the tax-deductible ways to contribute that are listed on the web site.

C and I, meanwhile, are in Full Wedding Frenzy, which means cake tastings, wedding dress alterations (me), suit shopping (him), vision statement and vow writing, debris and clutter-clearing, gardening and house cleaning, buying sofa beds and pillows and pillow cases for our house guests, buying baskets, silk petals, and gifts for the flower girls and ring bearers, booking wedding night retreat space, talking to my Dad who is as excited as we are, maybe more, and designing and sewing a chuppah. This last involved buying a sewing machine (buying tools is a guaranteed way to make C happy,) visiting a fabric store and buying fancy scissors, and a lot of visits to make-your-own-chuppah Internet sites. Who knew?

There have been meetings with the caterer and the facilities manager at the synagogue. I have actually had conversations about what color tablecloths and should the napkins be contrasting or complementing. Tablecloths! Just like in Carla's wonderful play, Wedding Singer Blues.

Meanwhile, I had armpits that had not been shaved since one abortive attempt when I was 13 years old. (I know--T.M.I. But still.) There was virgin forest there. I'd resigned myself to wearing short-sleeved shirts in the summer when I was working, and just letting my freak flag fly when I wasn't. But in honor of the solemnity of the occasion and of my sleeveless vintage wedding dress, which i bought with carla at the Vintage Expo, I thought I'd practice shaving, just so I'd be sure to get it right for the big day. Tonight I sit here with naked armpits that have little red bumps on them--irritation from the razor. Eccchhhh! I wish we lived in Europe.

That's pretty much life right now. Tomorrow we rent a truck and go to the dump. I buy lots of plants and attempt to weed the rosebushes and make something presentable out of the backyard. We haul out C's treasured fabric remnants and see if they go with any of the beautiful cloths I brought back from Malawi. We write up a program. We tease each other, we hug each other, we pray.

A couple of days of trying to stay off my burning aching feet have left me feeling like an invalid. In-valid. Even though the truth is I can still get around okay if I'm willing to pay the price for walking: pain. And if I stretch as religiously as the young woman I saw working out at my gym today, who had her leg up on the bar for a full six minutes on each side, nothing perfunctory about her.

I read up about this condition on-line--one doctor said that rolling one's feet over cold cans of soda could be good for sufferers of plantar fasciitis, so I got some. We'll see.

As far as Websudoku goes, I still reach for it on my computer, and then i remember it isn't there. I check People.com and usmagazine.com a million times a day but they don't keep me hooked in quite the same way. I just finished reading Susan Shapiro's funny insightful addiction memoir, Lighting Up: How I Quit Smoking, Drinking and every other good thing in life except sex. It was really good, and hopeful and insightful.

But my feet still hurt. And same-sex marriage is still not legal in California. Which was to be expected, given the way our state organizes these things--it should never have been the subject of a referendum in the first place. But still maddening and disappointing.

And even though I am sure it is only a question of time--that we will have full marriage equality in 2010, or at the very outside, 2012, I still feel sad and angry about it. And a little guilty about how easy it is for C and I, and how impossible for gay friends who have been in their unions longer than us, and have endured more trials together than we have.

All this makes me feel more strongly than ever that it's not the legal part that matters, it's the couple's own hearts, and the community and spiritual support that we get. So maybe the answer is to abolish "marriage" as a state entity altogether. Let the state/legal part be just to recognize civil unions--for everyone, gay or straight--and let the "marriage" label be a non-legal, spiritual (in the loosest possible definition of that word) ceremony--for everyone.

Because it's time to further separate Church and State--personally, I'd like to see those two suckers as far apart as possible. Let the State deal with the legal paperwork relating to property and hospital visitation and immigration sponsorship and hospital visitation rights and let churches and synagogues and Buddhist temples and pagan priestesses on windy mountaintops deal with the love and family parts. (I think this idea was originally Carla Zilbersmith's but I have adopted it as my own.)

Friday night we went to Carla's for a party she gave to thank her friends. The film crew was there, finishing up their work on the documentary they are making about her. One of her student-friends was wearing a red Carla-wig, and when we rounded the corner, C asked in surprise, "Is that Carla?" She was walking down the street, with her back to us, and from the back it did look exactly as if Carla were once again walking, as if there had been a miracle cure. The redhead turned to face us, and it was Sofia. Carla was out back, in her wheelchair, being kissed and fed and loved up by hordes of people.

Gina did a hilarious job as MC, channeling a Cuban sex-and-love relationship expert and taking questions from the crowd. Carla thanked us and cried, then everybody cried, then it got dark. Natta and Meyra did a spectacular fire dance in Carla's backyard, dancing with baskets of live coals suspended from long poles. At each move they made, the coals shook streams of sparks, like little meteors exploding harmlessly into the night.

It was gorgeous and poignant, the brevity of the sparks, the brevity of our lives, the beauty of the night, Carla tipped back a little in her wheelchair, alternately watching the sparks and Gina's big-eyed baby who pulled away from nursing at her mother's breast to stare at the spectacle, showers of bright orange sparks, like a cloud of fireflies in the dark sky...

Last night, we went to see our friend Colleen Tane Nakamoto perform at the Asian Arts festival. She did a piece of her one-woman show "Soft Tissue" which is about how historical violence, such as the rapes of Okinawan women during wartime occupation, are carried on in the muscle memory of their descendents, from generation to generation. Coke's piece was just one among many beautiful story-tellings--Brenda Wong Aoki performed a story, and several others. It was great to see veteran storytellers sharing the stage with newcomers, all the different flavors of Asian storytelling, from poetry to music and dance.

Today has been lazy--coffee and the Sunday Times, a visit from a friend, the gym, shopping and cooking. I needed this after an intense day Friday studying Domestic Volence. For the first time we had a man who works with batterers come in and speak. He spoke of the deep need for love these men had even when they are acting most unlovable. Earlier in the day a woman psychologist had spoken about PTSD and Complex PTSD, which is a new name for Borderline Personality Disorder, and Anti-Social Personality Disorder which I was also interested in. And I found out there is a kind of psychology called Forensic Psychology, which deals with criminal psych. You can also study something called Victimology. I'm not sure if I want to study all this for myself or for a career, just that I find human behavior fascinating.

I'm eating up this learning about psychology--I was always so suspicious of it before, probably because I never found a therapist whom i thought really changed things for me. I had a lot of critiques of the whole science of it.

Ironically, on the day my essay about playing tennis in MORE arrived, I got out of bed feeling as if someone had been nailing horseshoes to the soles of my feet overnight. Agony. I could barely hobble to the bathroom. Gerry and I had a rousing game yesterday--we picked up two women of a certain age down at the public courts by Lake Merritt--or maybe they picked us up as we sat on the bench waiting for them to finish and we had a rousing game of doubles.

I was leaping and flying and skipping and hopping all over the court, trash-talking the entire time and high-fiving my partner, and I'm paying for it today. Plantar fasciaitis. At the time I wrote the MORE essay, in 2008, I could boast about being relatively injury-free for my age. But all the tennis and the self-defense classes are taking their toll, and it's time for this old girl to get orthotics. (Stil, I'll be damned if I hobble down the aisle at my wedding in orthopedic shoes. I have to draw the line somewhere; high heels for that forty-five minutes, or bust. Ouch!)

Websudoku has been off my computer for a few days now, thanks to the perseverance of our computer guru, who has had to take more steps to get rid of it than he initially imagined. "It would be much easier if you were addicted to porn," he joked with me. There's tons of porn-blocking software out there. Unfortunately, Sudoku is considered a positive thing, a brain game. My M.D. even recommended it to me! So blocking it, customizing the parental controls--has been hard. Maybe when I've got more healing and more perspective under my belt, I'll write an essay about it that will influence software companies and internet providers like AOL to customize their parental controls more. A lot of people probably want to do that to their computers.

I do feel clearer--the part of my brain that could escape into the number combinations is quieter. I read in MORE that music stimulates dopamine production. Although I love music, and I'm marrying a musician and composer, I often work and live in silence with just thoughts and words buzzing in my head. It's as if it were too rich for my blood sometimes.

Right after I separated from my first husband music would make me cry. I had to be selective about playing it--was I in the mood for a sob-fest, or did I want to stay away from those emotions? over the years I've just gotten into the habit of not playing it. Of course I listen to music in the car while I'm driving, and C and I do sometimes at home--and I love the sounds of him practicing. But I don't take initiative to play my own CD's--it's as if I've ceded the musical part of our lives to him. And I don't, say, play Mozart--or anything--in the background while I'm writing. I wonder if I was vulnerable to the Sudoku addiction because I had shut off from that whole part of myself?

Dear friends,

I know I haven’t blogged here for more than a month. I’ve been taking a break, in an interior state, living privately instead of publicly, purifying myself as a precursor to marriage. (And now, today, we find out that odious, discriminatory Prop 8 has been upheld by the California Supreme Court. I don't know what to say about it. I expected this, actually, but I'm still heartsick. And I still think we'll win in 2010. Or 2012. But I hope it's 2010.)


