The new fridge was delivered today by two very adept Home Depot delivery guys, who delicately sidestepped piano benches (C's), leaning bicycle (housemate David's), and piles of boxes to bring in the new baby. They took doors off hinges quickly and efficiently and hoisted her in, and had the doors back on and were out within twenty minutes. Artistry. And now I have refrigerator envy--of my tenant! She gets that whole clean gleaming thing to herself, while C and I are sharing fridge space with Masankho and David, our salad fixings spilling over into someone else's Korean take-out, into someone else's peanut butter and half'n'half.

The other night I dreamed Hillary Clinton wanted to be my special friend. We were at some kind of function and she insisted on sitting next to me at my table and telling me she liked me. I told her I liked her too, but I didn't know if I could vote for her because she voted for the war. I still prefer Obama. (Also I'm suspicious that the Republicans are setting Hillary up to be the Democratic candidate because they think she's beatable.) It reminds me of the time I dreamed I was making love with Arnold Shwarzenegger--now that was horrifying and titillating--the deadly combination of his inflated pectorals and his odious politics!

I've spent time the last few days reconfiguring my poetry ms. for the bajillionth time and renaming it as well...with all the new poems I've been writing lately, it has taken on a different tone. I read an article Eavan Boland wrote a few years ago in Poets & Writers Magazine, about how first books aren't really first books anymore. With all the pressure that the competitions put on emerging writers, by the time a book finally gets published it is more like a third book. That is definitely true for me. This ms., which is supposed to be for my second book is really more like my fourth or fifth. I've put in and then taken out so many poems that I felt were not strong enough, even some that had been published. (And of course there are the ones Dad likes vs. the ones Ruth likes, and then the ones that never got accepted anywhere but I still just stubbornly like them.)

Boland's point in her essay was that this over-editing ultimately shortchanges readers who want to track a poet's growth and development--everything has become so polished by the time it hits the general airwaves that we miss the precious rough edges and transitions that are a normal part of any artist's development. I think she's right. Looking back over my tattered collection of favorite books of poems by W.C. Williams, Frank O'Hara, Muriel Rukeyser, Galway Kinnell, there are poems that are uneven, poems that might not make it through a rigorous workshop. But it doesn't matter because what I was after when I read poetry back in the day, before I was so thoroughly indoctrinated into the po' biz, was the feeling of a life laid bare on the page--and that was something these writers gave me, even in their most imperfect works.

I've discovered a new poet--finally bought a copy of Unfortunately, it was Paradise, by Mahmoud Darwish. He is the poet laureate of the Palestinians, if a stateless people can have a laureate. His voice is poignant, earthy, authentic. I brought in the following poem to my fourth and fifth graders this week. They were challenged and inspired by it:

The Flute Cried

The flute cried, If only I could go to Damascus as an echo.
Silk weeps on the shores and passes through a sobbing cry.
Landscapes fill with tears. The flute cried and tore the sky into two women.
It divided the road and broke the heart of the sand grouse.
It divided us so we’d fall in love. O flute, we plea for mercy!
We are not as distant as the sunset. Are you crying out so as to cry in vain,
or to crush the mountain as well as Adam and Eve’s apple? O shout of
infinite silence, cry Damascus, my woman, I will love and I will survive.

The flute cried. If only I could go to Damascus as an echo.
I even believe in what I don’t believe. Silky tears burn away our breath.
The flute cried. If only I could cry like the flute, then I would know Damascus.

--Mahmoud Darwish

The swim helped--almost as soon as I hit the water I got an idea for the scene with Max, wrote it later that day, revised it the next and the next, and then sent it off to the director. I just got a little email back from him indicating it's fine, he likes what I wrote. Phew! Moral of the story: just do it. Don't obsess and don't fret. And aerobic activity makes blood flow to the brain makes more better ideas come.

Saturday I skipped a faculty meeting in order to accompany C on a visit to a group home and speak Spanish to his student's mother. It was a sweet little outing, a needed getaway for both of us from the boxes, boxes, boxes at home (although progress has been made there as well; it's just that, having unpacked a ton of them, there are still a ton left. But we can see the floor now, and even watch videos in the living room again.)

I also got back to the Hot Tub play, after my conversation with Suzanne, and took another pass at it--I think it needs still more work, but it's moving in the right direction. Hope she agrees with me. (Actually, I hope she falls in love with it and feels compelled to help me shift things around in it to get to the climax faster, because she's really good at that.)

In Wing It! we're getting ready for our performances on the theme of "Hot Earth" --I feel a little nervous about it, we're all a bit rusty from not having performed in so long. Yesterday in practice I was dancing with E and caught my toe in the draggy droopy hem of my pants and tripped and fell hard on both knees. After that, surprisingly, I danced better than before. It reminds me of that song by Kate and Anna McGarrigle, "Dancer with Bruised Knees."

