Christopher told me he was going to take me on a mystery date, and then let it slip that it was going to be to an exhibit on the history of the screwdriver. I was all excited about that when lo and behold, the car pulled up in front of a movie theater playing Bright Star.

What a beautiful movie. I predict that Abby Cornish will at least be nominated for Best Actress, that Kerry Fox will be nominated for Best Supporting Actress, and that it will also be nominated in the categories of Screenplay, Cinematography and Costumes. It was a visual feast, and the writing and acting were wonderful. I loved the little pink-cheeked red-head who played Fanny Brawne's younger sister.

There was a naturalness and gentleness to the acting that was heartbreaking. I surprised myself by crying--a lot--as the lover's dreams of happiness slipped away. Keats knew all along, but she was young and naive and stubbornly clung to hope.

My favorite line in the movie was when Keats said, "A poet is the least poetical creature on earth," which is exactly what I think.

When we came home I got on Wikipedia and Google and read up a bit on the real history, which of course was more complicated and probably less pretty than what was portrayed in the movie. Fanny Brawne did marry someone else after Keats' death, and had three children, to whom she bequeathed the love letters he had written her. Keats himself had such a hard and painful life: poverty, abuse, lack of recognition, death of people close to him, illness, poverty, and loss, loss, loss. It's little wonder that he wrote "I have been half in love with easeful death." It must have come as a relief after so much suffering.

And with all that he wrote Ode on a Grecian Urn, and Bright Star and When I have fears that I may cease to be and all the rest of it. An astonishing legacy crammed into just a few years of life.

What is most poignant is that according to his biographers and the movie, he died "thinking himself a failure." If he only knew.

I remember reading La Belle Dame Sans Merci when I was a child--it was one of the poems in the Louis Untermeyer book I loved, the Child's Golden Book of Poetry--and I loved it and responded to its strong rhythms even if I didn't understand it completely.

I was so touched at C's selflessness--deep in his heart of hearts I suspect he may have preferred the history of the screwdriver--but he manfully and graciously made this date about doing what I wanted and we even ate Chinese afterward instead of pub food. So sweet.

And now I'm packing to go teach at Esalen this weekend which should be great fun only I wish i felt better physically. I've got a nagging tickle in the back of my throat which I hope doesn't erupt into anything worse. It will be an intense day Saturday--I'll teach four sessions starting at 8:30 a.m. and ending after 9 p.m.--but hopefully I'll get a chance to just hang in the hot tub with Angela and my other SUN friends. It would be really great if I could somehow squeeze a yoga class or a massage into the weekend, but probably not. probably I'll just try to get to my classes on time and stay hydrated.

Sunday night we are doing a reading in Marin. It will be at 7:30 at the the Mill Valley Community Center, 180 Camino Alto, for anyone reading this who wants to come.

And: shameless self-promotion time. See How We Almost Fly can be ordered from pearlmag.com/pearled.html.

I didn't sleep well last night, and got up early to see sunrise. Thick painterly smudges of gold and purple and mauve. A hummingbird in the guava tree. I sat there for a long time on the couch by the window, coffee cup in hand. Watched the world wake up, the deserted street begin to stir. A guy on a bicycle, wearing a florescent yellow vest, cycled slowly up the hill. My neighbor warmed up her car, then left for work. It's impossible to catch the exact moment when the sky changes from mauve to tea-colored to clear daylight.

Now I'm at work at my desk. Love Shack is complete and I'm sending it to another contest, only I've changed the name to Tiny Paradise. I spent the last week obsessing over a long poem I was building called "Cathedral." Besieged poor Christopher with drafts the moment he walked in the door. Sent drafts to Ruth, to my other friends. Nailed my butt to the chair revising and revising.

Now I think it's done. Done enough. It could always be better--everything could always be better--and there's always more to say, but comes a time to let things go. I realize this is the job of an aging artist. What's your narrow place, what is your Red Sea, what's your Promised Land? The narrowness for me is ambition that is too small, an overly tight focus on just accomplishing and achieving. I'm addicted to striving for that. I'm not proud to say it but it's true.

The Red Sea I have to cross is the wilderness of the work itself, surrendering to the process, really letting myself go as deep and far into my subconscious mind as I can bear, as I have courage for. That is scary but exhilarating.

The promised Land I used to imagine was publication, minor fame, making it onto the radar screen of the general culture, earning a seat at the big kid's table when it came time to discuss the interesting questions. That's what i wanted. I still want that, honestly--I do. But I'm thinking that perhaps the Promised Land is something quite other than whatever my ego imagines it to be. Perhaps the Promised Land is just a feeling of connection to all people, something that, ironically, success might prevent one from feeling. Success could be great, but it could also be isolating. Anyway, success is success. Connection is connection. They are not the same thing.

I am still figuring out what the Promised Land is to me.

I told my essay writing students to take themselves on artist dates, a la Julia Cameron, but I haven't done that for myself in ages. I've been waiting around passively to see Bright Star, the movie about Keats, which Christopher doesn't have time for, instead of just taking myself to the movies the way I used to do when I was single. So today's the day, reward for a task completed.

This last weekend Wing It! had a series of three concerts where we performed for the 20th anniversary of the company. It was very sweet and deep. Beautiful things happened at each concert, and each one was completely unique, being improvised. I feel so lucky and grateful to be part of the company, to have so many people to love, to be able to be in long-term relationship with such fine souls. Despite--or maybe because of--our differences.

None of my closest relationships have been conflict-free. Christopher and I are a great pair, but we're so different in our styles, temperaments, strengths and weaknesses that it's funny. One of the things that unites us is mutual sarcasm, stubbornness, and fiestiness. Also, he told me last night that he spent a year immersed in Bach, thinking of little else. This was a propos of my asking him about the influence of church music on his composition.

This relates to Wing It! because for so long I've had such a hard time accepting that I am indeed nestled into a group comprised mostly of church-going Protestants, a surprising number of whom are or have been ministers. I just could not wrap my head around that. Now I'm married to a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant and I so appreciate the virtues he has which come from that background; he's hard-working, humble, idealistic, and has great boundaries. I married my greatest teacher. Go figure.

So too, with me and Wing It!--it's not perfect, but it's very good. I'm glad even for the painful parts which shove me right up against my most alienated Jew self. I'm grateful for the opportunity to play and keep playing, to move through states, to keep getting a little better (hopefully,)to keep stretching and growing.

Today the lead story in the New York Times is about homeless youth. Kids as young as 11 and 12 are out on the streets because of the recession. Families are stressed and losing their homes; there's not enough space or money or food. Domestic violence is on the rise. The paper said perhaps the most tragic thing is how hard the kids work to elude capture by social workers whom they imagine are seeking them, when the sad fact is that parents often don't even report the kids missing. No one is even looking for them. They are truly invisible.

I think about the people I know and know of who are trying everything in their power to get pregnant--who are doing IVF and hormone treatments and investigating surrogates and buying other women's eggs in order to have a baby. How is it we live in a society in which one part of the population idealizes parenthood to such an extreme degree, while at the same time unwanted children starve or sell their bodies on the streets? How come millions are being spent every year trying to get menopausal women pregnant while there are real live born babies dying around the world of malnutrition and neglect?

C deals with those kinds of homeless and broken kids every day. Juvenile Hall sucks, but it's often the first place some of those children have ever experienced three meals a day. He brings home stories that are completely heartbreaking.

I can feel both sides of the issue; the longing for a pure unspoiled baby, a fresh start, a little bit of Heaven. The damage gets done so early, even in the womb. There are kids in the Hall who were crack babies, or have fetal alcohol syndrome. Who wants to take that on?

On the other hand, what happens to us as a country, as a world, when we prize the offspring of the affluent, and allow the children of the poor to die miserably in abandoned buildings?

We have been watching the HBO series Rome lately; C says he likes it even better than The Wire. I like it too but I don't know how much to trust the writing; were the ancient Romans indeed so similar to us? In their decadence and egotism and sexuality and sadism and voyeurism, they seem like a mirror of our own world, some of the least attractive parts of it. In the extremes of their classism, I think we are a bit different; at least now there is some lip service to the idea of universal human rights. At least most people nowadays agree that slavery is wrong.

But what do we practice? If someone doesn't have access to a warm bed, food, or medical care, does it really matter so much that he or she is not a slave?