Yesterday we went for a bike ride along the Marina. Gorgeous, bright, cool, breezy weather. Plenty of joggers and roller-bladers and bikers and walkers--whole families out picnicking and flying kites.

I was, frankly, terrified. I’ve barely been up on a bicycle these last thirty years or so. C bought me a great bike for Chanukah—sturdy and easy, only three speeds, not too high. But still.

I was doing fine until we got to the intersection and then I got spooked by a waiting line of traffic and tried to push off too fast with my feet in the wrong position. Crash, I went down, and skinned my knee. I haven’t had a skinned knee since elementary school. I was more embarrassed and shocked than anything. There was a big audience for my mishap, from people at the little sandwich shop on the corner to the line of cars that had scared me in the first place.

C daubed at my bloody knee with a wet napkin, and we took off again. We cycled all around the Marina, scene of our first date, and then the marriage proposal last year. Now we were circling it as almost husband and wife. My hair kept escaping my helmet and blowing in my eyes and getting on and off the bike was hard because I didn’t trust myself to put all my weight on one foot and hoist my butt in the air, but it was still big fun. And I felt proud of myself for even being out there, considering how balance-challenged I can be.

These days I think about what kind of old lady do I want to grow into. I was the kind of kid who always had my nose in a book, who walked around in a trance of reading, who shrank from sports and was picked last in gym class.

I want to grow old like one of my idols, the writer Colette, who married her third husband at the age of sixty (he was 18 years younger than she was) and broke her leg skiing at a time in life when many people are sitting in rocking chairs. I could do without the broken leg, but I hope I’m still taking risks as I move through menopause and beyond.

Which brings me to the real reason for my silence this last month: I’ve been in the grips of an embarrassing compulsion. My nephew introduced me to Sudoku a couple of years ago. It seemed like harmless fun, and my father gave me a few puzzles to work on during the flight back to California. When I was home I discovered a web site that allows me to play—and time myself—game after game after game. What started out as something to do on a long plane ride, morphed over the last three years into a compulsion that preoccupied me as soon as I sat down at the computer to write.

In the last year or so I was completely out of control. Every day I would tell myself the exact same thing: I was only going to play a few games. Hours later I would be late and/or unprepared for work, or I would have simply have wasted the morning/afternoon/evening. More importantly I would be wasted, my brain filled with numbers and spaces, whirring along on a stream completely opposite to poetry, playwriting, and meaning-making. And I couldn’t stop.

Writing is hard. Creating meaning from the chaos of daily life, fragments of conversation, emotions, fleeting sensations, ideas—all the stuff of art, which I love so much, and have tried to do for so long, is HARD. And playing Sudoku is easy. You just line up your numbers and spaces and look for what’s missing. Your choice is either right or wrong. It’s satisfying in an unambiguous, primal way.

I put off reading or returning work-related emails. I didn’t revise my essays, I didn’t finish the play. I didn’t get up from the computer and water the plants, call a friend or go to the gym. I played Sudoku, game after game, hour after hour. I got faster at the games, and competed with myself with the little timer they had conveniently located on the site. I could see how good my time was compared to all the other users who played, and compared to myself. I could shave seconds off my best time and have the illusion of mastery. I was not getting anything done, except disassociating from my own mind and my own feelings. That I was doing very well.

My mother had been disassociated through much of my childhood. She could get upset over small things, but when major calamities struck, she was eerily detached. Her responses confused and frightened me. I remember wondering how she did it, how she achieved that detached weird smile. In contrast, I wanted Presence with a capital P from myself and everyone else. Not wanted, demanded. How ironic. In the last year I have conducted important emotional phone conversations while playing online Sudoku. I have allowed—no sought out—the fracturing and splintering of my attention, arguably one of the most precious gifts I possess.

Why? I’ll go to therapy to really explore the ins and outs of this but meanwhile I can make some educated guesses: change, stress, hormones, grief, insecurity, blah blah blah. But there’s the thing: I live in the Bay Area. There’s yoga. There’s Interplay. There’s music. I have a ton of art supplies. There are much better, more alive ways to handle stress, and I’m supposed to know them and use them.

The truth is I I finally found my perfect drug, the one that was made just for my brain, like a lock and key. I know—most grown-ups go for booze, or weed, or porn, or shopping. Those are all fine, time-honored ways of escapism. The first three never did anything for me. Shopping is okay, but too humiliating. WebSudoku stimulated exactly the right place in my brain that gave me both pleasure and numbness. It didn’t harm my liver or make me run up my credit cards. All it did was block my work, give me eyestrain and backaches, and threaten my relationship.

C said Sudoku made me into a zombie—glassy-eyed and distant. He could always tell when I’d been playing, even though I would lie about it. He’d be puttering around the house, doing things, and I’d be up in my little study, hunched over the computer, “working.” He’d catch me lying to him, and it would tear him up. It was like being married to an alcoholic or a pothead.

I went out with an alcoholic pothead in high school. I could always tell when Tim had been smoking even though he’d try to hide it. His eyes would be a bit red but mostly it was the quality of his presence—or lack of presence—that tipped me off. He’d have a big goofy smile on his face and he just wasn’t all there. And I was. And it was lonely.

I could see I was making C feel lonely in our relationship. Also, frustrated, powerless and confused. He couldn’t make me stop playing the game and get back to being the creative woman he fell in love with. He didn’t want to be my baby-sitter, and I didn’t want him to be. But I was checking out—big-time—and he could tell, and what was he supposed to do? Ignore it? Hope that I’d come around and check back in again sometime?

I tried a couple of times to get the game taken off my computer, to install parental controls. I even physically brought my computer to a few places to ask for help. Hey all said they couldn’t do anything; it wasn’t on the level of hardware, it was in the network. And calls to AOL didn’t go anywhere; I couldn’t get a human being to talk to.

Meanwhile the compulsion just grew as if it had a life of its own. Things came to a head between C and me last week. He let me see how badly the compulsion was hurting him. I couldn’t bear that. I can hurt myself—it’s my life, after all. I’ve accumulated some regret over the years. But I can’t live with hurting him. So I made phone calls to a list of computer gurus he’d found on the Internet. We found this guy Rob Gross, who seems like the perfect fit for what we need. He understands—he has a degree in Organizational Psychology as well as being a techie. “I think I’m getting a dopamine hit from playing this game over and over,” I said cautiously. I’m really interested in brain chemistry since mine is fairly sensitive and easily unbalanced. I know about serotonin of course, and beta-endorphins. I think dopamine is related to new experiences and excitement, something I often don’t get enough of when I’m working on a writing project.

“Dopamine undoubtedly,” he affirmed. “Plus you’re probably getting a release of powerful opiates as well.” He suggested I find a psychologist or a group to work with on the emotional side of breaking the compulsion. Meanwhile, we gave him access to our computers and he’s already managed to remotely install software that blocks WebSudoku from my box.

It’s been hard to do. He joked that it would be easier if I were addicted to porn—there’s lots of porn-blocking software. It’s harder to block a “mild” web site like mine. In the little bit of brain research I’ve done, I’ve seen Sudoku touted as a good brain exercise. Well yes, and red wine is good for your heart—unless you happen to be an alcoholic, in which case it ruins your life. Funny how one woman’s meat can be another’s poison.

So when I say I’m in process I mean I’m in process. As in right now. Rob’s coming over tomorrow to complete his work on our computers. I’m only a day or two into not having Sudoku on my computer. So far so good. At least I’m blogging again. C and I are in a good place, honest and loving, able to laugh at ourselves. And wedding plans and house cleaning and personal purification and all the rest of it continues. .

Wahington D.C. I was born in the U.S. and have lived here all my life, and this is the first year I ever felt like I was really a citizen. Maybe it's a Jewish thing, maybe it's being from a liberal coastal state that was the only state that voted for McGovern in '72--and I was probably the only person in the country who believed McG would win--but I have always seen myself as fundamentally outside the corridors of power. I've never even had a desire to see them up close. No reverence, no patriotism, nothing. Until now.

Last week, in D.C. I wanted to kneel and touch the ground. I really did. There were tulips everywhere, banks of yellow and red tulips, and daffodils. the cherry trees were in full bloom, fat, pink pom pom blossoms, and the delicate purple flowering Judas tree. It's such a beautiful city. I had only ever been there before for demonstrations, had never seen the streets when I wasn't part of a chanting, freezing, have-to-go-to-he-bathroom-where-is-the-port-o-potty throng. Pro-choice, anti-war, no nukes, you name it. My memories of D.C. were all uncomfortable.

But now we were here with a president whom we had actually elected doing his work behind closed doors only a few miles from our hotel! The second day it gusted and rained outright, but still we sloshed through it in our sneakers to stand at the gates of the White House (which are surprisingly low, and look almost unguarded, although there must be invisible security all around,) to peer in in and send warm thoughts in Obama's general direction.