I wrote a new poem as well, not as polished and literary as the other stuff that's been coming out lately, but heartfelt and strong in its own way, a throwback to the days when I wrote more overtly political things. I'm wondering whether to redo it as a prose poem, a la Robert Hass in Human Wishes, where he has a lot of long political/personal poems that are like a cross between a poem and essay, or to leave it as is. I love all things Robert Hass--he has a new book out that I'm dying to get. He's fantastic. It's his surprising candor, combined with brilliance--but he never gets so erudite or abstract that I can't follow him. He's like a cross between Tony Hoagland and Mary Oliver. He's himself. I love him!

The other night C and I watched Flight 93, the movie about the doomed flight where the passengers managed to prevent the hijackers from crashing the plane into the White House. The movie affected both of us deeply--it was so non-Hollywood--the flight attendants and the passengers looked like real people, the air traffic controllers had genuine Boston accents (and those cannot be faked,) and there was just a grittiness and a sadness to it that we hadn't seen in any of the other movies that have come out about 9/11.

After the feature itself, we watched a documentary about the families of the passengers and the making of the film, which made us both cry. It felt good to watch it, not as if we were being "entertained," but as if we were able finally to enter a little more deeply into an experience that we had previously shut off from because it was too scary and horrible. Painful, but good.

Meanwhile, I've been teaching my classes, and there's more unpacking of boxes to do, and the refrigerator in the in-law just went bust, and there was a problem with my DMV registration and Chanukah comes early this year, and the time has changed, and the days are short, and money, and shopping, and normal life...blessed, ordinary, normal life.

I need to write a new scene for Kaddish, as I'd promised the director, and now for some reason, I'm scared. Scared I can't do it. Why would I think I can't do it? Go back into a play I stopped revising three years ago and just pick up the thread, just write a new scene to give the father a bigger voice and presence? What could be simpler?

I think I'll go swim.

Teaching at the elementary school, I reached into my handbag to find a lipstick. I was make-up free and wanted to at least make a stab at looking more like a grown-up, despite having rolled out of bed at 7:30 and driven like hell on the freeway, eating an "energy bar" (odious and deceptive term) and cursing all the other drivers, in order to get their on time.

I reached in and felt something smooth and tubular and lipstick-shaped. Pulled it out and it was a little vial containing C's mother's ashes, which I had "packed" when emptying his desk at the old place, but not wanted to throw into a box as I felt it would be disrespectful. So, in honor of Day of the Dead, it was "Bring Your Boyfriend's Deceased Parents To Work Day." (His father was in his own separate vial, also in my capacious handbag, which my friend Ellen refers to as my "goat," because she says it's like I'm still in the shtetl lugging around pounds of potatoes, with a goat under my arm. And because it weighs about that much.)

I taught the "Paint Me" lesson plan, which always gets great poems from the kids. It was fun but exhausting.

Last night I dreamed I was writing a musical about the bathhouse era of gay male culture that was interrupted when the AIDS epidemic began. In my dream, I had naked men running all over the stage, singing, while water showered down from the lights! I am feeling the urge to go back to my plays...had a very inspiring meeting with Suzanne Cohen, whose theatre company Mirror Stage Company in Seattle did a reading of my play Saying Kaddish back in 05. Suzanne is a great script doctor/dramaturg, and we talked about the two latest playscripts I had sent her--not ready for prime time, but not without merit either.

I got some good ideas for revision, and of course I have to write one extra little scene for Kaddish too, before the January production. Mostly, I've been working on poems for a while, steadily, feverishly, poeming away, stockpiling new poems for a third book even though the second book is not yet sold (although I found out today that the first book has sold out its second printing.)

Okay, naptime.

Unpacking is harder than packing, because unpacking is creative. You have to decide where everything goes; you have to create a new structure, a new home.

Packing is destructive--you're taking pictures off the walls, emptying closets. Unpacking, you have to decide where to hang the pictures, which wall to put the bookcase against, what to do when both of you have perfectly good sets of cookware.

It's always easier to destroy than it is to create. There is something fun in destruction, something powerful. By destroying you are declaring, "I can do it again; I can do it better if I want to."

Creating is full of questions. Does this look better here? What about over here? What do you want to do about...?

It is sweet living together, even if he's been working days and I've been teaching evenings, so we've had to make do with stolen half-hours between work-shifts or before bed.

Last night I subbed at The Writing Salon, and saw my old student J, who emigrated from the countryside of China. She always reminds me how good I/we have it, she is always inspiring, a testament to true grit. The piece she brought in last night was about her grandmother's bound feet. For a thousand years, until about 1911, all Chinese women had their feet bound. J described the process in excruciating detail, the broken toes and heel, the oozing wounds to the feet that would not heal.

Despite being in constant pain from her feet for eighty years, J's grandmother bore eight children, hauled water, cooked over a wood fire, and scrambled up the mountainside with her babies clinging to her to escape invading Japanese soldiers.

Can you imagine--a thousand years of women with crippled feet? Every single woman in the country? A thousand years of little girls subjected to that torture, cut off at the ankles, never able to run or jump rope, or enjoy the freedom of walking comfortably on the earth? A thousand years of women cut off from their own natural physical power?

Today, J walks three miles to work, three miles back, every day, and always appreciates her big comfortable unbound feet, shod in running shoes. I will think of her when I walk around the lake this afternoon.