One surprising thing that watching Rome is doing for me is in softening my attitude toward Christianity. I used to think that the Christian religion was a scourge on the earth, the cause of many of our current ills. But seeing the blood lust of Roman society before Christianity even arrived on the scene, I understand more how it was a kind of evolution, an improvement. Of course, once Rome got ahold of the religion, they turned it into something that was culturally close to what they had before; the Pope was just another kind of Emperor. The Crusades were another chance to rape and pillage. But the ideals of forgiveness and mercy, even if expressed as "We're better than you because we're Christian," were a step in the right direction. Even if we're not there yet. Even if we never get there.

Gandhi, when asked what he thought of Western civilization, is said to have answered, "I think it's a very good idea!"

Shameless self-promotion section: you can order See How We Almost Fly from www.pearlmag.com/pearled.html

The youngest grandchild was fourteen months old, toddling around like a drunken sailor, occasionally crawling under the glass-topped dining room table to get away from the fray. The oldest party-goer was my Dad's cousin Arthur, a tall thin 83-year-old flirt. In between were all the rest of us, eating cake, talking, laughing, doing a jig saw puzzle, wrangling nieces and nephews--"Lucy! Get down!"--and looking at the album of photos which we compiled for Dad's 75th.

He cried when he looked at all the old pictures, some of which he had even forgotten existed. There was our mother, dark-eyed and gorgeous and young, before the M.S., before the bad times. There we all were with our terrible '70s haircuts, up against the car with the sun in our eyes, squinting.

Dad was overcome and overjoyed. And he cried when I showed him the poem I wrote for him, which I tucked as a surprise into See How We Almost Fly. I really don't have words for how much I love my father. I can't convey the utter sweetness of this man who would do anything, give anything for his children. He shows me the roundness of a life well-lived, coming full circle, the children's children on his lap, the overspilling living room.

There was a freak early snow on the day we celebrated his birthday--earliest in the year in recorded history. I had brought my long underwear and I wore it, despite everyone's teasing--yes, I am a California wuss and I need to be warm. Christopher and I went out and ate pub food. I wanted him to taste real New England onion rings which are so delicious and about a jillion calories apiece. He liked the clam chowder and the fish chowder.

Monday, my birthday, we wandered around Newburyport, a scenic little fishing town that has become a tourist mecca. Looked in windows at stores selling ships in a bottle, looked at boats on the dilapidated wharf, ate seafood chili, and wandered under leafy tree-cathedrals. I had taught poetry workshops in a nephew's fifth grade classroom and a niece's kindergarten earlier in the week, so there was a little bit of everything: work, play, family, and couple time. The one thing there was no time or space for was writing, so now I'm back at it, back at my desk, looking at rough drafts for some new poems, the revision of an essay about remarriage, and of course the new play, The Recruiter. Trying to decide which thing to work on first. Poems win.

The weather has turned gray and cold, which is depressing for life but good for work. There must be so many great English writers because the weather there is so dismal; it's harder here in California where the outdoors is so glorious it seems really stupid to stay inside trying to put words in some pleasing order.

Here's what I've been seeing, reading, and thinking about lately: after an appropriate mourning period after finishing The Wire, which was the best show EVER, we are now renting ROME from Netflix, which is good; not quite as good as the Wire, but it has the added benefit of teaching you some ancient history.

Rome is bloody and violent in a casual way that makes The Sopranos look like Romper Room. Watching it I could understand how, in context of the times, Christianity would seem a better option; when contrasted with human sacrifice and animal sacrifice on a large scale, with torturing and killing slaves for entertainment, with rape and incest as common ways of passing the time, Christianity could be seen as a real improvement. (When the Emperor converted to Christianity, then Christianity itself became Roman-ized, in the form of Roman Catholicism, and the old values of empire and violence became part of the religion, but that's another discussion.)

Anyway, we watched the first two episodes with interest, and two more just arrived in the mail, so we'll keep up with it for a while. I wondered where the Jews were when all this history was going on, and marveled at our survival in such a bloody, bloody time. My friend Marci says it was Jews (Jewish slaves?) who built the Coliseum. How did we ever make it?

We also went to the Berkeley Rep last weekend and saw American Idiot, the Green Day musical. If I were twenty-five I might find it inspiring and moving; as a fifty-year-old I was irritated not to be able to make out the lyrics for the first third of the show. I also found myself thinking, "Hair was better." Which is, perhaps, an unfair comparison: that was then, this is now. American idiot represents the anomie and angst of the generation that came up under 8 years of Bush, Jr. So there's a lot of rage and hopelessness and flailing, which we can all relate to, but which, by itself, doesn't necessarily make for good theater. You need some plot or characters or something to hang it all on. There were many moments of beauty; there was some very fun dancing, and a lovely aerial ballet featuring four wounded soldiers; there were some good voices and some nice guitar work. But four days after seeing it, I retain not one line or note. There's nothing running through my head from it, it's like the proverbial Chinese meal--none of it stuck.

Last night I went to see The Pillow Man at San Jose Repertory Theater, a black comedy about the random torture and murder of children. It's a brilliant play; like a set of those nesting Russian dolls, stories within stories, opening up to more stories. Among other things the play asks the question, "If art arose in human beings as a response to the horror of suffering, if telling stories is a way we soothe ourselves from suffering, a way we make sense of it, then what price are we willing to pay for our stories? Is the suffering and death of innocents necessary to a world in order for theater to exist?"

As the play progressed and as the gruesome stories piled up, I was caught between laughter and horror. It was so over-the-top it was funny, and, well, as my companion (not C., another friend) said, "Slipping on a banana peel is funny." I was raised by a woman who believed that slipping on a banana peel is not funny--we were not allowed to watch The Three Stooges because she found the image of people hitting each other on the heads with hammers to be repellant. I'm fairly certain she would have hated the Pillow Man.

For myself, I'm torn; I wonder why we find violence so entertaining. Are we just like the Romans? Their gladiators really did suffer and die, while our actors are only pretending, but is there something in the human psyche that revels in the spectacle of other people's pain?

The Hindus think of all of this drama of life that we undergo as "lila" (not sure if I'm spelling that right)--God's play. We appear to suffer; we appear to die. In reality, they say, life is everlasting, and all these terrible things, wars, famine, sicknesses--are just illusions. Our souls are untouched by it all. But something about this whole human experiment calls for drama, and in drama you have to have the play of light and shadow, good and evil, life and death. Even if, underlyingly, it's all one, we need our illusions for the sake of, I don't know--education? The testing of one's mettle for the progress towards enlightenment?

Which begs the question: would God enjoy watching The Sopranos? Would He or She enjoy gladiator contests, or wars? What kind of a huge (sick?) mind would God have to have to be entertained by this stuff we call life?

Sorry, but this is what watching Martin McDonagh's work does to me. It opens up these weird cynical dark places in my brain that I am normally not in touch with. McDonagh wrote The Pillow Man, along with six(!) other plays in one year--actually in one nine-month stretch--when he was 24 years old. This is kind of inconceivable to me as a writer--it's a feat akin to running a marathon every day. On the one hand it shows what a person is capable of if he focuses, and he doesn't have anything else going on in his life, and if the weather is really shitty. On the other hand, what the--? How is anyone sane supposed to be able to compete with that?

All his plays are filled with images of torture, cruelty, sudden death, and the like. There's a real shortage of what we could call the feminine principle. And they are funny. And brilliant in their own way, although after I saw the Beauty Queen of Lenane I wanted to throw myself under a train. It was the most godawful depressing disturbing thing I had ever sat through--and I've sat through some bad poetry readings and a fair amount of bleak theater.

Anyway, I appreciated seeing The Pillow Man because there was so much to chew on, even though it was depressing, and even though Mary Zimmerman's Arabian Nights also dealt with the theme of story-telling and the never-ending story without making you want to go out a down a bottle of Prozac. I wished they would have cut about twenty minutes out of the script and had an after-theatre discussion--although we wouldn't have been able to stay for it, as it was a weeknight--because I think the real value in this kind of work lies not only in experiencing it, but mainly in digesting it--with other people. Theatre, unlike reading, is a communal act, and the fact that we were all assembled there to hear these unspeakable stories, and watch some of them acted out, and even to laugh at some of the horrors our world comes up with, is something worth acknowledging.

I'm also reading The Elegance of the Hedgehog, a wonderful novel that was recommended to me by one of my writing students last year. I'm loving it, reading slowly and savoring as I go.

I finished a draft of the Second Marriage essay for MORE magazine--at least that's who I intend it for, I hope they'll take it. They still are holding onto a 900-word piece I wrote earlier in the summer. The magazine industry has been hit so hard by the recession that many editors have been laid off, and advertising pages lost, which means less pages available for essays and memoirs. Which means for me, that it's taking three times as long to hear back about work I've submitted, and that essays which might once have been taken--like the piece on self-defense for women which was near and dear to my heart--are being rejected. Not enough pages, the magazine is too skinny to support the more eccentric work.