We bought cheap umbrellas which promptly broke; we visited some of the Smithsonian museums. I say some of them because you could camp out on Capitol Hill for a year and spend all day every day in the museums and still not see a fraction of the treasures there. We walked all over: down the mall, to the Washington monument, to the Lincoln Memorial, the Vietnam Memorial, the World War 11 Memorial, the Korean War Memorial. Beautiful, beautiful, tired, footsore, hungry, beautiful.

We spent hours in museums--all of them free to the public. The Holocaust Museum took four or five hours. So much thought and care and elegant design had gone into the creation of exhibits that would showcase the most brutal wrong-headed behavior the human race is capable of. That was the supreme contradiction. The building itself had a deliberately industrial feel, as if you were in a depressed Germany, perhaps between wars; red-brick walls, factory decor. There was a whole exhibit especially designed for children, where you could walk through the replica of a house where a Jewish boy named Daniel lived, touch his toys, see his schoolbooks, and hear his mother and sister laughing in the kitchen as they made cookies.

You followed Daniel's story as he was thrown out of school for being Jewish and then sent with his family to live in a ghetto, and finally a concentration camp where his mother and sister were killed. This was the historical record of a real family: photographs, old steamer trunks, clothing, and wallpaper.

There was a railway compartment that was a replica of the one that concentration camp inmates were transported in; you could walk through it and feel its dimensions. There was a huge glass case filled to the brim with human hair that was cut from the heads of women and used to stuff mattresses. i don't know how the museum's curators got hold if the hair. Unthinkable. There was another glass case entirely filled with shoes--many many small children's shoes, and women's shoes, all dirty and dusty.

I heard sniffling behind me. C was crying, and he cried throughout our four hour visit. If a book should be an axe to break through the frozen sea within us, as Kafka says, then that museum was designed to be a similar kind of axe. I felt numb and shut down: I had had too much Holocaust in my youth, I couldn't, wouldn't, couldn't let myself go there again. What thawed me were C's tears. I could feel with him and for him and through him. It was piggy-backing, it was cheating, but his example helped ease and open my own heart. I was so moved by his stamina. As long as our visit took, as many stories piled up, as overwhelming as the heartbreak was, he just didn't shut down. He allowed himself to be overwhelmed, and he kept feeling. He did not try to protect himself. Of all his great qualities, this is the one that moves me most. That specific kind of courage.

The part that got me was at the end, the stories of the survivors--one woman ended up marrying the American soldier who liberated her camp; fifty years later they told the story together. And the stories of all the rescuers, the many many people who risked and sometimes lost their own lives saving and hiding Jews. Would I have had that courage? Would I have risked torture, or having my whole family sent to a concentration camp, in order to help people I didn't even know?

And what about the victims I pass every day on the street, the homeless and drug addicts? What about the people in Darfour, or anywhere else around the world, who are in danger?

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We also visited the Museum of Natural History, along with about 10,000 schoolchildren, all of whom, like C, were on their spring break. Deafening. Still wonderful, especially the dinosaur movie which we watched in an IMAX theatre (along with about 10,000 schoolchildren) and 3-D glasses. If, in geological time, the dinosaurs ruled the earth for 48 minutes, the human species has been here for 48 seconds. That's right, an eyeblink. You and I as individuals? Less than nothing.

And: it was a meteor which destroyed the dinosaurs, brought their long era to an end. It crashed in the Yucatan, and recent advances in infra-red photography now show that there have been a lot of meteors that have crashed into the earth over the millenia, and very likely another one will wipe out us humans if we don't do it to ourselves first.

So have some chocolate cake!

That was my first thought: whoo-pee, freedom!! Freedom from this impossible stupid pressure we put on ourselves with the illusions of control and accomplishment. I don't have to revise any more essays for publication, update my resume, swim a mile, or even floss anymore. It really doesn't matter in the long run.

Of course in the short run there are quality of life issues. And a mortgage. But this overall weight of feeling like every little thing we do or don't do--I went to yoga class, good girl, I ate a cookie, bad girl, and on and on-- has some tremendously important bearing on our lives, on our very survival--it feels better to go through my day without that. Just living, like the dinosaurs.

The human species may not survive, and perhaps our demise could pave the way for a more evolved life form. We don't know; we don't even understand our little 48-second eyeblink. Had the dinosaurs not become extinct in a global atmospheric catastrophe, we humans could not have developed. No matter what the creationists claim, it would have been impossible for fragile, puny, thin-skinned big-headed two-leggeds to evolve with hundred-ton armored monsters crashing about everywhere.

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I think C would have been quite happy to live inside the Air and Space Museum for a year or two. He got to see a replica of the first space capsule, and the Wright brothers' earliest aircraft, and a bunch of other cool stuff. And I got to soak in the art museums, including a wonderful Louise Bourgeois exhibit at the Hirschhorn. And we didn't even scratch the tip of the iceberg.

D.C. is a nerd's paradise, the proverbial candy store for insatiably curious kids who can't get enough amazement into their craniums. There is a museum for every possible interest you can imagine, and we only had time and stamina and foot-energy for a handful. I didn't get to see the Folger Shakespeare Library, and C didn't get to see the Museum of Design, and neither of us saw the American Indian Museum, and the African American Museum wasn't even open yet. So we'll be back maybe next year, sore-footed slack-jawed, puny, and rapt. Which seems the right scale for humans.

Yesterday I reread the poet Ted Berrigan’s work, and critical essays about him, and got so turned on I wrote three or four poems. Of course I sent them prematurely to Ruth, and C and Carla, and only later saw how unready they are, how glaringly full of clichés and errors. Today I am working on them more, and just wrote another one, using Berrigan’s technique of cutting and pasting lines, disrupting the syntactical flow in order to get more jagged edges, and especially in order to see the poem as a built thing rather than just an emotional outpouring.

In Berrigan’s aesthetic, especially in his Sonnets, lines are like building blocks, like Legos, and you can fasten them and unfasten them and refasten them to other lines in new and interesting ways. He uses lots of repetition and variation.

I’ve never been a language poet—quite the opposite, I lean too heavily in the direction of meaning I think, which sometimes makes my poems weighty and non-musical—but I appreciate what language poets do. They revivify and refresh, they wake us up to the tired old ways we habitually use English, they delight in serendipity, and their integrity lies in being true to the rules they themselves set up.

I’ll always love everyday speech. The other night C and I were eating at the little hole-in-the-wall restaurant we like, just a tiny local place, and a couple of young women were at the next table talking loudly about how much they loved “Mowatt.” (Moet champagne.) They interrupted themselves occasionally to yell at a little four-year-old boy climbing all over the chairs, whose head was covered in braids, named Michael.

The most formative poet for me was probably William Carlos Williams who knew how to take this kind of speech and make great poems out of it. He was unafraid to be plain, daily and awkward.

That’s the challenge, if you’re working with this kind of material—not to “transform” it, which just calls attention to the poet, but to let what is already in it shine through. To let it transform, in its own way, on its own terms. When I was younger, n older poet looked at my work and suggested I do what Berrigan had done—the cut and paste thing. I was offended. I had worked so hard to achieve coherence and meaning. Every line in my poems was precious to me, it was all set in concrete, and now he was suggesting that I just throw it up in the air and see where the pieces settle? Never!

Now I’ve been mining that vein of coherence and meaning until I’m tired of it. Now I see the value of breaking my own patterns and throwing things up in the air. Now I want to play and experiment.

My editor from NY just called to see if I checked the revision of the essay about playing tennis with C that will appear in MORE in June. They changed the title to “A Perfect Match”—not my idea. I don’t like the word “perfect”—it seems hubristic to me. And C and I are from perfect, either as individuals or a couple. What we are is stubborn and lucky, and willing. We’ve been humbled enough to be willing. But God save me from perfect or from anyone talking about their perfect relationship. I don’t trust that and I hope I never give that impression.

My editor and I started talking and got on the subject of The Wire, which C and I watch with feverish interest, occasionally pausing the DVD to ask each other, “What just happened? What did they say?” My editor said that Obama watches The Wire too, and that his favorite character is Omar.

I feel like I should be working on essays not poetry—essays are more lucrative, when and if I can actually sell them. (Big if.) But poems keep coming. Essays are work, poetry is obsession. The solution, as always, is more coffee.

I taught at the Pleasanton Arts Festival this weekend. Dana Gioia spoke. I had only heard of him, never read his work, except for a few poems. He's a great speaker! Passionate, funny, and he didn't use notes. He told the story of Robert Frost, how he was a failure at age 37, how he'd never amounted to anything at any of his jobs. He talked about Philip Larkin, and quoted from his poem, "They fuck you up, your mum and dad..." (He said that poem was very popular with nuns. Who knew?)

When he spoke about the Poetry out Loud program which I coached for in January, and what it has meant to some of the students who came through it, he got tears in his eyes.

It was great to see his passion. Inspiring.

He was asked about his own writing process. He said when he is writing full-time for himself he spends about 3 hours at his desk feeling like the biggest loser in the world before he gets over himself and starts writing. I can relate all too well.