There's something about dismantling a home that is disturbing (as well as exhilerating) even when it's in service of a wonderful cause, even when it's not my home being dismantled. Taking apart C's home yesterday, from the bookcases to the cleaning supplies under the sink, from the storage closet off the living room area that contained canvaqs drop cloths and a motorcycle jacket that's headed for the Goodwill, and finally cleaning out the last of the stuff in the fridge and the freezer, leaving behind us a bare, empty vacuumed, gleaming space...it reminds me of impermanence.

When a home is set up, even a makeshift home in an artist's loft, it feels settled. Things in their right places feel as if they belong there, have always belonged there. Taking it all apart--hiring three young guys in baggy shorts to haul it downstairs and out the door and into a moving truck and drive it over here--feels like the death of something--and it is. The death of C's old home, where he lived and studied and made food and made music, and met me, and wined and dined and courted me, where he brushed his cat and talked on the phone, and lived.

Now he'll do all that living at my--at our--home. And it's good.

But I think that seeing how it all comes apart reminds me of how everything can all come apart, including our precious bodies, our relationships, our houses--everything that feels solid and permanent is in fact porous and malleable. And destructible. Even our lives.

There are boxes stacked shoulder high all over the living room. Boxes in the dining room, in towering piles. Boxes in C's new room, lined up all around the walls. Boxes and boxes and boxes.

There is furniture, both handmade by C and the other kind. There is the organ, no, excuse me, the two organs, the grand piano, the upright piano, and the keyboard. There are the various and sundry other pieces of musical equipment, plus the guitsrs, both electric and acoustic, and the catcher's mitt with the baseball in it, and the paintings and painting supplies, and the wood--don't forget the wood. And the saw and the drill and all the woodworking and furniture making equipment. And the books. Don't forget the books. At least thirty boxes of them. And papers, both official and personal, and photographs and other memorabilia, and, and and...

We are both beyond exhausted, but still so glad to be doing this. Looking at The Great Pile 'O' Stuff right now though, it's hard to imagine being dug out by Thanksgiving.

"Words taught me words."

That was the first line of a poem written by one of my fourth graders today, a Chinese girl of immigrant parents. She may have been born in Hong Kong herself, I don't know. She is an amazing writer, and she said she wants to be "a writer and a fashion designer and a landlady" when she grows up.

I had brought in a poem about a boy learning to ride a bike which I think I found on the Writer's Almanac. Metaphor, simile, and they could all relate to the imagery too, of the father teaching the child to ride a bike, although some of them said their mothers taught them, or a brother or sister or uncle. All but her. Maybe nobody taught her to ride a bike. Maybe she still doesn't know.

I had them brainstorm all the things someone had taught them how to do: swim, cook, sew, ski, boogie board, read, write, play sports, even walk.

This girl loves literature, but it's very possible that her parents don't speak much English. So she started her poem, "Words taught me words." It's about how the books themselves taught her literature. I thought it was one of the best things I've read or heard ever, because it's so true. Water teaches me to swim. The sun teaches me to love life. Words teach me words.

When I described the ball game to R in Wing It! practice, and the incredible outpouring of male love, he started to cry. Of course he also cried when we were talking about art and he was describing some of the beautiful paintings he has been privileged to see. I don't cry easily myself, but I admire people who have easy access to their own tears, their sense of wonder and gratitude.

I've been eating way too much sugar.

Practice was good--we are preparing for a performance in three weeks about global warming. Or rather, they are, since the performance is in a church, on a Friday night, and I decided to skip it. I'll do the Saturday night performance, which is semi-private and will take place at Interplayce. After last year's Christmas meltdown, I gave myself permission to stay out of church services for a year. The year's not up yet, but I feel less inclined than ever to sit through another church service, even if it's one that we're performing for. I just don't want to, and even though I'm committed to diversity and to stretching my cultural boundaries yada yada yada, when it comes to Christianity and Interplay, I'm overstretched already, like a broken rubber band. I need to regain my own natural secular Jewish shape.

I just got an email from the director of Saying Kaddish, sounding me out about writing another scene for the play. I said yes of course. It's been so long since I worked on it, but now I feel ready to go in there and reconnect with my old characters, Lorraine, Max, Lydia and Rachel. And God, of course, who could forget God?

What was beautiful about the Red Sox winning last night and going to the World Series was seeing these tough macho athletes leaping into each other's arms like burly ballerinas, carrying each other around, legs wrapped around waist, like kids. What was beautiful was watching the coach, a middle-aged white guy, pouring a bottle of no-doubt very expensive champagne down the neck of Big Poppy, David Ortiz, a beautiful black man, and hugging him and hanging on like he was Santa Claus and this was Christmas.

"It's very homoerotic," I poked G in the ribs with my elbow.

He snorted. "Whatever."

Beyond erotic, it was love, pure love, a huge outpouring of it. Mass energy, catharsis on a grand scale, drama and excellence and sacrifice, ritual and redemption.

I can't believe I'm writing about this.