It may, big picture, be a good thing, politically and ecologically speaking, for some of these glossies to shrink or go under completely. It's probably for the good of the planet if Revlon and Cover Girl and the people who make Botox and spend millions promoting their unnecessary products fail. But for those of us free-lancers who cling to the undersides of capitalism--and I realize, yes, it's parasitic--(but it's also a way to sometimes get paid good money for writing)-- it's a loss of an outlet. Then again, there's the hope that other venues will spring up, maybe ones that are healthier for civilization as a whole.

Okay, shameless self-promotion: you can order my book of poems, See How We Almost Fly from www.pearlmag/pearled.html, or from Amazon.

It's beautiful, cool sunny fall weather, but there's a sadness in the changing of the season. We want to hold the light and we can't. Figs are hardening on the tree. Feral kittens nowhere to be found this morning, although the mama is coming around faithfully. C is healing well but still in some pain. And my book is HERE and I've been sitting at my desk thinking up strategies for shameless self-promotion, which is what's needed, but kind of embarrassing. I do want to sell the book. Eight years in the making, the work deserves whatever publicity I can get for it. At the same time, the poems in it are old to me; I'm more interested in what I'm working on now, or what I'm about to work on. Last poems for Love Shack. Finish the essay I started about second marriage and the book proposal. Finish The Recruiter. Get the three little one-act plays of Glitter and Spew produced, separately or together. And keep going deeper into the heart of the world, leaves and light and people.

See How We Almost Fly is officially here!!!

The books came two days ahead of schedule, in a big box, and they are beautiful!! If I were more tech-savvy, I would include a picture of the front cover to display, but you can see them (and, hopefully, order them) from my web site www.alisonluterman.com. Or you can go to Pearl Editions at www.pearlmag.com/pearled/html and order your copy there.!

I have to go drop off some copies for friends now....

Christopher came home Thursday night--weak, fragile, and in pain. I don't know how we got him up the stairs into our bed, but we did. God bless Gerry for staying with us through a long boring frustrating exhausting day at the hospital, trying to get a notary to come to C's bedside to authorize me to collect his car from the tow-yard ("But you're married," my friend Ruth said incredulously. "Yeah, you'd think that heterosexual privilege would count for something," I said. It doesn't. Everyone's trying to legally protect themselves from getting sued.)

C meanwhile, still couldn't keep anything down, and was throwing up and writhing in pain whenever he tried to sit up. Finally by the end of the day he managed to sit up and we got the back brace on him, then loaded him into a wheelchair and took him home. No discharge plan, no cane or walker, no thing. Good-bye and good luck.

He made it into the house on sheer determination alone, collapsed into bed and basically slept for the better part of two days, eating a very little at first and then gradually a little more. Friday he sat up incredibly s-l-o-w-l-y and carefully, and we got the back brace on. A trip to the bathroom was an Odyssey. But Saturday, he managed to walk all over the top floor and even venture downstairs. And today he's been puttering--slowly, cautiously, balancing between pain medication and the brace, but puttering. He's learning what he can and can't do in this new, recovering body, and--typical--he wants to be up and doing again.

It's bright and hot out and we've been sitting in the living room drinking coffee, eating figs from the tree, listening to Harry Reasoner and reading the Sunday Times. So simple and precious.

Last night I left him for a few hours in the care of a good friend and with his encouragement drove to Sacramento to hear No Nude Men Theater group read my play Glitter and Spew. It was about two dozen people, lots of very strong actors, a couple of other playwrights, and directors. They loved the play! They laughed, sighed, and there was a great discussion afterward which gave me ideas about how I could expand and improve the third section. Of course I felt critical as I heard it aloud--lots of places I wanted to fix. In particular I'm concerned about the balance of lyricism to "real" dialogue.

I read an interview with Sarah Ruhl (author of The Clean House and many other wonderful plays) who said that writing a play was writing poetry for the stage. That quote from her gave me permission to write heightened, poetic monologues for my characters; it was very freeing. I'm concerned though that it's easy for me to write "poetically" and that i shouldn't lean on that ability as a lazy substitute for character development or plot. So hearing the play aloud, I wanted to trim some of the fancier monologues. But Stuart, the director, said that he wouldn't change a thing from the first two short sections. The third one he said, does need more development.

It felt great to have the play read aloud, finally, and exciting to make connection with this talented crew. And it felt--I don't know--independent--a little lonely, but kind of good--to know that i could have both these halves of my life, but that I alone am responsible for balancing them--to work as an artist and also be a care-taker. It was a long drive back without radio reception; I listened to my CD of Carla singing, and also to the Roche Sisters. It reminded me of so many long empty moonlit road trips, with Alan and without him, and now with C and without him. Times in the car when you go without saying or even thinking much of anything for long stretches and then come to with a start, realizing you've been dreaming awake, and the road has flown by, and you are finally home.

Unfortunately, Christopher passed out from low blood sugar behind the wheel of his car. Fortunately, (thank god, thank God, thank God) he was not on the freeway at the time and only hit a chain link fence going very slowly. Fortunately, he received good medical care at the scene and got taken to a decent hospital. Fortunately, I was home when the phone call came and after an interminable wait in the waiting room at the ER, I could see him and be with him without restriction. And Ruth came, and sat with me, and brought salad and little tea candles, and lavender oil, and a book of spiritual poetry.

Unfortunately, he has compression fractures in his vertebrae and it hurts when he tries to move. Fortunately, there are drugs to deal with it--lots of good drugs.

He spent a lot of time today dozing, and having an MRI, and got measured for a back brace by a charming young man with one prosthetic foot.

"What happened?" I asked.

"Farm equipment when I was a kid," he said. "It sucks, but it's how I got into this line of work."

It was clear he really cared about what he did; he was careful and friendly and easy as he made lots of tiny black dots on Christopher's body with a magic marker. Unfortunately, Christopher will be in this brace for the next few months. Fortunately, this will not be permanent, and who knows? Maybe this whole incident has some good things to teach us--like we should meditate, or we'll start doing yoga together, or...

Unfortunately, this accident puts the kibosh on some of C's more ambitious plans for doing the solar paneling on our roof himself. On the other hand, who knows--there could be a silver lining to that too.

I'm feeling the kind of numb I get around hospitals. The smell. Last night as I drove home after spending about eight hours in the hospital--from 3:30 to 11:30 I was immensely comforted by the bare moonlit hills of Castro Valley, and the rich stink of skunk. Okay, it's not a "nice" smell, but it was real. Whereas hospitals have this fake baby-powder smell that is really masking some far ickier scents, and it just makes me anxious.

Fortunately, I could come home and sleep--sort of--in our own bed. The first time i have slept there alone since Christopher moved in two years ago. I am going to cook myself a bunch of garlicky string beans and eat them--an antidote to the abysmal, sugar-laden glop that is available at hospitals--and I admit, there's something about stress and trauma that makes me crave sugar. I feel like eating a king-sized box of movie candy and just disappearing into a PEOPLE magazine. (There was a reader's Digest Ann Rule true crime book at the gift shop which I bought for a dollar and have been reading--all about a dentist who killed his girlfriend and his wife. Very uplifting.)

I asked C how he felt about staying in the hospital one more night as he was dozing off into a morphine haze. "Well, they do have cable, " he murmured. "And then it's hard to beat the food..."

Before we found out exactly what happened, when I was sitting for that interminable hour and a half in the sitting room, imagining stroke, seizure, heart attack, I had told Ruth, "As long as his sense of humor is intact. If he can't walk, that will be a drag, but we'll manage. As long as he still has his sense of humor..."

He can feel all his toes and wiggle them and move his legs. It's just that his back seizes up when he tries to do anything more than that. And it's hard to see him in pain. I think I'll go say hi to the mama feral cat (who is still nursing, even though her babies are almost as big as she is.) Maybe pull a few weeds and eat something green. Then head back to the hospital again.

"How are things in the poem factory?" Christopher asks as he arrives home. I barely take my eyes off the screen.

"Just finishing up." I kiss him and shove a few pages under his nose. "Here, read this."

"Can I go to the bathroom first? Can I get a snack?"

"If you must."

For the past few--I don't know how long it's been, days? Weeks?-- the poems have been coming thick and furious. I've pulled apart the manuscript of Love Shack, eliminated a lot of weaker pieces that I see now were just place-holders, and replaced them with the new work which feels much stronger.