Yesterday I took my Little Sister to the beach--keeping out of C's hair as much as possible so he could weed-whack--and then played tennis with C and then went to see Elizabeth perform at Dance Mission in the city. (Today I was so tired I could barely crawl out of bed.)

The bodies of the young dancers were so lithe and muscular. They swung from ropes, bounced and flew across the stage. Elizabeth was a great comedienne. She danced with a little boy as her partner, tumbling him over her shoulders with ease, like a little monkey.

Run, don't walk, to the nearest bookstore and buy a copy of Lisa Jones' book, Broken; A Love Story, about Stanford Addison, an Arapoho medicine man who has been paralyzed for thirty years following a car accident in his reckless youth. Addison teaches people how to break horses; he teaches everyone how to surrender humbly, lose themselves and find their center. He does it through sacrifice, suffering, humor and love, in the midst of poverty and illness and swarms of kids, dogs, horses, relatives and refugees.

This all sounds very woo-woo and New Age. It isn't. Trust me, I hate that shit. The Indian community as depicted in this book is awash in contradictions; sacred and broken, poor and wealthy, sick and healthy. The people drink diet cherry cokes and shop at Wal-Mart; ingest peyote and attend sweat lodges; get arrested for drunk and disorderly conduct and offer cigarettes to a stature of the Virgin Mary the Virgin Mary during hospital stays.

It is not, repeat not, another romanticized white person's spiritual quest on Native lands. Instead it is a lovingly wrought, painfully honest, crowded, poignant, and funny look at all of it.

I had read versions of this book in draft form a year or two ago when I helped Lisa with some little editorial things. She manages to pack in history, politics, spirituality, healing, and personal stories so seamlessly and compactly that you are not even aware of what a huge mouthful you are digesting until after you have swallowed it and are lying around in the sun like a snake that has just swallowed a jackrabbit. The book is the snake and your ego is--was-- the rabbit. Taking it in is like ingesting peyote for those of us who are less adventurous with hallucinogens. Read it and weep, shake, laugh, and let your heart creak open.

I've spent the morning--I was going to say "being deliciously anal," but that seems a poor choice of words. Anyway, futzing over every poem, every word, every comma of See How We Almost Fly before emailing the complete manuscript to the publisher. I made big last-minute changes--pulled some poems out, restored others--and small ones, changing line breaks and trimming excess words. I love the version I have now, and doing this process has given me peace around my question, "Why did it have to take eight years?"

I've revisited the poems I wrote after visiting Alaska in 2002; I was so stimulated by what i saw and felt there that I came back and wrote a slew of poems. I wrestled with one, about pole-fishing for salmon on Kenai Peninsula at 10 p.m. near Summer Solstice--it was still quite light out, a kind of bright twilight--anyway I must have rewritten that poem 500 times. Today I finally got it right.

And others, the Moose poem...I regret that the Caribou one is lost to history, a casualty of my stolen laptop.

Anyway, it's all good, and it's DONE, and in the process of doing it I also made changes to Love Shack, so it's all in a days' work...now I'm going to go outside into this glorious day and hike and swim and reathe.

Carla and I went to the Vintage Expo to look for my wedding dress and we found it! A pink cocktail frock—when I say pink, I mean old rose/blush/coral color—fitted through the top and with a skirt that goes out. Beautiful old-fashioned detail, lace V-neck, revealing some cleavage but not too much, some heavy brocaded embroidery, an overlay of –I think it’s netting. I don’t know the words to describe all the details. It’s feminine and pretty and a little bit fancy, but not over-the-top. I hope my five-year-old nieces, both high femmes who adore a children’s heroine called Fancy Nancy, will like it. I won’t be swathed in yards of white satin or anything. And the dress is inexpensive enough so that if I change my mind, I haven’t broken the bank or anything. Now I just want to lose ten pounds—it fits as is, but it would be easier to squeeze into and out of if I were a little thinner.

The expo was fun—booths and booths of vintage clothes, some of them very beautiful, some dowdy. There were wool jackets with real fur collars, cowboy and cowgirl boots with stencils and engravings in different colors, and outrageous hats. I tried on one that was as big as a platter with peacock feathers, ribbons, and fabric flowers all over it.

“This looks like something Minnie Pearl would wear,” I said to Carla. She looked dubious.

“Minnie Pearl would take one look at that thing and say ‘No, it’s too much, even for me.’”

I really did love that hat. If it hadn’t cost $225.00 I would have been tempted to buy it.

There were some very interestingly and eccentrically dressed people at the expo. We got a sense of a sub-culture of people who live for the precious objects of the past.

Carla got a beautiful black crocheted sweater. Then she convinced me to by this Joan Crawford-esque ball gown that really is too tight—a long full French blue skirt with a black lace overlay, and a black velvet top. Stunning. If I move the button over on the chest to give the girls more breathing room, and if I buy a wide black velvet belt at Joanne’s to cover the gap between the skirt and my stomach, it might almost work.

It was fun to be on a normal date with Carla. I say “normal” but of course nothing is. She tires more easily these days; the three hour trip was a marathon expenditure of energy for her. I told her several times I would understand completely if she wanted to back out, but she didn’t, and I was glad for her company and her sharp eye and even sharper opinions, to wit: “Honey you’re too old to wear something dowdy.” Said with total love. The ALS is always there, the wheelchair and the handicapped accessible bathroom that isn’t really accessible because the stall is so small she had to do a 100-point turn just to get into and out of it. But we were focused on fashion and wedding stuff and girl talk. It was just an outing and it was also a small miracle.

The wedding is coming together without too much angst. I think it’s because both C and I are not agonizing about the decisions. Neither of us really care about all the stuff you’re supposed to have or do. We just want simplicity, quality, and intimacy. No need to interview every caterer in the Bay Area, or listen to every band, or try on every dress.

Meanwhile, I finished the second draft of the empathy essay and I’m now ready to do the third one. It’s an interesting journey this essay—it’s really challenging, it takes me so many places, including pockets of unhealed anger and resistance. I’d rather work those things out in draft form than publish them unedited.

C is finishing up work on the in-law even as I type this. He’s done a prodigious amount of work, and today we bought a shower curtain and some other last-minute odds and ends.

Yesterday, five cops were shot a few miles from where we live. Four of them died. It was the worst single day for police murders in California history. Today the city is still in shock. We see officers riding by in their patrol cars looking grim. I asked C if we could drive by the site after our hike. We did and saw a few cops putting flowers in plastic buckets at a makeshift shrine on the desolate block where the firefight happened. There were some American flags there, also in a plastic bucket, and a skeleton TV crew filming the whole sad little scene.

C asked if I wanted to visit the site “out of compassion” for the cops, and I said no, it wouldn’t do the policemen a damn bit of good whether we went there or not. I just wanted to bear witness.

I think our love affair with the HBO show “The Wire” influenced my response to the shootings. “The Wire” is such an intimate portrayal of the police subculture; the cops’ brotherhood with each other, their jokes and profanity, their drinking, their despair and loyalty and street-smarts and vulnerability. We are both caught up in the characters’ lives and loves and drinking problems.

Our street has a strong police presence; it’s not unusual to see cruisers with their lights flashing, making busts on street corners or pulling people over for passing the stop signs and also, I’m sure, checking for drugs. What happened thirty blocks away could just as easily have happened here. In all the talk that follows a drama like this, I hope gun control will become a focus. If that parolee had been armed only with a knife, he might have been able to do some damage, but he never would have been able to kill four people in just a few minutes.

Yesterday was my mother's yahrzeit. I said Kaddish with my sister Emily over the phone. Later, I lit the candle for her and two other candles I had bought for C's parents and we said Kaddish together for our ancestors. Then we watched the movie Evening in tribute to Natasha Richardson. What a lovely lady, in the old-fashioned sense of the word. Her smile communicated warmth and womanliness and deep contentment in love. What a loss.

(The movie itself was okay. I think I'm over Michael Cunningham. All these affairs in New England beachhouses, and quasi triangles involving two men and one woman and ambiguous homoerotic overtones. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with any of that. I'm just saying I saw it in A Home At The End of the World and also in The Hours. His thematic territory is well-worked.)

The fig tree is putting out its little green leaves, like baby hands. Later in the season they will metamorphose into big glossy dark-green clown gloves. There are those tart lemony yellow wildflowers everywhere--I was on a walk with Ruth yesterday and she ate one so I ate one--sour!

And the peach tree is in glorious pink blossom, and on our walk we also saw a blossoming apricot, and lots of California poppies--the bright orange ones, and some paler orange contrasting. Say what you will about God, S/He/It is amazing with color. With justice and mercy, not so much, or at least, not so comprehensible. But with interior or exterior design, unsurpassable.

C is nearing completion on the in-law--although whenever I tell that to anyone close to me they dissolve into laughter since I've been saying that for months now. But it gets truer and truer. I can feel the space opening up. I cleared about a third of the backyard from the mile high weeds that were growing back there--there's two thirds left to go. I finished a good draft of the empathy essay, but it still needs more work. "Go deeper," Ruth says. That's pretty much what she always says.