I've always been scornful of sports, probably because I'm not coordinated enough to play them. Picked last on gym teams in junior high, I became head of the Drama Club in High school and ducked out of gym class whenever I could. Were it not for modern dance, I would have gotten an F in the whole business.

But somehow in middle age, I have muddled through to enjoy fierce amateur games of tennis, the thwacking of the ball, extending my body in time and space beyond where i thought the limits were. It feels good, it feels new, it feels like a welcome relief from all this reading and writing and introspection.

And since G has this hi-def TV, which cost a mint and which I gave him no end of flak for buying, and since the Red Sox are, well, the closest thing to a religion my father really has ("Did he mind that C's not Jewish?" a friend asked. "He said, 'As long as he doesn't root for the Yankees,'" I answered.)

Anyway, we watched.

It was a great game! Close at the beginning, and then the Sox picked up speed and just ran over the Cleveland Indians. The pitcher who came in after the old pitcher got tired looked like a bull staring down a matador. I swear I saw his nostrils flare. (On these hi-def TVs you can see everything: their saliva, their spit--and why do they spit so much? If I were their mothers I would be embarrassed to see my kid spitting like that on national TV. On the other hand if I were their mother, I'd be laughing all the way to the bank, so take that, Miss Manners.)

The new pitcher looked like a bull, and he pitched like a laser gun. Ferocious. Every pore and follicle of him focused, no checking out, no haze. In a way it was like seeing a Zen master concentrate in action.

He pitched perfectly, and the Red Sox didn't give up another run for the rest of the game. And when the skinny little white rookie hit a home run so hard that the ball pinged off the giant Coke sign in Fenway Park, and then rounded the bases and leaped into Big Poppy's arms for a teddy bear hug while the stands erupted, I jumped off the couch and screamed and danced around the room.

It was so comforting to realize that my father, 3,000 miles away was also probably leaping and screaming at that point (if he hadn't dozed off in his big chair in front of the TV since the game was on way past his bedtime.) It was like what he always says at Passover: "Jews all over the world are sitting down tonight to celebrate, just as we are." And Boston fans all over the world will be tuning in on Wednesday to hear how the first game went, and I will be angling for another invite from G to sit in front of his hi-def TV where I can see the beads of sweat form on the batter's brow.

Here is a picture of some Malawian children and me, downloaded from my friend Baina's collection, which is up on Picassa. Yesterday I went to G's house where he had the software and the high resolution computer needed to open up the CD of pictures she had sent me. He and I looked at them, one by one, but did not even get through half--there were hundreds of beautiful photos, taken with her very discerning eye. Seeing them brought back so many warm memories...

I just finished Edwidge Danticat's memoir, Brother I'm Dying, with tears streaming down my face. I'm definitely going to use this book when I teach Memoir and Testimony at New College again this next winter/spring.

I am moved and amazed at Danticat's restraint, the way she conveys so much about the way her family loves each other without resorting to gushing, just letting the gentleness and consistency of their actions speak for themselves. There's no ego in this book--she doesn't present herself as either fatally flawed or saintly or terrifically accomplished (even though she is,)or anything else. She is present and accounted for, in the most unassuming way. Meanwhile, the portraits of family members leap off the page.

In the book, her uncle dies at Krome, a detention center in the Everglades that houses (imprisons) thousands of Haitian refugees. Inadequate food, health care, santitation, legal representation. I was there twenty-seven years ago, when I worked in Miami as a VISTA volunteer. Because I speak Creole, I went to Krome once or twice, to help the Haitian Refugee Center's American lawyer communicate with his clients. He had a huge caseload and no resources, and then as now, people hardly ever got out. The mistreatment of Haitians, both in Haiti and when they are refugees in this country, will go down in history as shameful.

Danticat's book rekindled my homesickness for Haitian culture and desire to return to Haiti, even though the country sounds much more dangerous and turbulent than when I last visited, in 1981. Then, it was still under the rule of Baby Doc Duvalier, who was a despot and a thief, but at least you could walk the streets safely. There were no guns going off, and no houses being torched, or roving gangs. In this book, Danticat describes a reign of terror from which there is no escape for thousands of ordinary people caught in the crossfire between gangs, the military, and U.N. "peacekeeping" troups.

C gave me this book for my birthday, Friday, when I turned 49. It was a quiet birthday, marked by some playing in the morning at Interplayce, some pampering in the afternoon, and then a good dinner and a movie (Elizabeth, with Cate Blanchett. Blanchett was fantastic; the movie flawed but interesting sent us to wikipedia that night to learn more about the real story of the Spanish Armada and Elizabeth's reign.)

I feel grateful, chastened and humble to have reached this age. What have I actually accomplished besides write a lot of poems and a few articles, and teach a lot of people? What have I been doing with my time here? While I was at the hairdresser's (the pampering part of the day,) I read in her current issue of People Magazine, about a woman who had fostered hundreds of disabled and seriously ill children, and adopted half a dozen of them. She also is forty-nine.