Of course that means the overall shape of the book is changing as well, bursting its bounds, like the fig tree in our front yard which I wouldn't let C prune back as hard as he wanted to last winter. Now she has completely taken over, threatening to put people's eyes out with branches that reach across the sidewalk, but oh, there are millions of figs. Enough for us, for the birds, for passersby...

So the book, which started out life as a collection of love poems--I was thinking specifically about an Anne Sexton book, Love Poems, which I read a million years ago, and which contains some of her best writing--has now expanded to include a bunch of my other, usual preoccupations, Oakland, street people, kids, women, etc. And animals.

More cats and dogs in this book than ever before, probably a result of living with Mr. Cat-Magnet, who, however little sleep he has gotten the night before, still always remembers to set out food for the feral cat family. The mama now boldly nurses her babies out in the open in our back yard, in plain view of everyone. I see her from the upstairs bathroom window and if I make any noise she looks up startled, and the kitties jump and scatter. I didn't realize that cats had such an acute sense of hearing.

Last night we went to hear Chick Corea at Yoshi's, courtesy of a wedding gift from a friend. Awesome. Corea looks like a friendly science teacher and plays like a monster, but I fell in love with Stanley Clarke, the bassist. What a presence. he did everything with that bass short of actually fucking it onstage and I'm sure I was not the only woman in the audience who thought about him doing that. He caressed it, slapped it, bowed it, played with it, and in general was one with his instrument.

I envy musicians having such communal fun with each other, with the audience while they are doing their art. It's a great feeling to be writing so intensely, great and also lonely. When my friend Angela was on a writer's retreat last week, it was almost like we were working together as she and I would email each other updates during the day.

Now that she's back to her real job, I email drafts to Ruth, and bless her, she manages to respond with great speed and helpfulness, even claiming that it's "fun" to be inundated with new poems. I also send them to family and friends, fairly promiscuously. My father, who has no more self-control than I do, usually responds by inflicting my early drafts on his entire email list. By the time those poems have landed in his friends' inboxes I've usually revised them.

There's a new movie out about Keats called Bright Star and of course I'm going to see it. I love seeing writers depicted in movies, especially since writing is such a boring and solitary pursuit. I mean, where's the dramatic tension in watching someone hunched over a piece of paper or a keyboard? It's not exactly The Wrestler, with Mickey Rourke sticking needles full of steroids in his butt in the locker room, or any of the great bio-pics about musicians, which have plenty of wonderful concert footage.

How do you dramatize something as ethereal and often sedentary as thought? I mean, moving commas around and selecting one word over another may end up having a profound effect on a poem, but it doesn't do much visually.

My favorite writer-movie scene, because it was so highly improbable, occurred in Julia, when Jane Fonda, playing Lillian Hellman, threw her typewriter out the window in a fit of frustration. Loved that. Would never ever ever do that, no matter how frustrated. They really should show writers opening the refrigerator door and staring at the contents, picking their noses, checking the mail obsessively, and pacing around their house, pinching dead leaves off of houseplants, only that is almost as boring and depressing as the act of writing itself.

No matter. The poems are coming. The book is getting leaner, meaner, and yet more abundant. Expansion and contraction at the same time, which is the theme for this week. I have been thinking about how there is not expansion in life without a significant contraction buried in the heart of it, and vice versa. No contraction without a strange and contradictory expansion. I could say more about this, but I have a feeling everyone reading it will have their own examples.

Christopher sent me an interesting link to an article in today's New York Times about unconditional love. This article talked about the way parents give and withhold approval from their kids in an attempt to control their children's behavior. The research shows that conditional love "works"--that is, parents are able to get their kids to be socialized, achieve, etcetera, by this method. But it produces adults who are insecure and resentful.

I wondered about this. First, I wondered What would unconditional love look like? How could a parent conceal their approval of some behaviors and their disapproval of others? Would that even be desirable?

Then I wondered, What would unconditional love feel like? I suspect it would make me uncomfortable because I am so accustomed to judgment as a way of being. It would be hard to release that. But delicious, I think. Delicious and scary. My fear for myself would be that without conditions I would descend into total sloth and selfishness. Without the fear of losing other people's love and approval I would not be motivated to exert any efforts to combat my own natural immaturity.

I thought about my Little Sister. I don't love her unconditionally. Well, I feel compassion for her, and I appreciate her funny, quirky, stubborn nature, but I can only deal with being around her if she is relatively gentle and respectful; I can't take it when she's aggressive and rude. It wears me out.

I know the deal is to separate the person from their behavior. "I love you, I just don't love it when you..." Or as my mother used to say, "I love you I just don't like you." Ecchhhh.

That hurt, when she said that. but what if it's true? What if sometimes you don't like the person you are supposed to love--or the person you do love deep-down even though right this moment you can't access that love-feeling? What do you do--dissemble? Remove yourself from the situation until the love comes back? Apply unconditional self-love as fast as possible and hope that does the trick? Man, my heart goes out to parents. This shit is hard.

Luckily, Christopher has not yet done anything that has even come close to shaking my love for him. We get annoyed and frustrated with each other at times, yes, but nothing toxic, ever. He has never made me feel like I had to choose between him and my own psychic survival. At the end of the day I can always count on his innate decency and kindness--I'd bet my life on those qualities of his. I have bet my life on them.

My Little Sister on the other hand, has worked my last nerve. She stretches me and tries me and I come up short and find myself wanting. It's hard for someone who didn't receive unconditional love as a child to learn how to give it. It's hard to unconditionally love someone who has built up thick hostile-looking walls. It's hard to love when the relationship is by its nature lopsided, when the language and culture are different, when it's inconvenient and expensive and often feels unappreciated.

Yet the more challenging it is to love in this way the more rewarding it is when the breakthrough occurs, the walls are breached, the shift happens. In her and in me.

I read the article. I understood the words. But seeing and experiencing difficult love is another animal entirely. I am such a beginner.

Today I laid down the law with my Little Sister and got great results. She was giving me attitude before my car had even left the church parking lot where I picked her up, turning up the volume to earsplitting levels on the radio--KMEL which I let her listen to, rather than NPR or KCSM the jazz stations, which I prefer--and defying my attempts to turn it down. She had that hostile, distant, closed look on her face which I've come to know and dread over the past year, the look which makes me feel like I'm dealing with a 20-year-old thug rather than a child.

I stopped the car, took a deep breath and said, "Look, I am a volunteer, do you know what that means?"

She nodded in an adults-always-lecture-you way.

I said, "Tell me what that means."

Eye-roll. "It means you want to help."

"Right, I do want to help. But I don't want to be treated badly. And I don't have to do this if I don't want to. If you can't be nice to me then you're going to have to find a new big sister."

She was quiet for about five minutes after that as we drove and I thought Uh-oh I blew it. But then she started talking like a normal 8-year-old, rattling on some stories about making a volcano out of play-doh and putting vinegar and baking soda together to make a bubbling froth to come out of it. Normal kid stuff. Amazing.

And she stayed like that for the next three and a half hours, during which we bought food coloring, made play doh, did science experiments, cleaned up science experiments, and made a batch of chocolate chip cookies. She even let me read a few pages of a kid's book to her. And we wrapped up the cookies and tied them with a ribbon for her granny and she wrote out a gift card, totally on her own initiative.

She's starting to grow up. We were talking about being the baby of the family, which she is, versus being the eldest, which I am, and she said, "When you're the baby you're spoiled, like I am." She didn't have any shame about saying that about
herself; she thought it was a good thing to be spoiled. She wouldn't want to trade her position.

When I was a kid my mother used to say that my father spoiled me and I'd feel terribly ashamed and try to prove that I wasn't spoiled. Now, I'm not even sure I know what spoiled means exactly. Is it getting what you want? What you need?

I do know that it works much better with this little girl when I set firm limits and back them up. This has not historically been my strong suit, but when pushed to the wall I can do it. (I guess the trick is to learn how to do it even when not pushed to the wall.) Some people just need to see that strong reaction from you to know that you're not kidding. Or maybe to know that you're really there.

She had taken her medication too. That may have had something to do with it.

I had been feeling lately like I wanted out of this volunteer commitment. Had even talked to the social worker at Big Brothers Big Sisters about it. It's been over a year and I couldn't feel that she was really bonded with me--not when she'd act so distant and defiant. There were many times when I felt just like a chauffeur and a meal ticket. I know this is a common experience for parents of teenagers, but it's not what I signed up for.

I couldn't figure out how to "make" her treat me with respect, but when the moment was right, those words came. And more important than the words were the eye contact I gave her, and the body language that said I really meant it.