Today I walked around the lake with my friend Laurie and we talked about the Feminine. I seem to have this irrational need for the women in my life to always be perfectly rational. Or, more accurately, I get impatient with "mushiness," with lack of clarity or difficulty articulating (even though I myself am not always perfectly clear.)

As a writing teacher that translates into lecturing on the value of straightforward sentences: subject verb object. I want women to risk coming out and saying what they mean. No qualifiers. Laurie and I co-taught a writing weekend last summer. it went very well, but she told me a couple of women were intimidated by the expectations I was bringing to the table. They were used to a more free-form practice; Laurie teaches Wild Writing which emphasizes letting the unconscious infuse the work with its own energy.

I was surprised when we worked together how that triggered me. At the time i couldn't put a finger on it. Laurie and I both enjoy each other and respect each other's work. We shared the space and the power well, and the group of women which she had assembled were wonderful. Nevertheless I was a bit irritable, and though I tried to control my impatience, I am a lousy dissembler, and some of it leaked through. It took us nine months to find the time to take a walk and begin talking about it.

"I have to confess something awful," I told her. "I despise and desire the Feminine."

She laughed. "I feel the same way!"

"You do??" I thought I was the only one. Sometimes I feel like a brute. I blame it on my size and strength, but it's not about that at all. It's energetic. When I meet a woman who seems to live from her feminine energy, whose strength lies in nurturing or seducing, in the sensual and in feelings rather than in reason and in logic, I feel both attraction and envy and rage and contempt.

I don't know why I do this polarizing thing to myself and others--assume that if a woman is in her feminine goddess aspect then that means there isn't room for the two of us, and so I have tot ake on the masculine role. It fits in with another tendency I have, which is whenever anyone expresses a quality I take on its opposite. I don't know why I am so oppositional--a positive answer would be that it's a balancing tendency, to make sure all qualities are represented. A truer answer might be that it's a scarcity model--there's only so much beauty or womanliness or strength or whatever to go ahead, so if you're owning it, I'll have to own something else.

I'm not saying any of this is rational. I'm just saying it comes up. And working with another woman, it comes up more. Which is a great reason to work with other women. I get along well with men, for the most part, and/but I find our interactions don't challenge my deepest self-inquiries the way women do. Men are good friends and wonderful supporters. Women are mirrors, with all the honesty and ego that that implies.

Tomorrow I'm going with Carla to the Vintage Expo to look for a wedding dress--it doesn't have to be traditional wedding-y, just a nice dress. the clothes in Evening were from the fifties and I love those styles.

I got with Paul McCartney last night. I don't know how this happened. I was always a John girl.

We respect each other's boundaries. That's the cool thing about our relationship. I always called him "Sir Paul." It's part of the thrill.

He had admired my prowess in self-defense and wanted a private training session. He needed help dealing with the papparazzi.

I showed up at his apartment lugging a big sack of equipment--padded bricks, punching mitt, padded helmet, knee pads. Oh, and one of the guys, one of the model muggers, to help me teach.

I must say I looked good. Trim and fit and collegiate. And I felt quite young and frisky. Sir Paul wants to get sweaty with me? Bring it on.

Then it began to grow light around the edges of the curtains. C got up and dressed for work. I turned over, and the cat was snoring.

I've been under the weather since Death Flu three weeks ago--what a great phrase "under the weather is," it describes the feeling exactly. So there is not much scintillating to report. But we did get to see The Wrestler last Saturday night and I was so moved by Mickey Rourke's performance--the broken gentleness, the manliness, the ease with his body and those of the other wrestling guys, contrasted with the incredible discomfort and harshness of life outside the ring. I had never been interested in Wide World of Wrestling, had only glimpsed it when turning on the TV to pop in a video, but this movie is about a man's relationship with his own body, and what happens when that body betrays him. I've never seen such a physical performance before, or one in which the physical and the emotional are so married.

Again--the character is not someone you want for a boyfriend or father--even for a friend--but the empathy is complete. I am thinking right now about the difference in empathy between a writer and an actor. A writer just has to describe a character's feelings and thoughts, an actor has to embody them. I read an interview with Kate Winslet where she said she had resistance to entering her character in the Reader. She didn't like the woman. Fair enough. But she did it anyway, because it is her work. It is not the artist's work to judge, it is the artist's work to enter.

I think it may have been not just that she didn't like the woman, but that the pain she was in was unbearable. I think about the people I have been unable to empathize with and wonder if it is because their pain was just too painful for me. It might not have to do with quantity of pain (as if that could be measured,) but the particular type of pain I found unpalatable.

I keep working with this issue of empathy--artistic, personal, physical, emotional. I just finished reading The Reader by Bernhard Schlenk--wanted to read the book before I saw the movie. The book is fantastic and walks that slippery tightrope where we are not asked to condone the actions of a Nazi guard but to understand the human being who made them. I don't know exactly how the writer pulled off this feat, but he made me look deeply within my fairly self-righteous soul and find more compassion there than I had dreamed possible.

Ruth and I were talking about my experiences at the demonstration. I told her I could not abide the counter-demonstrators, and could not bring myself to "dialogue" with any of them. (One sweet young gay man, who was standing near me, talked about how his mother talks to her Bible Study group about him being gay, and how it's not a sin. I can't imagine having a mother who goes to that kind of Bible Study and being okay with it. This young man, raised Catholic, also has a brother who converted to Mormonism and regards him as a sinner, although he says he still loves him. I can't imagine still being in relationship with someone who felt that way about me. I admired him for his calm, loving, open-mindedness. This young man did, in fact, engage some of the Christian protesters in meaningful dialogue. Better him than me.

Ruth said that even though she is lesbian, she could easily put herself into the shoes of someone homophobic. She could imagine how the world would look through that person's eyes; someone who felt that the stability of their family and their world was threatened by gay sex and love. I said I couldn't imagine myself inside the skin of such a person.

We talked about the limits of empathy. Empathy is the artist's instrument. Especially writers and actors, I think. Singers too. Maybe musicians can get away without it, or painters, but a writer or an actor needs to be able to step inside the skin of another human being. (Then why are many writers and actors narcissistic personalities? I don't know.)

In addition to being a writer, Ruth is also a depth psychologist, and cousels people who come from different backgrounds than she does. So empathy is doubly important to her. She says she is empathic to a fault, but the one trait she finds it hard to relate to is the deliberate desire to hurt someone else: violence, or cruelty.

I immediately said I could relate to this trait all too well. I can understand the man who is so jealous of his wife or girlfriend that he beats her or kills her. I don't condone such behavior, but I recognize that I have the rage-beast within me also, and I can say "There but for the grace of God go I."

I have in fact written poems of empathy for Greg Withrow who was a member of the American Nazi Party (since reprogrammed and now an anti-racist,) and Saddam Hussein. After 9/11 when everyone was pumped up on hating the evil terrorists, I couldn't find it in my heart to hate them. I could see that under their system of thinking, raised in the circumstances they were raised in and brainwashed the way they were, that what they did was "right" in their own eyes, even brave and courageous. I could imagine myself raised in a refugee camp to hate, envy and fear the West, and being inculcated from a young age, that I might do the same.

The thing is, I told Ruth, I cannot empathize with these anti-gay Christians. If I were a better writer, a better person, I could imagine myself into the mind of a woman who gets on a bus or a plane in Salt Lake City to come down to San Francisco, den of iniquity, and try to stop the cancer of same-sex love and marriage from spreading.

I should be able to do that. I have corresponded with people on Death Row, I have written from the point of view of men, of people of different races and ages and circumstances than myself. Was it Gerturde Stein who said, "Nothing human is alien to me?" Someone said it, and I agree with that remark. I have counseled drug addicts who did terrible things while under the sway of their habit, I turn on The Sopranos and see myself reflected in Tony Soprano--but. I cannot imagine myself inside the mind of someone who thinks that two gay people marrying will somehow violate her own marriage.

"I should be able to write a short story from this person's point of view," I told Ruth. "But I'm sure that I can't do it without sounding as if I'm stereotyping--without, in fact, stereotyping that person. I can empathize with violent fuck-ups. I have fucked up plenty myself. But I can't under any circumstances imagine myself as so spiritually smug as Christians who are sure they are going to Heaven and others are going to Hell."

"Can't or won't?" asks Ruth. "I think you have some resistance there."

She's right, I do have resistance. So I set myself this goal. I need to write something convincing, empathic, and non-stereotyping, from the point of view of the Other I despise most--conservative Christians. I will do research if necessary. I will enlarge the place of my tent.

So, yesterday I went into the city with C. He had an appointment; I went to a rally in support of overturning Prop 8, the mean vicious anti-gay marriage proposition that was foisted on California's ballot by a well-organized crew of Mormons and other right-wing ultra-Christian nut jobs, many of whom were from out of state. (I heard that the Mormon church in Utah contributed 20 million to the campaign of disinformation that was mounted in California, targeting especially churches of color, but I can't substantiate that figure.)