I admire this woman even though I don't know her. I admire Danticat for being able to write such a clear-eyed memoir in the midst of what must be great personal pain. I did work with Haitians, not just in Miami for that one VISTA year, but for years afterward, teaching English as a Second language in Boston. I did not go on and get a social work degree, or learn the medical skills necessary to go back to haiti as an aid worker, or even just continue slogging it out in ESL work. I knew I was burned out and I wanted to be an artist. I took another path.

I remember decades ago, being a sophomore in college and taking a walk with my then ten-year-old youngest brother.

"Do you know what you want to do when you grow up?" he asked me.

"I'm torn," I said. "I want to be a writer, but I also want to help people."

"When you write, you are helping people," he said.

"I am?"

"Yeah! You're expanding their minds!"

Out of the mouths of (admittedly very precocious) babes.

I forgot to say that another great thing happened last week--I cleaned my study, with invaluable assistance from Val Bowman, a friend and former housemate who has opened her own business called Space for Grace, helping creative messy people get some order into their lives so that they can let their love-light shine more effectively. The web site is www.spaceforgrace.net, and I highly recommend her services.

She is patient, non-judgemental, loving, flexible, practical, well-organized and well-supplied. I mean she actually brings file boxes and collapsible baskets to your house, and she also helped me out with the address for an electronics recycling center that will take your old dead or injured appliances and recycle them, free of charge.

So, the clean-out continues, and order starts to creep in. It's another gray morning, when I found it difficult to get out of bed. I love working with the kids, and I love teaching adults too, but I'm still feeling at loose ends. Not enough committed connection to the outside world. I know I should be working on various play projects, but haven't been disciplined enough to do that for a bit--instead some poems have come through, and I've honored that impulse.

Last night I went and revisited my old neighborhood in North oakland, the place where I lived when I was first separated from Alan. I went to the home of the family whom I befriended, who befriended me thirteen years ago. For three years, while I lived on that street, the kids Patty and Abraham, and sometimes their big sister Ulai and sometimes their cousins Ophelia and Sharon, would be over my house every day.

I took them to Tilden, to the petting zoo, to the beach, to the community garden a few blocks away. I bought them sodas and ice creams at the store. I played with them and cooked them mac and cheese, and read to them. Their childhood--that little piece of it--was the closest I've come to the kind of daily contact and relationship with children that I've always wanted but was afraid to go after for myself--afraid for economic reasons, principally, but also for energetic ones. Would I be able to sustain the kind of energy it takes to be a parent, when I come home from a half-day's teaching poetry in the schools too tired to get out of my car?

Patty and Abraham were five when I moved in, eight when I moved away. Now they're nineteen--Abraham is a strapping muscular young man, and Patty goes by Patricia now--she's shy and plump and beautiful, with tons of long hair extensions that fall in front of her face.

She's getting her GED, he's in some kind of job training program. Ulai, who was always so bright, a really good student, had a baby when she was fifteen and another one when she was eighteen. She's twenty-two now and looking for affordable housing and going to cosmetology school. She wants to open a chain of shops and be a haridresser to the stars one day.

She had a new puppy, a baby bulldog, three weeks old, whom she'd rescued. Typical. The living room floor was covered with newspapers because they were paper-training her. I cuddled the puppy and it fell asleep in my arms, leaking truly noxious farts. I loved the tiny weight of it, and the way it slept, wheezing, against my chest. Then when it woke up it peed and shat on the paper, and Patty folded it over.

The whole time I was there the TV was on, just like the old days. I watched most of a Disney channel program about twin black princess witches, called Twitches. Pretty good. Patty is so shy it's hard to talk with her, but Ulai remembered the potato latkes she ate at my house and I remembered when she tried to sell me Christmas wrapping paper when she was eight-years old.

"I'm Jewish, honey," I said, and without missing a beat she replied, "I have Chanukah paper." And she did--blue with gold stars, and I bought some, and that's how we became friends.

I found out that Ophelia has a year-old baby and is married and living in Hayward with her mother and sisters who also have babies. I wish her well, but don't want to see her. I feel a pang about the baby--they almost all have babies, and have them young--they are young mothers in their early twenties. And they're tired, even though they're young, and it's hard, especially in the Bay Area housing market. The babies are cute, but stunned into a kind of early overwhelm, maybe from all the TV and stress of being hauled around the city looking for work or housing or low-cost food or health care or all the things low-income parents have to constantly be seeking.

I don't know. I don't know. I love the feeling of a baby sleeping peacefully against my chest and belly. I know I'm good at that, good in the kind of way you can't learn, just instinctively good at having a relaxed and relaxing body to cuddle against. And I know there is so much more to it all than that.

Okay, I haven't blogged in more than a week, I know, thank you CB for pointing it out.

I did a long, humorous, slightly snippy blog in here about two weeks ago and hurt someone's feelings. Badly. In turn they hurt my feelings. I've been licking my scratches and assessing my personal responsibility. Actually, more to the point, I've been moping.

I can be a smart-ass but then when I actually offend someone it knocks the wind out of me. So painful. At the same time, I stand by my observations and comments.