I am no saint. And I am not always as skilled, with her or in other situations, as I would like to be. What I do give myself credit for is sheer stubbornness. She can be a tough little girl--there are a lot of good reasons why she has had to be--but I can be a tough woman too. And I like it that I don't quit. I'm glad I'm hanging in with her, despite the ADHD, despite our differences and all the other issues. She's not the only one learning and growing.

The title of the new Mark Morris dance performance premiering at Zellerbach Hall,"Sightlines," reminds me of what happened when I was assisting a women's self-defense class this summer. The other assistant and I were sitting at the far end of the room when we "saw" one of the male instructors slap one of the young female students on the butt. If you had handed me a Bible just then and asked me to swear on it under pain of perjury, I would have. That's what my eyes saw. My ears heard the slapping sound.

I was startled. This was a clear boundary violation. I looked at the young woman; she seemed relaxed and focused, not at all upset. I looked at the row of students lined up against the wall. They were all engaged and content. No one seemed perplexed or disturbed. I looked at the lead female instructor at the head of the room. Again, everything was fine.

I decided I must have been seeing things, and filed it away in my brain under the category Weird Shit.

My co-assistant believed the evidence of her eyes and ears. She went and spoke to the lead instructor, who spoke to the male instructor, the slapper. I had worked with the male instructor before. He is a great guy, sweet, unpretentious, a feminist. I would trust him with my sister. I would trust him with my nieces. I would trust him with anyone.

It turns out he had slapped the sole of the girl's shoe as her foot was cocked, ready to do side-thrust kicks, to indicate "Okay, go for it!" Totally appropriate. From the angle that my co-assistant and I had, in the spot where we were sitting, it looked like he was tapping her on the butt. Everyone else could see he was touching her shoe.

Last week, when the Lovely libra Grrlz and I went to Bolinas for one last ocean romp of the summer, I was frolicking in the waves when I saw some teenage boys on shore heading towards the towel where all our stuff was piled, including one of my friend's wallets. Oakland-based paranoia set in and I ran out of the surf, my thighs pumping, to defend our material belongings. And I was sure it was our belongings they were rummaging in. After all, our location was distinctive, right near the empty lifeguard chair.

It wasn't until I got really close, almost on top of them, (and thank God I hadn't yelled out, "Hey! Get away from our stuff!") that I saw that their towel was actually laid down directly in front of ours. They were innocent, innocent, innocent. They were rummaging in their own backpacks. And I was reminded once again that I could not always trust even the evidence of my own eyes. Sightlines.

I'm trying to use these experiences to broaden my understanding of how other people's points of view appear rational to them even while seeming quite crazy to me. I think I'm okay at empathizing with other people's emotions. At least i can respect their emotions even when I am not feeling the exact same thing myself. I can try to imagine what I might feel in their shoes. But I can be intolerant when it comes to other people's opinions. How can they think that?

Swimming today I hit that blissful spot where the swim itself took over. I was no longer hauling myself through the water, rather something was swimming me. Performers get this sometimes, I think--when the song starts singing them. And writers. Artists, athletes, everyone. The hard part is just putting in the miles to get there. Once you're there you can't conceive of being anywhere else.

Today it came after about twenty-five lengths of solid work and didn't last that long, but it made the whole effort to get to the gym worth it. The only "problem" is that afterwards I'm so relaxed and slow that I'm not good for much else. It's hard to work up the requisite driven anxious intensity that fuels a lot of my writing and sending out frenzies. I can write, of course, but through a haze of feel-good endorphins, the material is different. It's like everything has a lazy shit-eating grin on it.

Last night we watched Man On Wire, about Philippe Petit, the crazy Frenchman who strung a cable between the Twin Towers and walked across it. I have such a fear of heights that I was sitting--no, writhing on the couch, screaming, as the camera panned down, down, down to the tiny ant-cars and people below. Just thinking about it now sends waves of feelings through my body; nausea, and fear and vertigo and excitement and longing.

I was a kid who could barely make it across the balance beam; my ankles would shake uncontrollably as soon as I stepped on it. But Petit stepped on that wire as if it were made for him, as if there were a magnetic force pulling him along.

It was an awesome feat, a dance in the clouds, a dialogue with death, a pas de deux with God. A crazy thing. He enlisted a whole team of impressionable young friends who were willing to risk arrest just to help him pull this stunt off.

Watching him, I was reminded of my old French boyfriend Maxime, who was playful and bossy and arrogant like Petit, and also like him, romantically attached to the notion of living with passion and intensity. (It took a small army of self-sacrificing individuals to help Petit achieve his goal, but that, I guess, was not his problem.)

Like Petit, Maxime was constitutionally against authority. Rage against the machine motivated him. If he heard of a rule, he would break it. He almost felt morally obliged to break it. Like Philippe Petit, he was annoying and inspiring, narcissistic and childlike and inventive. Petit is still alive, wizened in face but lithe and slender in body, still practicing daily on an outdoor tightrope. Maxime got involved with drugs and committed suicide at the age of twenty-two. He's been dead for almost thirty years.

We finally got around to watching the movie Doubt last night, starring Meryl Streep and Phillip Seymour Hoffman. (I know, I know, it's lame to be blogging about movies that came out last year, but it's been a slow news week around here. Christopher started back to work and I've been writing poems.)

I loved the play by John Patrick Shanley. It's a stripped down little jewel, a miniature cathedral, perfectly balanced. Everything that's there needs to be there and nothing else. It's a miracle of construction and compression. The movie is by necessity much more open and complex. You get the real sense of a school, kids running around, bells ringing and buzzing, lights failing, blackboards squeaking, people eating and reading and talking and interrupting each other. Of course Streep and Hoffman are wonderful, but I loved the supporting actors even more; Amy Adams as the radiant young nun, and Viola Davis as the mother of a boy at the school.

Adams gave the young nun more intelligence and dignity than I had read into her part when it was just words on the page. You could see her character thinking and feeling; she was so transparent, and yet not silly or easy. Davis just went to a place that was so deep she took my breath away.

By contrast Streep sometimes distracted me with her Streepian mannerisms, her strong Bronx accent, her agitated hands brandishing her crucifix...she went over the top. There was one scene in particular, when she and Hoffman were shouting at each other in her office, the climactic showdown between them, that went on too long, where the weight of the famous stars' technique sort of sank the credibility for me. I know this is blasphemy, and I do love Meryl Streep, but there are a lot of wonderful actors in their fifties and sixties, and I would love to see a less-familiar face. When you're watching Streep you're watching Streep, that's the fun of it, but it takes away from getting lost in the story.

Hoffman was very powerful, but in my mind's eye I had seen Father Flynn as younger, sleeker and more sexy. I thought it was Flynn's eroticism that fueled the feud between him and Sister Aloysius. Hoffman is many things, versatile and powerful and poignant and vulnerable, but he's not sexy. Not. I thought Father Flynn should be the kind of man who would appeal to both men and women; that everyone would want to touch him, draw close to him, even if they didn't understand the source of their attraction.

The movie is visually beautiful and deep. Christopher loved it (and he might disagree with some of my comments about Hoffman, who was wonderful when he delivered sermons, really inspired.) It was fun to share my love for Shanley, whom I feel has been a playwriting teacher to me even though I've never met him. Last year I read my way through everything of his that was in print and learned so much. I envy him his output--dozens of plays, and several movies--and it was fascinating to trace his development as he stretched and contracted to meet the different demands of the various forms.

Yesterday I went to Theron and Elizabeth's house to help them brainstorm their vows and to give them the wedding poem they had requested I write for them. It was an honor to bask in their nuptial glow and to pass on some of the practical ideas Rabbi David shared with us when we were preparing our words.

The kitties are back!

Not long before our wedding, while cleaning up the backyard, I picked up a stray piece of lumber that had been hiding a nest with three kittens in it. The mama, a black and white feral cat who has been hanging around our yard for ages, jumped up and ran away a short distance, where she stood, glowering.

Christopher started leaving bowls of food and water out for the nursing mother and from time to time we'd peek in at the little ones, whose eyes were still mostly closed. Then, unwisely, I advertised the family's presence to my kitten-besotted five year old niece. Two visits in one day from a short human with a higher than average hummingbird-like vibration was too much for the mama: she picked her babies up by the scruff of the neck and moved them one by one to an undisclosed location, safe from the shining eyes and petting fingers of pre-kindergarteners.

When Dede died, we were all the more sad to be missing the kittens; suddenly we were completely bereft, for all practical purposes, catless. The feral mama continued to come out to get food--four square meals a day, I live with a generous man-- but the babies were kept in the witness protection program.