Yesterday California's Supreme Court started hearings on a motion to overturn that proposition. The rally was outside the Supreme Court building at 350 McAllister. I have been to a lot of rallies and demonstations before, but never one where we were so intermingled and face-to-face with our opponents. Usually there is separate turfs; over here the demonstrators, over there the counter-demonstrators. But we were all jammed up together, the "No On 8" crowd, with our signs and banners, cheek by jowl with the homophobes with their signs, which read things like "Gays Are An Anti-Species," and "A Moral Wrong Cannot Be A Civil Right," and "Marriage = One man plus one Woman."

I was looking for my friend Jonathan, who said he's be there, but I couldn't find him. Perhaps he was across the street watching the proceedings in court on a giant Tele-tron. I was singing. Some young guys on our side had a guitar and we sang old spirituals and Beatles songs: I Wanna Hold Your Hand, Let Us Be (with apologies to george Harrison,) All Ya Need is Love, etc. I ended up holding up one side of a big banner. The other pole was held by a cute young gay chiropracter with a magnificent tenor voice. When he sang lead on Stand By Me, you could practically see the music pouring out of him. Beautiful.

I liked it a lot better when we were singing than when we =were shouting. When we were singing the other side fell silent and listened. We had some good voices in our group and some sweet harmonies. When we were shouting "No on 8!" they took up their shouting "Yes on 8!" and soon the two sounds belended together. They were composed of the same oppostional angry energy.

I got interviewed by a reporter from the NY Times. Here's the link. I'm one of the talking heads below the article. I was tired when we started and by the time we got back from the city I was exhausted. Three hours of standing on pavement in the middle of that energy plus walking around the city afterwards with C looking for a place to eat left me footsore and limp. But I was glad to have shown up. This issue may come down to numbers again, and every body counts.

http://www.nytimes.com%2F2009%2F03%2F06%2Fus%2F06marriage.html%3F_r%3D1

Today it rains off and on, off and on. I can't believe that after all this good soaking we've gotten, we are still in a state of drought, but them's the rumors. Last week, I was driving my Little Sister home after a fun though messy bout of making chocolate chip cookies. She was a bit sleepy, lolling in the front seat of the car, then she asked, "Ali-Al, why do it stop and start like that?"

"What--the rain?"

"What makes it stop raining and then start again?"

Scientific knowledge is not my strong suit. If she had asked, "Where did Sylvia Plath do her undergraduate work?" or "Which painters influenced Frank O'Hara?" or "What is enjambement?" then we would have been cooking with gas. Instead I resorted to what someone had told me when I was seven:

"The clouds are like paper bags full of water and when they bump into each other, the soggy bags break and the water falls down on us and that is rain."

She was not impressed by this, and rightly so, since C later told me it was inaccurate. "Maybe I should handle the meteorological inquiries," he suggested.

"Why do it start and then stop again?" she repeated until I had to say, honestly, "I don't know."

And there you have it: I don't know. Gerry asked me what I thought of the stimulus package, whether it will work or not. I don't know. Where will the good jobs be and will I get one? I don't know. Will Love Shack get taken by a small press soon, or will I be sending it to contests for the next eight years as I did with See How We Almost Fly? I don't know. How much money am I making this year now that my poetry in the schools work has mostly dried up? I don't know. What will I do for work in the next part of my life? I don't know.

I keep repeating to myself what Carla says in circumstances that are harder and more out-of-control than the economy: My positive attitude is unconditional. It does not hinge on specific outcomes, desired or not. It is intrinsic; it comes from within. That's the only way to go. All the rest is weather. It rains, it stops raining. It starts raining again. C says this has something to do with the winds blowing the clouds around. I don't know why.

It's STILL raining...a good, deep, soaking rain. This has to make a difference in the drought. It rained all weekend and C worked on the in-law which is sparkling like a gem. New plumbing. he installed all the fixtures we bought last summer--the new, low-flush toilet (Okay, you know you are middle-aged when you get excited about a new toilet. It is one of the ten warning signs.) New brushed-chrome faucets, new lights. We still have to get curtain rods, and clean the place up and there are a few possibly-leaky spots, but otherwise...I'm afraid to even say it out loud...the project may be FINISHED!!

I sat on the couch and worked on Love Shack. I can't quite believe how quickly this book came together. Less than four months from conception to what feels (today) like finished.

Friday night I performed with Wing It! Phil asked me to improvise a poem and I did one about my mother. the theme of the show was To Tell The Truth. I don't talk about my mother in Wing It much. that is, I don't tell stories about her. I don't know how to convey her. A thousand specific details wouldn't do it.

She loved Latin and the etymology of words. She corrected people's grammar and their approximations of time constantly: it wouldn't do to say "It's a quarter to two," if it was really twenty till. You couldn't get away with saying you were fifty--you were fifty and a half. She ate her food by even numbers: four Oreo cookies, six almonds. She was scared that when she died she wouldn't really be dead and would be buried alive. She loved the theatre and took me to see plays. She loved storytelling and was fiercely anti-war yet she enraged me by remarking wistfully of Barbara Bush Sr: "At least all her children come home for the holidays."

She seemed to me always to be hiding something: her true self. Maybe she was, or maybe, as my father said, "This is her true self." I never believed his version. I thought it was a case of she had hidden it so well from others that when she needed it, she couldn't find it.

She worked hard. Baskets of laundry washed and folded, casseroles defrosted, children taught. In her heyday, she was thin, strong, efficient, beautiful without make-up or fashion, and a little forbidding. Her dark curly hair was cut short. She had large dark eyes, a luminous smile, and beautiful legs. She used to say "Energy begets energy."

She didn't get her driver's licence until she was forty, and she was never a good driver. I remember being in the car with her when she stepped on the gas instead of the brake and we plowed into the car ahead of us. It was at a stop light and no one was going very fast.

She got herself out of Brooklyn and into a house into the green suburbs where she was busy and lonely. When I was an adolescent I blamed her for her loneliness and isolation. I thought it was her fault for being untrusting and needing to be better than everyone. Now that I am middle-aged and lonely myself with some of the same tendencies, I understand better.

Her marriage to my father worked for a long time and then it didn't. they stayed together anyway. He was loyal when she got sick with M.S.--not a saint, but loyal and responsible. She was difficult. She had an inner flame, a radiance, that drew people to her, strangers. All the policemen in town knew her, all the waitors in Chinese restaurants, all the shop clerks. She was a bit of a minor celebrity in Lexington, and also a character. She'd go cruising down in her wheelchair wearing the floppy blue sun hat I gave her, to Walgreen's where she would torture the clerks with a fistfull of coupons.

She had a habit of buying things and then returning them. A good friend of hers said "She had a whim of iron." A great description of her.

Justice was important to her. She had a chldlike quality and always wanted things to be fair. She played no favorites among her four children, although some of us were easier for her to raise than others. After she had had us, after we had grown up and turned into the real people that we are, she could not quite believe we were hers. Maybe all parents feel this way, I don't know. It is a miracle. but in her there was also a radical detachment. This helped her in some ways; it also hurt her.

I never really felt like her daughter. the closest we ever came was one night when we were supposed to go to the movies together and ended up in the car, talking about hour relationship. She confessed that she had not felt like my mother either. It was as if both were playing a part. It was the closest I ever felt to her because it was honest. Later, she denied it.

So Friday night I told some little tiny piece of this in a poem. Theron played the flute and he anchored me with tender eye contact. And there were dancers. Afterwards, people sighed. I felt quite raw. I felt like it had been a terrible downer of a poem.

After the show, several people told me it was one of their favorite parts of the evening. Cynthia just wrote me to tell me she lloved that piece. It's one more lesson in the never-ending curriculum that what I think of my work--or my life, or myself--is not what other people see. I am always the harshest critic, especially when it comes to intimacy. I wish I could change that. I wish I could realize that it is okay to tell the truth. As it is I tell the truth and then suffer emeotional fall-out afterwards. Not so much from the outside world--although sometimes--but mostly from myself. Nevertheless, I keep telling it.

First pink blossoms on the peach tree outside the kitchen window. Reward for weeks of rain.

It would be inaccurate to say I was sick as a dog last weekend. Dogs don't complain. Not to be dramatic or anything, but this flu made me feel like I was being crucified. I hurt so much I couldn't even read. That was probably a good thing. I lay on the bed and listened to Mozart while C looked at me pityingly and occasionally brought glasses of water and Ny-Quil.

I developed a taste for Ny-Quil. The miny flavor's not bad.

Today I am breathing through both nostrils. My body is so glad to be moving once more, going up and down stairs, any little thing.

I am still finding more poems for Love Shack, and more reaons to procrastinate doing anything else. Coffee tastes sweet. Everything tastes sweet. I am so grateful to be healthy again.