What was ironic about all this was that just the night before, I had taught a Personal essay class in which the subject came up--as it always does--What do you do about writing about living people who may read what you write and take offense.

Well, I said, there's not one right answer to that, just a bunch of different strategies. Change identifying characteristics as much as you can if at all possible. If it's not possible, consider publishing somewhere where this person is not likely to see it. If you are really really afraid, consider publishing under a pseudonym.

One woman raised her hand. "What about not writing it at all?" she asked. This is what some people would want from me. Unfortunately it's not possible. I was put here on earth to communicate, often about uncomfortable things, to be a dispatcher from the front lines of my particular tiny tadpole pool. That's the only thing I'm really good at.

There are things I haven't published, haven't put out there because they would be too painful to my family. I try to be careful, I try very hard. And I don't always succeed. Sometimes someone reads somthing I never thought they would, sometimes someone takes offense at something I said in a way I hadn't expected. I hate it that that happens, but what am I going to do? I'm not Mary Oliver, who writes about snakes and bears and fish. I usually write about opinionated volatile people, not unlike myself.

Okay, back to daily life. The Great Move-In continues. The Great Grunt is on. Today I found an electronics recycling place in Berkeley, and hand-delivered a carload full of dead and defunct appliances, computers, etc there. the sad thing is there are still more in the basement; computers and dead TVs too heavy for me to lift, left behind by generations of housemates passing through.

I also bought some vegetable starts, finally, two months after returning from Malawi. I planted four kales and six little broccoli starts. The broccoli looked feeble, I wonder if it will make it. But the kale looks pretty hardy. C and I eat so much salad, I want to plant lettuce as well, I just know the snails will get at it. I'm going to ask him to help me figure out a solution for that, maybe make me an indoor planter, or some kind of wire mesh arrangement. I'd like to grow expensive wonderful salad stuff like endive, and frise, which costs a fortune in the grocery store.

I also stopped off at the Berkeley Ecology Center and found a place--two places--where I could work on my goal of planting fifty trees in this next year, my jubilee year. There's an organization called Urban Releaf, www.urbanreleaf.org here in Oakland, and there's a San Francisco organization called Friends of the Urban Forest at www.fuf.net.

Got home and actually spaded up the wet clay-ey soil and put the little kale suckers and broccoli starts in the ground--ouf! Okay, gardening is work.

I feel better now that I have actually gotten underway with some of the things I declared I wanted to do. I'd been sitting on that energy and it was getting stagnant and uncomfortable. I also feel a little lonely now, too. I have plenty of friends, I'm just not staying in very good touch. This moving in business is momentous and I guesws I'm "processing" it by isolating (not the best strategy, let me be the first to admit.)

Also, I've been hurling myself at new poems, which has been good (I think) but gets me caught up in a vortex of personal ambition. Hopefully that energy too is shifting. Everything always is.

October eighth, my father's birthday, possibly the most beautiful day of the year. Sun in the window, hot coffee. C has been scraping the ceiling of the room he's moving into in my house, scraping and washing, and prepping and working. I've helped out where I can, but he's meticulous and no one can do the job the way he can, so I stand around and offer beer and snacks and retire to my study to try to write.

I did a final (I think) revision on my play My Hot Tub With Andrea, and am sending it to the Playwrights Foundation contest. And sent SHWAF to yet another contest. And an essay I wrote last year, which started out as a rant in this blog to another magazine. And another page or two on the Marie Antoinette play and a few pages about Vegas. I feel slow like a turtle, everything's going slowly, but at least it's going.

Yesterday Ellen and Beth and Susan and I went to lake Chabot for a Libra Girl celebration--this one was specifically in honor of Ellen. She asked for a group painting on the subject of "Self-Possession" and had brought canvas, paints, and markers. We each painted a quadrant on the canvas (after eating and drinking and singing and lying around on the grass looking at the sky with our heads touching and talking about aging of course.)

I am not having a hard time with aging--yet. I feel good; my estrogen is still pumping, I can still swim half a mile without too much strain, and if I worked up to it I could swim a mile again. Energy is fine. The biggest regret--and it is huge--is not having children. Quiet dinners with C when we talk about our work and our lives are precious, and so are Sunday mornings reading the Times and working on the musical, but I still feel the absence of the kind of noise and life and activity that children bring to a house. I don't know what to do about that other than to be aware of the feeling. There's too much big change going on right now to act on it.

And I'm not sure if I should act on it. There are seasons in a person's life, and however good I feel, I am going into autumn--a beautiful time, yes, but not a time for having kids. Or could it be? Could we somehow skip the having children part and go straight to grandchildren? One of my goals this week is to find out whether I can plant an autumn/winter garden. I know planting season is officially spring, but there are vegetables like kale and chard that thrive and give all winter long. You can plant garlic now, I think. And bulbs. And somehow that's all a metaphor--I know this is harvest time, and I am harvesting, but does that mean I don't still get to plant?