Until this week, when they came out, half-grown and more sure-footed, but still recognizably kittens, with big sensitive ears and curious faces. They're shy and will run away if they even sense us watching them. They love to hide and play under the big overstuffed red velvet chair on the patio, treating it as a playground structure. Christopher feeds them attentively, no matter how long his day has been; up at six and down to the fog-shrouded garden, and then last thing at night, under the moon.

He says the kittens are still nursing, (as well as crowding each other hungrily at the food-bowls,) but the mother is trying to kick them off the maternal teat. They don't want to go get a job, he says; they'd rather lounge around the house, playing video games and eating ding-dongs. At some point in their near future there will be a cat-carrier, trip to the vet, and the premature end to their procreative lives, so I hope they enjoy their innocent carefree days while they can. Meanwhile we're calling the mama cat Molly after Molly Goldberg.

"You owe me ten chick flicks for this one," I hissed at Christopher during the climactic and bloody final scene of "Inglorious Basterds." "No, you owe me a hundred films featuring women sitting cross-legged on the floor talking about their feelings, or getting makeovers and finding themselves."

Call me a humorless prude, a self-conscious politically correct bluestocking, but exploitative violence-porn just doesn't do it for me. I read an article by some rabbi in the Huffington Post which said that all Jews can now get their long-denied vicarious thrills from watching a Jewish commando pump Hitler full of lead (with a huge conflagration in the background and lots of panicked Nazis milling around, getting murdered in interesting ways.)

Not this Jew. I didn't find it a satisfying revenge fantasy; its only redeeming feature was that the orgy of violence was so sickeningly over-the-top that it made me recoil from the very idea of revenge altogether. (And if you want a good Jewish revenge movie, what about "Munich," written by my idol Tony Kushner, which tells the story of an elite group of Jewish commandos who carry out assassinations of anti-Semites all over Europe. It's not a perfect movie, but at least the characters have three dimensions, and they wrestle with moral complexity.)

Understand, I knew that Tarantino would be violent--he always is. I loved Pulp Fiction for its wit and the great performances by everyone, and for the way Tarantino played with the chronology. I loved The Sopranos--great writing, great acting, and I saw my own shadow in the character of Tony Soprano. The Wire was even better. I've eaten up all the Bourne movies with Matt Damon, who is the Hollywood star I would most like to have dinner with. I love films like "A History of Violence," with Viggo Mortensen (who gives Damon a run for his money in the most-want-to-have-dinner-with category.) I would recommend "The Hurt Locker" as the best movie I've seen yet about Iraq (second best would be "Stop-Loss.")

If violence is integral to the plot and the characters, if the story warrants it, okay, show blood. But using the Holocaust in order to have your own private sadism-fest is just a cheap trick.

(To be fair, I can't stand most movies about the Holocaust, including Schindler's List, which felt manipulative, and Life is Beautiful, which everyone else loved and I hated. I've seen two good movies about that time: both written by Germans. One was "Aimee and Jaguar," about a lesbian love affair between an undercover Jewish journalist and the wife of a Nazi officer. Fantastic. Everyone should rent it, but be prepared to have your heart shattered. The other was "The Reader," which, instead of just showing Nazis as cardboard monsters, wrestled with the much more difficult and complex question of Nazis and ex-Nazis as flawed, traumatized human beings.

I didn't like these movies better because they were "politically correct," I liked them better because they told stories with depth and heart and real stakes instead of gallons of fake red blood and gross special effects.

I do agree with Tarantino on one point though; movies are important. (And yes, I got the metaphor; by using film to burn down the movie theatre where the top brass of the Third Reich were all conveniently clustered, he was saying movies have the power to change the world and as artists we even have the license to rewrite history. Nice metaphor, but it takes more than a metaphor to make a story work.) Movies are our collective dream; they get under our skin and stay there; they show us to each other, they matter. So for God's sake, Quentin, make them with heart.

The "lion of the Senate" is gone; a great spirit has passed. Shakespeare said that some are born great, and some have greatness thrust upon them. I would add that some are born into really great really fucked-up families and have to thrash around and make terrible mistakes and endure a lot of scorn and judgment and pain before they crawl out of the mud and step by painful step achieve their own kind of greatness.

Ted Kennedy was the widow of his brothers. To think of the torch that he had to carry is enough to make anyone misty-eyed.

I'm moved by his story--as the NY Times put it candidly, "his personal life was a mess." Until he was about sixty. That's a pretty good long run of messiness. And he didn't achieve greatness by force of charisma; he did it be going to work every day and pushing legislation through the Senate. Bo-ring. He never became President. He was constantly being compared to his brothers and the comparisons were mostly unfavorable (until now, when he's dead, and the accolades come out of the woodwork.) He made his own life. And that's the hardest and the best thing any of us can do.

I think about time a lot. The great cathedrals took three generations of workmen to build; the grandfather would humbly toil on the foundations, his son would spend his entire life building the walls and the grandsons, or the great-grandsons would finally finish the roof. A hundred years and more. I always think about the architects who made the plans to begin with, and had to content themselves with visions and faith. What selflessness to lay foundations for God-inspired buildings you know you will never see! What colossal patience.

In my own life, I am so impatient for results. I want things now--want my ideas to transform from thought to word to printed book or produced play fast, faster, NOW Godammit--and they don't. The more impatient I become, the longer the whole thing takes in the end because I send stuff off before it's ready, and it comes right back like a boomerang. Right now, I am putting Love Shack through yet another draft, and all the while I am conscious of the next book which is whispering at the edge of my consciousness...

I sit with the half-finished, half-revised plays. I read something Annie Dillard wrote, about working on her book; that she'd sit with it, as you would a very sick person whom you could not cure. Every once in a while you might adjust a pillow, or get a glass of water, but basically it was a lot of just being there.

That's what it feels like, especially the opening pages. I just sit and adjust little things, tweak and change lines. There are obvious edits to make, things to cut out, and then a lot of stuff that I just don't know yet. More layers to the characters.

Poor Christopher: I've been frustrated as hell with my progress, or lack thereof. Yesterday he suggested helpfully that I scale down a little. He's got a point. I seem to be concept-driven: I had the idea, years ago, that it would be cool to do a whole play in and around a hot tub, and despite the obvious difficulties in staging that that would present, I just went ahead with it, because the idea excited me so much.

With Glitter and Spew the form is so weird--three linked one-acts, the way some post-modern novels are told in linked short stories--that some theatre companies are rejecting it out-of-hand: "We don't do one-acts." But it's basically a full-length play! Just a strangely-shaped one, I'll admit.

This morning I was moping and kvetching again--always very attractive and a real day-brightener for my partner--and he suggested I go back to writing poetry, since it's so hard to get a play produced. Also a good idea, but no poems want to come out right this minute. I don't know how much choice I have in this whole thing.

I always want my process to be as quick as thought, which is very fast and effortless. It's so easy to imagine a project to do. I can sit here and dream up a dozen ideas without half-trying. but to execute them, to go from conception through labor to birth, is much slower and messier.

We did get out of town, very briefly, because we got a nice gift certificate to Sam's Chowder House in Half-Moon Bay. It was good to leave the house, which is such a creative bee-hive for both of us, and get onto the toad. Gray skies, wild jagged cliffs and green-gray-indigo water. Farmstands selling fresh strawberries and peas and artichokes and honey.

We stayed at a sweet lodge very close to the water, and went out to a great dinner and walked along the pier afterwards. I'd been feeling nostalgic for my youth, for the days and weeks spent on the road, for spontaneity and freedom and simplicity. And of course, just for being younger, for having a thinner body whose heels and insteps did not hurt, a body that could sleep on the front seat of a Ford and waken refreshed, a face without wrinkles.

Christopher has a new camera with a great sharp lens and he took some photos of me. They are sweet, and/but I was shocked at the gray hair and the...well, you know. I'm not a girl on the open road anymore. I had a very very long run of being a girl, about as long as anyone could possibly stretch it out, and it's over. So.

Now I'm a very lucky woman, with a house and a life and a life-work that's constantly in transition, constantly being revised, edited, worked-on...and that's okay. That's what is. And I have a cup of strong black tea and milk and some dark-chocolate-covered Trader Joe's pretzels at hand and slowly, slowly I begin to know the characters in this play, one of whom may be the Devil himself.

I spent Saturday in the woods with my Little Sister and her church family. It was my Little's birthday and so I went to the annual church picnic at her request. I was the only white person there, and I would bet cash money that I was also the only Jew. I felt warmly and respectfully embraced.