The other night I kept dreaming, "The rabbi is coming! The rabbi is coming!" In my dream I was living in Harvard Square, where I lived when I married my first husband. I had to get home in time for this appointment with the rabbi. But I couldn't find my street in Oakland, much less my house, because I was in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Nevertheless: "The rabbi is coming, the rabbi is coming!" I kept repeating, in a state of great excitement, until I woke up.

Yesterday evening, the rabbi came to our house. I like it that he's slight and unassuming and used to be a labor lawyer. He wears a little knit cap all the time, and carries a laptop. We talked for several hours, drinking tea and nibbling on edamame, crackers and hummus, home-made cookies, store-bought cookies, dolmas, tamari almonds, dried peaches, olive tapenade, and strips of sweet red peppers (I wonder if he gets served basically the same food at all the Bay Area liberal families he visits: vegetarian, Mediterranean, "safe" in terms of kosher, dairy-free, wheat-free...)

We talked about our upcoming wedding; he gave us an overview of the structure for Jewish weddings, and told us which elements we could re-invent or re-imagine (just about all of it, as it's Renewal.) I had never had that kind of concentrated private attention from a rabbi before. He asked us in a completely non-judgmental way about our spirituality. It was clear that any answer we gave would be acceptable.

I won't write about C's answers, because they are private to him. For myself I don't feel God as anthropomorphic, except that sometimes I think God is the aggregate of all consciousness everywhere, including the consciousness of rocks and trees. I kind of imagine God as a big cloud, maybe a glittering soft cloud of connection, like the cloud of gnats that buzz around a Redwood tree on a hot hazy day, only not annoying, like gnats. (Well, maybe sometimes annoying.) I experience God in the whirlwind, in the breeze, in anything airborne, swarms of bees, dust storms. Not that those are necessarily signs of God's presence, but I imagine God's presence to feel like that, something enveloping and yet not concrete--something you can sense but not grasp.

I didn't say all this at our meeting. I said that my concept of God had changed, was changing over the years.

The rabbi said, "Years? That's very stable of you. My concept of God changes from hour to hour."

He asked us to write a vision statement for our relationship. Later we'll have more writing assignments to fulfill. I got excited about writing a vision statement. (Lists! Goals! You're singing my song!) Then I realized I don't know exactly what a vision statement is. I googled it. The web site How to Write a Compelling Vision Statement says: "A vision statement is a vivid idealized description of a desired outcome that inspires, energizes and helps you create a mental picture of your target. It could be a vision of a part of your life, or the outcome of a project or goal.

Vision statements are often confused with mission statements, but they serve complementary purposes.

The best vision statements for result areas describe outcomes that are five to ten years away, although some look even further out..."

I am so glad we are doing the wedding this way: consciously. Of course there will be all the brouhaha about a chupah, a dress, and C's clothes, and rings, and flowers, and food, and music. Logistics and aesthetics. But this is the heart of why we're even bothering to get legally married, so we can ask and consider and commit to these questions: what do we intend to do with our time here together, and with this love which we were lucky enough (and bruised enough) to cherish when we found it?

The other thing he told us which moved me so much was that since Prop 8 passed, he doesn't want to sign our marriage certificate. Since he can't perform that function for the gay couples he marries, he doesn't want to do it for the straight ones--it would be discriminatory. If Prop 8 is still in effect by summer--which I hope it won't be--we'll go down to City Hall and get a marriage certificate signed there, and then do the religious ceremony at synagogue, just like any gay couple in our congregation.

This feels right to me. I already feel badly about being able to enjoy the privilege of legal marriage which my gay friends are excluded from. I am glad our rabbi has integrity and is committed to fairness as we are.

In writing news: I was going great guns on Love Shack until the weekend of studying drug addiction issues kind of knocked the wind out of my creative sails. I am used to being fairly casual and practical about my writing and sometimes I forget how delicate the process is. I am going to see Carla today and she's going to try and download the B-52s song Love Shack for me to listen to. I hope that gets me back into it.

Meanwhile I rewrote the self-defense essay again, for the thousandth time, and am working on the rewrite of the Carla article (again, for the thousandth time.) And Tim wants to re-enter the process of recording my hot tub play as a radio play, so we'll work on that in a couple of weeks.

Rain for days now, soaking, drenching, gentle and then hard, stopping and starting, heavy downpour to light drizzle, thoroughly wet through and through, mud puddles, backyard swamps, RAIN. We keep repeating, "We need it," to each other through shivering lips. Everyone says it. the cashier at the grocery store, my Little Sister's grandmother, my friends and I:

"We need it, we need it. Thank God for the rain. They've been predicting the worst drought in twenty years for California, maybe this will mitigate it."

Yes, it's great for the thirsty earth, for the dry garden, for my neighbor's corn, for the vast orchards of asparagus and lettuce, for the peach trees, for the depleted reservoirs which were showing their bones when we drove up to Ashland last summer, under the heavy pall of smoke from two hundred separate forest fires all around the state. And when I read about what's going on in Australia, I want to run outside naked in the downpour, to splash and shout, "More, more more!"

It feels like hope, it feels like a reprieve from all the doom and gloom of the economic news. It feels like Obama winning the election.

On the other hand, it's a bitch to drive in. Friends who are in wheelchairs are more housebound and hampered than usual. And my feet are cold.

Sunday was the second day of classes for the certificate in counseling drug addicts. I love the class--the teacher knows his stuff, he is expert yet humble and real. There's TONS of material, more than I can assimilate, and there's all the initial stress of finding a strange campus, parking, wandering around looking for the right building--in the rain. Sunday I stupidly left my car lights on when I rushed into class, and when I came out my battery was dead. This necessitated waiting around in the rain and growing darkness for campus police to come give me a jump. I was chilled to the bone, but when I finally got home C had made his incomparable black bean soup with chunks of pork.

And class, as I said, is good. For one thing it's just good to be learning something new. There's so much to assimilate in this field: family dynamics, legal stuff, psychology and physiology of addiction, different kinds of therapeutic interventions and protocols. It's very practical, measurable and results-oriented--you can measure success by the addict not relapsing. That works better for me than being the kind of therapist with patients who just have general malaise. (Can you imagine treating Woody Allen? I'd jump out the window. Of course, I'd land in a big pile of dough, so maybe it wouldn't be that bad.) It's also, embarrasingly, the kind of therapy client I always was. How can you tell if you're getting better or if you're just getting better at complaining? It's so subtle and elusive.

Sitting in class for seven hours a day, listening, is hard. The other students are mostly working in the field--there's a nurse, a couple of therapists who want to learn more about addiction issues, and some social workers. Some are in recovery themselves.

The main fear I had going into this was that because I don't have an alcohol or drug problem myself, I would be less qualified than someone who had real exprience of recovery in their life. I have struggled with addictions, but most of them have been behavioral--co-dependecy, addiction to procrastination, playing computer games, and sugar. The teacher, who is in recovery himself, said that the counselors who helped him the most were not former addicts themselves. The crucial ingredient is caring and believing, not one's own personal history.

I did find that in the last ten years or so my attitudes have shifted. I am more conservative than I used to be. When I was working with addicts in the nineties, I was inclined to see the face of angels in each and every derelict. I got enthralled with the drama and the romance of the stories and was a bit starry-eyed and overcome with the meaningfulness of it all. Now I feel more anger and exhaustion at the waste. I am more sympathetic to the people around the addict, and less inclined to buy into the charm of larger than life personalities.

The teacher showed us a movie called Shattered Spirits with Martin Sheen playing the alcoholic father of a classically dysfunctional family. The movie was a bit corny, but it hit the marks very accurately in terms of the unpredictability (yet predictability) of the father's rages, and the children's different responses to it.

There was the heroic child, the daughter who did everything right and took over parental responsibilites. The scapegoat was the middle son who acted out, got poor grades, and was made to bear the brunt of the father's rages. The youngest was the "lost child," introverted, solitary, living in an imaginary world. I saw aspects of myself and of friends and people I have known. But mostly I just wanted to slug the alcoholic father. I had little compassion for him. Perhpas it's my age--women with declining hormones get less empathic and more irritable--but as the credits rolled and the classroom lights went on, I saw many of my classmates were wiping away tears. I was fuming and wanted to swim 20 laps. Interesting.

The teacher was honest when I raised this point and said that inside of every addict lived Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. They are all--and of course, we are all--capable of evil or greatness. It's a primal question, a primal problem, just made more stark and dramatic by the choice the addict faces about whether to put booze or drugs into his body. If I drink a glass of wine, my morality and ethics do not hang in the balance. I don't risk turning into another person, someone so ugly I would rather die than be her. But the addict does face that.

On the other hand, I have faced ugliness within myself, and sometimes watched, horrified, as a part of my mind and psyche that is capable of thinking terrible, destructive mean thoughts, let itself be heard. I do live cognizant of my own shadow. It's pretty dark. I am capable of hatred and vengeance, of pettiness and meanness and grudge-holding, of bitterness and withholding. I'm grateful I don't act out of it much. When I do let slip, I feel terrible. But there it is. Part of being human.