Evelyn Orbach, from Jewish Ensemble Theatre in Michigan, called me the other night to tell me there's a new director for Saying Kaddish. He'll be contacting me soon, and she wants me to go to Michigan for a week or so during the rehearsal process in January. I'm excited--I've never sat in on rehearsals for a real production of my play, and also--they have a GREAT pool in the JCC. Hope the rehearsals are held there, and hope I get a free pass!

Two nights ago I dremaed that Alan, my dead ex-husband, has taken up knitting. He had a gorgeous, multi-colored skein of yarn that I was admiring/envying.

"Where do you get your yarn?" I asked him. "When did you learn how to knit?"

He was working on something beautiful and complicated--much harder than anything I'm capable of doing at this stage.

"Oh, here and there," he said vaguely. "I read knitting blogs and get ideas."

The dream was brought on, no doubt, by my own adventures in knitting. I made a beautiful forest-green and gold scarf for C which matches his eyes. Unfortunately, I used needles that were too small for the thick sumptuous wool, and the thing has the consistency of chain mail. Oh well, he can use it as a bullet-proof vest at Junvenile Hall, where he works.

Last night I dreamed I was sculling in the sky--not quite a flying dream, I didn't get very far up. I was just running and floating, hovering right over earth without touching it. I was at some sort of workshop, and later it developed that I had run next to a monastary where people were meditating. I was using the energy of the meditators to fuel my extra-terrestrial leaping, and that was not kosher. Not bad exactly, but not the best possible use for that energy. It would have been better to concentrate and make it go up the center of my head and out the top.

It's appropriate that I dreamed about knitting with Alan, because that's what I'm trying to do, knit up our story, recapture the dropped stitches. Most people would just let it go, and perhaps that would be the best thing. I seem to have this compulsion to comb back over things again and again until I find a way to work in all the loose threads.

I decided that before I turn 50 in October of '08, I'm going to plant fifty trees. By hand. So I've started making phone calls and inquiries about how to go about doing that. I'd like to plant them on public lands, someplace where they are needed.

I called my friend Donald, a professional gardener, and he said he'd help me with that, also with putting in a vegetable garden. C and I go through so many greens every day that it makes sense to try and grow some. I wonder if I could grow lettuce in big pots, so the snails wouldn't get to them?

I revised the essay The Insufficiently Caffeinated Poetry Teacher vs. The Problem of Western Civilization and re-sent it to The Sun. It's so much stronger now than it was when I sent it to them before. if they don't take this version, then I'll enter it in a contest. Meanwhile, I've started another essay, about Las Vegas and Malawi, consumption, simplicity, excess, family love, and the material world, of which I am a somewhat imperfectly adapted part.

In celebration of my upcoming 49th birthday, and because I was getting nagged about it a lot, I finally got a mammogram. It was less traumatic than my first one, fifteen years ago, either because they've refined the hamburger-patty-breast-squashing machines, or because my breasts are less, um, dense, with age (read: droopy.)

In the waiting room at Alta Bates, as I was signing in, I heard "Ali! Ali!" and it was Marie, the mother of Patty and Abraham, the children I always played with from the old neighborhood. They are nineteen now, doing well--Patty is going to college and Abraham is involved with some good skill-building program. I took her number and will swing by and see them. I miss them!

Over dinner, C and I talked about his work. He's getting more involved with some of the young men he is a resource specialist for at juvenile hall. It's bringing him a lot of joy to support their interests, bringing in art books, teaching the rudiments of music theory to a kid that wants to learn bass. I feel so proud of what he's doing I could bust my britches, and it also rekindles my desire to do the same.

We also went to see In the Valley of Elah last night, hoping, like vultures (I am referring to myself here, of course,) to glean material for our musical.

The movie deals with PTSD and the monstrous effect war in general, and this current war in particular, has on the psyches of young men. How angelic looking young men may be hiding monstrous secrets. In that way it resembled The Winter Soldier, the documentary I saw about Vietnam Vets.

Tommy Lee Jones was spectacular as the father of a missing GI. I love Susan Sarandon and would happily pay nine dollars to watch her read the phone book or pick her teeth or any damn thing she pleases. Charlize Theron also starred and her performance in Monster is one of the best things I've ever seen on film. (If you haven't seen it, rent it! And be prepared to be deeply disturbed...)

The script wasted Theron's considerable talent by focusing on her sexuality and beauty, which are also considerable, but for God's sake, if she could be glammed down that much for Monster, she could have been glammed down more for this. C said that as soon as he saw her on screen, playing a single mother police detective and looking like a Hollywood model, he knew there'd be something wrong with the movie. It punched a hole in its credibility.

It wasn't only that she looked too good, it was the stupid dialogue they gave her to contend with; a colleague of hers sneered to her face that she'd "fucked her way up from receptionist" or something like that, and she responded in kind that yeah, she'd gotten her position as detective through fucking her superiors. Name me one woman who has had that obvious of an exchange in their workplace, in 2007, who would not run screaming for HR to file a sexual harrassment complaint. It just didn't fit, and took away from the darker underbelly of the story.

I wanted more of the relationship between the parents of the missing soldier--more Susan Sarandon, please.