Last year, when they had a church fair and I was invited and showed up, my Little Sister pretended she didn't know me. I kept following her around the sno-cone seller, the pony rides and popcorn, the stands of handbags and Obama T-shirts for sale in the parking lot and she kept dodging me like an urchin. My feelings were hurt but a social worker has since told me that was age-appropriate. Whatever. This year, thankfully, she's aged out of it. She ran up and threw her arms around me, grabbed my hand and introduced me to people. I stood on line for barbecue with her granny, got a plate of chicken and ribs and corn and green bean salad and sat in the shade fanning away wasps and chatting with some of the church ladies. Who would have thunk it?

I'm proud of myself for a) sticking it out with my Little, who is moody (she has a lot to be moody about,) and not always the easiest child to hang with. And b) getting over my fears about Christianity enough to just lay down my sword and hang out with people. No one tried to convert me or gave me any talk about Jesus. In fact, his name only came up once, in blessing the food, and that was quick and relatively painless.

Meanwhile, I've been reading Ruth Reichl's book Comfort Me With Apples. I think dad sent it to me months ago and I just now picked it up. This woman has eaten the world. Seriously, she's been all over, tasting and recording her sensations. She has, in her word, "paid serious attention to her hungers." I think that's what engrossed me so about the book. She's a competent writer, not a poet, but the force of her will to have a great life is so powerful it knocked me over. Food has been her vehicle, and a potent metaphor for really slowing down and experiencing one's life, tasting it, instead of gulping and swallowing and on to the next.

I'm trying to pay more attention to flavors and textures as I eat. My sense of eating got so fucked up by worrying about my weight since my teenage years that I've kind of suppressed my nautral inner greedy gourmand. There's so much anxiety about eating too--am I eating the right thing, too much, too little, organic, politically-correct, all that.

This morning I had delicious cold watermelon and hot coffee with soymilk, and hard-boiled eggs and a piece of toast slathered with butter and the tart homemade apricot jam that my step-sister gave us for a wedding present. It was delicious.

So it's Wednesday morning, the garbage trucks are rattling outside, sun is pouring through the windows. I've made onion-garlic-potato-mushroom omelettes for breakfast and later I'll take my Little Sister to the Wildlife Museum so we can look at raptors. Or swimming if it's too hot. For now I'm drinking coffee and revising the hot tub play. Happy to be re-united with these characters. After a long-enough absence I can finally hear them clearly. Oh. This is what you were saying. Sorry I didn't catch it the first time.

I'm cutting fat, cutting and cutting. There's a lot of banter that can just go by the wayside, it doesn't "progress" anything, as Sarah Palin would say. Where's the plot? If this play were a steak, it would be well-marbled; a heart attack waiting to happen. I'm killing my darlings, all those clever lines I was so in love with, all that snap, crackle and fizz. I'm trying to get closer to the bone: what does this play want to be about?

Is it about the contradictions in people who do great work in the world, fight for justice, stand up for the underdog, work for the greater social good--yet are clueless failures in their personal lives?

Is it about marriage and commitment, and the way we carry each other or let each other fall?

Is it just a story about two people who love each other and can't live together who get drunk in a hot tub on the longest night of the year?

I wrote it the year before I met Christopher. Pushed the first draft out in about a week, really fast. I was delighted with the raw energy that was coming through; all this frustration over the years of dating men who were too recently out of failed marriages, all my drama and disappointment at the time were finally finding a voice.

Now the bones are rearranging themselves. The characters are making moves they never made in any previous drafts. Oh shit, it's not revising, it's rewriting. The thing is still alive, but it's like working on Frankenstein and Rip van Winkle all at once. Something that was asleep, dreaming its own separate life, and then wakes up, changed. Can I trust myself more in 2009 then I did in 2006 to do right by it?

Maybe I needed to be in a different space altogether, to have some real distance from that drama before I could see it more dispassionately, before I could revise the play. I still think--hope-- there's something worth saying there. But I'm not in it the way I was.

One of my students at the Writing Salon asked me the other night if you have to be "on the other side" of something difficult in order to write about it. I said that the writing itself was part of what moved you to the other side. Also, that what you write on "the other side," (if indeed there really is one,) is different, but not necessarily better than what you write from the thick of things.

I told her about writing the poem "Smashing the Plates" when I was still very much a mess over an infected break-up. I had asked my friend Phil if I could help him break plates for a mosaic project he was working on, and I went over to his place (Interplayce, but the floor wasn't put in yet, it was still rough concrete,) and I helped him smash plates with a hammer and then I wrote a poem about it. It was raw. I couldn't write that piece now--I'm not there now. The energy came through me in the way it did then and I caught it in the container I had at the time.

I love the montage in the movie "Something's Gotta Give" where the Diane Keaton character is grieving a broken relationship with the Jack Nicholson character. There's a series of scenes that show her sobbing--and typing. Different outfits, different weather outside, different spots in the house--she's having her feelings, week after week, and doing her work also.

I don't know why some of the things I write in the moment come out well, and some other things, like this hot tub play, seem to take years to come together. Some poems I've written have taken years before I found their endings. I do know that my ego got excited--maybe too excited-- by how good I thought the play was on the first draft and maybe that slowed the process down. Or maybe this is just how it is.

In a moment of nostalgia, I google-stalked the web site of a guy I had dated ten years ago, one of several men who make up the composite character of Jack. Actually I googled a couple of those guys. I was reminded that they do do great things in the world. There were good reasons I was so attracted to them, wanted to be with them. And good reasons why it never would have worked. It took a very long time for me to be ready for someone like Christopher.

I feel more objective about it all now, as if I were a scientist saying, "If you take this element and combine it with that element, you will get an explosion, or a sticky goo, or a healing medicine." Whatever.

Yesterday I went food shopping for Carla--a bunch of gluten-free, dairy-free organic healthy stuff from Whole Foods, and then some deliciously evil stuff from the liquor store, good balance--and then went to the post Office with twenty copies of "Glitter and Spew" (another item on the to-do list.) I mean I staggered in there with the L.L. Bean canvas tote that my sister-in-law gave me stuffed with manuscripts. I watched the clerk stamp each envelope and toss them in a pile--my seeds scattering out into the wind. Good luck little play. Then I turned around to go home and work some more.

Someone wrote in a comment that they wanted to see the groom. Here he is, a few days before the wedding, looking very happy to receive a big hug. (This photo was taken by my stepmother, Samayadevi.)

Yesterday was our first Sunday without Dede. Sunday mornings are usually some of our sweetest times; Christopher with the front page spread out in front of him and a plate of breakfast nearby, me on the couch, Dede walking all over the paper, plopping herself down on the most interesting article, or sniffing at the eggs, finally finding a sunny place on the couch to nap while we read and ate.

I had signed up months ago to assist at an Impact self-defense class for young women this weekend. When Friday came I didn't want to go. I didn't want to leave Christopher, my foot hurt, my mind kept spinning back to Dede. But I had committed so I went.

It was hard to be there and good to be there. Three days of intensity. My foot hurt and I tried to avoid fighting the first two days. (Also, in all honesty, I felt like my form sucked and I didn't want to model imperfect form for them.) The young women rocked. The were so present with their emotions and with each other, so strong and fierce in their fighting once invited to get to it. Their stories inevitably reminded me of my own.

When the time came to do the "custom" fights, the fights where each student can choose a scenario she wants to revisit, I am always moved most by the women fighting their "inner mugger." The messages girls get about their own worthlessness are so pervasive, and they haven't changed or lessened in the decades since I was young. I feel most for the ones who believe they can't do it, can't fight, are too weak or uncoordinated or whatever, and then discover that they can.

This particular group was unusually open. They just went for it. Intimate stories came out quickly, tears flowed, the Kleenex box got passed around and they fought through it all. Girls are always getting told they are too tall, too short, too skinny, too fat, the wrong racial mix, too loud, too quiet, too sexy, not sexy enough, and on and on. Forty years of the second wave of feminism have not changed any of that, even though there's a new woman on the Supreme Court and Hillary made a serious run at the presidency. Our fiercest battles remain the ones within, our own personal spiritual struggles against the voices that tell us we're not good enough.

My own yoga was just a struggle to be present with my divided mind and hurting feet, to stay present in the class, to keep bringing myself back from other thoughts to the present. I held back from my own fighting the first two days because of my feet, and by the third day I was quite miserable. The instructor invited me to do an "extended"--a super-long fight--and despite my fears I just went for it. We all dedicated our "extended" fights to someone--these are the fights that push you and test you, because they teach that you can fight when you're exhausted, when you don't think you have anything left. I dedicated mine to Carla, whom I was thinking about all weekend. I was touched by how many of the girls dedicated their fights to their mothers. After I fought it was much easier to be present. Fuck my aching feet.