Because I was in class all weekend, I saw my Little Sister yesterday. We made chocolate chip cookies, a la a seven-year-old. She loved squishing the gooey mass of dough between her fingers and getting flour all over my pants and sweater, all over the table and floor, over everything. She insisted on making one huge "cookie" which turned out surprisingly well once we had cut it into tiny chunks. then we watched Pride, a better-than-I-expected movie with Terrence Howard playing a swim coach. Watching the fine rippling bodies of the young swimmers was a great motivator for me to get back into the pool.

I'm reading Exit Ghost by Philip Roth--my Dad sent it to me. Dad loves Roth. I wasn't so enthusiastic--I read the first of the Zuckerman trilogy, when he's a young man, meeting his idol, Lonoff, and liked it in spite of myself. The second one, not so much. It felt too solipsistic, too much of the writer writing about sitting around isloated in his own study--and the guy is so sexist and so in love with his own sexism. It's hard to get over that. But he does make beautiful intelligent complex literate sentences and his take on America--or a certain slice of it--feels accurate and vivid.

My discomfort with Roth is personal and I own it--I don't want to ever be like him, solitary, self-absorbed in a hall of reflecting mirrors. (He's great at narrative, but all his characters sound just like him.) And I suppose I see a side of myself that gets so obsessed with my own work, my own process, that is capable of that kind of narcissism, and I recoil from it.

In the second Zuckerman book, the one I didn't like, Zuckerman the writer-hero is suffering from some mysterious pain. By the end of the book he is in the hospital, finding some measure of relief in self-forgetfulness, helping to tend the other patients and seeing that everyone suffers.

In this third one I'm reading now, the poor guy is seventy-one, incontinent and impotent because of prostate surgery a decade before. He's as lust-filled as ever, but I have more compassion for him. And his description of the zeitgeist of New York around the time of the 2004 election is fascinating, especially in light of how dramatically things have changed recently.

I reluctantly must admit that Roth is a major important great writer. I might not want any woman I care about to date him, but he did his work faithfully, and he's a pleasure to read. And here I have to admit another thing. I loved Junto Diaz' book Drown but I set aside Oscar Wao in order to read Roth. Oscar Wao isn't wowing me the way I thought it would. Yes, the language is amazing, but the story gets confusing. (Same for A History of Love by Nicole Krauss, which is a great novel, but I got lost halfway through the plot.) I'm not getting a clear enough narrative through-line to keep me turning the pages. There. I said it. Heresy.

Okay now I'm going to go swim because I sat on my butt eating raw cookie dough and popcorn all yesterday afternoon. And whenever it finally stops raining it will be close to summer, and sleeveless shirts and a wedding gown.

I just signed myself up for a core course in the Chemical Dependency Certification program at a local college. My first step towards moving into counseling work again. I have doubts about this--will I like it? Will I be bored? Will it be a waste of time and money? Are there any jobs out there? But I have been trying to get my butt into graduate school for twenty years now--longer--twenty-eight--yikes! And I am so interested in the brain and how it works and all the things that afffect it. So, here goes.

It's a program designed for working adults, so that means weekends--C and I won't get our lazy wonderful Sunday mornings together--but he supports me taking this new step. He knows that as the poet in the schools work has dried up I've been loathe to go out and beat the bushes to find or create more. It was great while it lasted, but I've been doing it for seventeen years or so, and free-lance work is unsatisfying in some ways because you never get to dig in and commit (of course you also avoid feeling trapped.) I am not enough of a hustler to make much money at it, I tend to lie back and let the gigs come to me. Sometimes they do, and sometimes they are great gigs, but I'm ready earn a steadier paycheck and use different parts of myself. (I realize that as the economy is melting down may not be the best time to invest in a career change, but hey. There will always be drug addicts.)

At the same time, work on the next book of poems continues apace. I have a few revisions to do, and a couple more pieces to write and then it's ready to start sending out. I need to turn my attention toward the book of essays next. I printed out and looked at the hard copy of the women's self-defense piece which I had thought was so wonderful only to discover that it wasn't. Wonderful. It was lame and stiff. How did that happen?

I'm about to run out the door to teach my Tuesday evening essay class. I love this class, so full and committed. Last Sunday I took my Little Sister and her real big sister out to San Ramon to hear the finalists for the Contra Costa Poetry Out Loud recitation contest. Several of my students were reciting--I wanted them all to win. I also loved the students I didn't coach. I still don't know who won because my little sister got so restless and squirmy that we had to leave at intermission--she just couldn't sit in her seat a moment longer.

I took them to Borders where she acted up even more, and after buying her a Barbie book (her choice, definitely not mine,) and her sister Twilight, took them home. It was raining on and off all day, which was great--we need it--but dates with my little sister always work better when we can be outside and she can run around.

Yesterday E and I walked along the Marina, talking about all kinds of things, plans, family, travels, houses, partners. It was bright and cold and windy (it's colder today.) I gave her the latest version of the new book to read--of course it has changed a little since I gave it to her, I keep adding to it. I found out from the publisher that See How We Almost Fly will be published in the fall of this year--probably in October. Look for it then. Pearl Editions.

Gentle, fertile, life-giving rain. We woke to it this morning, drumming on the roof. It's continuing gray, and I don't mind. Let it rain, we need it. Already, my neighbor's tiny seedlings look slaked and grateful. I'm sitting here working on the love book: 45 pages and counting so far. I need a minimum of 48, so I'm almost there. Of course, they have to be 48 good pages, and coherent. I'd like it to be fuller than that, at least 50 or 55 pages actually. But you can't force poetry (you can't force anything.)

I'm liking this process of building a book, consciously, poem by poem, in a unified way. It's satisfying to have a theme around which the poems can coalesce.

This past week I coached a couple of the winners of the school-wide Poetry out Loud contests; this Sunday is the county-wide competition. I'll go and bring my Little Sister--along with a coloring book, crayons, and fried pork rinds to keep her happy. Meanwhile, C reminds me of the March 1 deadline for the book of essays which I should be working on. And the new play...

***********************************************************************************

This was my entry. I published it and went back to the poems. A gray day, quiet, the house quiet, just putting one line after another, occasionally emailing a poem to Ruth for her critique. Either she's getting soft in her old age or I'm really on a roll here, because she's been liking the poems I've been sending her--a lot. But still, nothing special.

"I have a very boring life," I told my essay class last Tuesday, only half-joking. "I get up, I roll over to the computer, I drink coffee, I write, I get the mail."

The phone rang. It was Marilyn Johnson of Pearl Editions. I won their poetry prize this year. See How We Almost Fly will finally be published!!!

I screamed in that poor lady's ear. She laughed. She's a poet herself, she understands. I was too excited to ask any of the relevant questions: when will it come out? Will there be any readings? I wonder about distribution. How do they get their books out?

Mostly I'm just so relieved. I called C at work and he was excited for me--champagne with dinner tonight. And I know the ritual I want to do with him. I want to take out the lists and lists and lists of contests to which I have submitted this book and just show him--just have him witness--how many there were. I want him to see, and I want me to see too. In fact, I want to count them up. Eight years.

If I am anything to anyone reading this blog, let me stand as a monument to persistence. Fourteen years of personals ads and blind dates and un-blind dates (which may as well have been blind) before I met my love, my life partner. I honestly don't know why it had to be so hard or take so long. My friends say I wasn't ready before, but I certainly felt ready. I was ready back in 1995! On the other hand, if I had succeeded in my quest, what adventures I would have missed along the way (but what other adventures I would have had.)

I don't know why things have to take the time they take, why some stuff comes so easily and a lot of it has to be worked for, sweated for--and in the end there's always that element of chance. This book has been good enough to be published for several years now--the individual poems that were in the ms were published, many of them had won prizes. It came in as runner-up finalist in several contests, but it never won; it was the proverbial red-headed stepchild. I loved it, but I was beginning to doubt--maybe it's just too raggedy, too inconsistent, about too many things at once. Why can't I write a book that's about all one subject, like Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red, or that book by what's her name, the Pulitzer prize winner who won the Pulitzer Prize? Why do I have to be so all over the place?

And this is how it happens. Athletes go to the Olympics and either it's their day or it isn't. The judge likes the gymnastics routine or he doesn't. The audience comes out on a rainy night to see the play, or they stay home and watch Netflix. You go to the dance and you either meet the right partner or you don't. But you have to keep going to the dance--or doing something--or nothing happens.

Was it the right dance, this contest route? Sometimes I think I got addicted to the quest. I passed some kind of point of no return where not only did I not give up, it was as if I couldn't give up. The quest had taken on a life of its own. I hope this next project happens more quickly, more organically. This next book, the love book. How great would it be to just create things and hand them over to the production people and go on to creating the next thing instead of having to be an administrator for one's own work for years and years. But whether it happens or not, I'll be here at my desk, drinking coffee, looking at the mail, putting one line after the other.