I had invited Gerry to the public celebration, and he came with his camera, and took a few photos (just of me and one other woman who had requested it.) By the end I was very glad to have been there, to have watched these young women come a little more fully into their power.

She only weighed thirteen pounds at her heaviest, but she was the queen of the house, climbing over our bodies when we were trying to sleep in, sitting on the head seat at the kitchen table (and jumping back the minute she was moved,) yowling when she woke in the middle of the night, and purring like an outboard motor on steroids when she was in her favorite place in the universe, Christopher's lap.

Their relationship was wordless and complete. First thing every morning, he'd take care of her needs. She had the cleanest litter box any cat ever knew. Her water bowl and food dish were always full. He understood her panoply of expressions, from butting her forehead up against a hand or cheek ("Stroke me! Not like that, like this! Harder!) to sitting near her food dish with a pained expression ("It's been a half an hour since you last checked to see if this was full. What gives here?") The last thing he did at night was fill her bowl again, change her water, check her box.

She had a coquettish ladylike way of crossing her front paws which belied her strong willed nature. She was unsquelchably curious and bore no grudges. If you picked her off the kitchen table a thousand times, she would climb back on a thousand and one. Though she lived to be a very old lady in cat years, she retained the personality of a kitten to her last day.

She was Christopher's spiritual teacher, and she became mine as well. She taught unconditional acceptance and love and was unshakable on this point: Be yourself. Even when you're being annoying. She enjoyed the best spot in the middle of the couch, or sometimes laid in front of the refrigerator at dinnertime, just when preparations were busiest. She was a night owl who kept Mick Jagger-esque hours, and would yowl at our door in the middle of the night if she awakened with a bad dream.

She lived with Christopher for almost all of her nineteen years, moving with him from apartment to loft space to our house, vetting his girlfriends and climbing on his head when he was preoccupied. She liked me fine, but she was a Daddy's girl to the core. In my lap she purred placidly; in his lap her purr deepened into the sound of orgasmic contentedness.

For the last couple of weeks she'd been getting weaker and stiffer, but she was still interested in trying to get to whatever was on our plates; she was still jumping on the furniture, although more awkwardly and slowly. Then a few days ago, she really began to fail. She was too weak to eat, she fell over when she tried to stand, and her paws curled inward in strange positions--from anemia, the vet said, brought on by kidney failure.

Our vet, Dr. McKinney, makes house calls. In that way he reminds me of our rabbi, who also sat with us in our living room in the months and weeks leading up to our wedding. Both men were there to help us through big initiations.

We'd called Dr. McKinney before several times; a year ago he'd given Dede four months to live. She'd outlasted his prediction by eight months. We had gone through dress rehearsals for this, but there's no way to prepare. When the moment came for her actual death, I felt a huge blackness. She was such a physical presence in our home--always there.

Dr. McKinney was quick and gentle--she didn't suffer. Afterwards he nodded at the plate on which I'd put three cookies in an automatic gesture of hospitality. He took one and Christopher took one. I didn't want a cookie. "Communion," Dr. M said, and I took and ate.

We cried a lot after he left, and we brushed her amazingly soft dark fur and Christopher clipped her toenails one last time. She didn't seem dead, she was still soft and warm and I thought that the thing I liked best about her was her weight--she was such a warm, comforting little bundle. I realized I would miss her more than I had thought.

He wrapped her in a t-shirt his mother had mended for him in the week before she died. I had never seen it before. It was just an ordinary t-shirt, frayed at the neck. She had taken care to fix the breast pocket just so. This little detail told me more about the woman I never met than anything else. I saw where Christopher gets his attention to detail, to small simple things, to love.

He dug Dede's hole deep, so raccoons and possum couldn't get at it. Even though we're in the middle of the city, I felt the presence of the wild kingdom all around us as we buried her. A crow flapped overhead and cawed once. And the feral cat who showed up about a month ago, who had her kittens in a nest against our back wall and whom Christopher has been feeding faithfully--the Cat We Are Not Adopting, whom he has named Uomie (pronounced "You owe me"--skulked behind the shed where she moved her kitties after an overenthusiastic visit from our kitten-loving five-year-old niece Lucy.

We buried her, and I said Kaddish, which made us cry more, and we put some flowers on her grave and got some wine, and poured her out a little libation and then we drank a toast to her. And now it is two days later. the first day we were awakened by a call from Lucy, who asked me "Is Christopher sad?"

"Yes," I said. "He's sad but he's also okay."

"Is he sad because Dede died?"

"Yes."

"And Mimi died too." (Mimi is the kids' name for my mother, who died eight years ago.)

"Yes."

"That was before I was even in Mommy's belly, when I was just a twinkle in the sky."

"That's right."

Then we went through a litany of all the people and animals who had died before she was born--her great-grandparents, and Christopher's parents, and several family pets, and on and on.

"A lot of people died when I was just a twinkle in the sky," she concluded.

(I recounted this conversation to Carla later and she said, "Yeah, being the youngest frees you from the delusion that it all started with you." It's true. When you're the oldest child it's just the opposite--you transformed two inexperienced kids into parents, you are Adam naming the animals, you, you, you are the alpha and the omega.)

We are two days into our new cat-less lives. The house is quieter. We let ourselves laugh, or dance or cry as the spirit moves.

I know she's dead, I watched it all happen, and yet it still seems to me that she is just in the next room. Christopher isn't sure what to do with her litter box. I told him to just put it in the basement--out of sight, but not thrown away. have a feeling another feline is in our future--if not Uomie, who has been feral too long for house-living, then maybe one of her kittens, if we can catch them. Or some other animal will find us. But they won't be Dede.

I reflect on her graciousness in picking the exactly right moment to die--two weeks after the wedding, so as not to disturb the celebration, a month before school starts again, so as to give Christopher time and space to grieve. Their connection was deep beyond words. I have faith that somehow, some way, they will meet each other again.

(The picture above was taken by my cousin Jessica)

It's official. C has become Jewish without benefit of Hebrew lessons, synagogue attendance, or ritual circumcision. Last night I was complaining about how he always turns the refrigerator settings too cold--there is a layer of Perma-frost over all our vegetables. I get frostbite just peeling a cucumber, I kvetched.

He looked me dead in the eye and said, "That should be your worst problem." He was channeling my mother, who always used to say that to us whenever we complained about some petty little thing. I howled. I've heard you always marry your mother, but how did I turn a nice, polite, mild-mannered Midwestern Protestant into a Brooklyn Jew?

We have eaten the leftover wedding cake, all ten pounds of it which are now on my hips, we have opened our gifts, and written our thank yous (but not sent them yet,) and been goofy and sentimental when we see the other person wearing their ring. It feels very right and comfortable to be married. No huge changes, except that the wedding seems to have released C's inner dancing demon. He danced up a storm at our recetion and hasn't stopped since. I'm hoping this means many more years of dancing together--and separately too, sometimes.

Now it's a week and a half after the wedding and we're in our new/old life. Planning, writing, making lists, teaching classes, shopping, cooking, swimming at the gym (to try and deal with all that cake!) and all the rest of it. This week--until Sunday--is supposed to be a particularly intense "portal" according to a Mayan astrology listserve I am on. Something to do with the eclipse the other day.

I have too many writing projects on my list: essays to revise, plays to write. I'm itching to get back to working on a play I started two years ago, about military recruitment, but keep feeling like I have to do more research first. To that end I'm planning on seeing The Hurt Locker, even though I know it's going to be intense and scary, and I also9 ordered a DVD called The Recruiter, a documentary.

And of course I write an essay about the wedding--if people aren't ready to throw up at all this goo-goo ga-ga stuff as my Little Sister puts it. (Being seven, she is particularly opposed to kissing.) It's sort of like all the new-mother blogs that have proliferated all over the web now, sprouting up like toadstools after a soaking rain: on the one hand, children have been born and gotten raised for lo these many millenia, without having to talk about it so much, and by the same token, people have been falling in love and getting married, even fifty-year-old oversensitive underemployed poets, but this happened to me, someone who was pretty sure it would never happen for her again, and so this is what I have to write about. Just fat, happy, boring life, eating cake and watering rosebushes, arguing about the temperature of the frdge, and trying to figure out who gave us the three beautiful mix CDs for wedding presents. We love them, but your name or card got detached from the CDs, so please let us know who you are so we can thank you properly.

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.