And Paul Haggis missed a fantastic opportunity, given the theme of dismemberment, to refer to the Isis/Osiris myth, or even Antigone. Instead he used the story of David and Goliath as a metaphor and I was--and still am--unclear as to how that fits. Who was supposed to be David? The young American soldiers whose terrible fear made them commit atrocities, or the Iraqis, or the father, going up against the military establishment to uncover the truth, or Charlize Theron...? It wasn't clear how the myth related to the story which was not so much about fear and courage but about insanity and humanity. Paul Haggis is a writer and director I really admire--I loved Crash, saw it twice, and would happily see it again--so this just underscored how hard it is to get these things right.

I told C, "Ours will be better," and he laughed and said, "Oh, of course. Nothing simpler in the world."

This is the one-year anniversary of this blog. When I started it, my intention was to write about the life of an old-fashioned "cultural worker" to use that 70's term coined by Holly Near. I wanted to write about working for a living, about sending out work, creating a sustainable life in which i could write, and I hoped my book, See How We Almost Fly would be published, or at least accepted for publication early in the year.

I didn't expect I'd go to Africa, fall so deeply and quickly in love, have my beloved move in with me, win a big poetry prize unrelated to my book, publish something in More magazine, have my play Saying Kaddish With My Sister produced, or any one of a number of great things that happened this year.

I didn't expect to meet people who know me mostly through my blog, and how intimate and intense those exchanges could be.

I didn't expect to write a play in 9 days, as i did with My Hot Tub With Andrea.

I didn't expect to write a short play in a long weekend, Oasis, that was produced in SF last May.

I didn't expect Elizabeth Mendana's production of See How We Almost Fly would be so gorgeous, or that my father and sister's visit would be so sweet and rich.

I didn't expect Michael to die, or Jasch, or Scott. I didn't realize how much those deaths would hurt.

I didn't expect that falling consciously in love would entail looking at some of my deepest wounds again, through fresh eyes.

I didn't expect that after coming in as a finalist in at least two contests, See How We Almost Fly would still not be published. I didn't expect that that would not matter so much, in light of everything else going on.

Last night I went to New College to hear Rebecca Solnit speak about "The Writer as Activist." What a brilliant woman! She seems to think in whole paragrapsh, which come tumbling out of her mouth at ninety miles an hour, a torrent of words. She's also about my age, I guess, from looking at her, and has published ten books. Yikes. Not that I'm comparing or anything. Comparisons are odious.

Meanwhile, I'm still engaged in this monumental task of shoveling out--I mean cleaning the house from the detritus of untold generations of housemates. I asked for and C obligingly dropped off some big hefty trash bags--the kind used on construction sites. I'm going down to the basement--a scary scary place--and begin the excavation. Send in the dogs if I don't appear within a day or two.

Yom Kippor and I backslid into a weird, exhausted confused state last night, triggered by talking about my mother and some of her more florid craziness.

I learned: I have to quit sugar yesterday, and adhere to the right exercise and medication regime.

I'm not ready to deal with my feelings about my mother in casual conversation yet--I still have more healing left to do.

Rage does not heal itself through the simple passage of time.

I need to make more careful note of where I leave my car parked when it is dark out and I am hurrying (late) to Yom Kippor services.

Elsewhere in the news, the great preparations for the great move-in are underway. C and I went all over the house and garden, looking at what would need to be cleared in order for him to start really moving in. It will be a big overhaul--almost as big a job as if we were moving into a new house together. New curtains, new bookcases, new arrangements for furniture, new kitchen set-up...and that's just the beginning. I have begun with what's doable for me--throwing away old spices that have been here since the last century.

It's gray and cold--feels like fall is settling in. The persimmons are ripening on the tree out back; in front, the figs feel cold and hard. It's a time of major change and transition for so many people in my life right now--often difficult changes, griefs, death, divorce. I'm in the middle of a huge change too, as C and I discuss plans for his move-in, to start this weekend. A joyous transition, but a transition none theless, with its attendant anxiety and ground-shifting-under-my feet feeling.

I know we can hurt each other. We can betray each other, devastate each other, enrapture, enrage, encourage, inspire, and comfort each other. I can feel the process of attachment in my body, the part of me that has come to seek his lanky body and his long arms with their musician's fingers, the look in his eye when he looks in my face, the thrilling nakedness of intimacy balanced against the need to keep being a grown-up and not drop any of the balls I've worked so hard to juggle.

Today I'm a little headachey and hungover from computer-bingeing--long hours yesterday and the day before, getting the latest iteration of See How We Almost Fly ready to send out to the next round of contests, and starting work on another one-act play. I've addressed envelopes, SASE's, and written checks for ten contests and open reading periods, all over the country, purged the manuscript down to a lean mean 63 pages of poetry, and done last-minute revisions on some of the poems. Now it's down to the copy shop on Grand Ave., the one with the best prices where I know the Indian family who runs it by name, and then on to the post office where I send my words out onto the wind.

The total cost of this effort will run something over $300.00--money well spent, my friend Carla tells me, an investment--and that's just this time around. I've been sending the ms. out like this once, twice, three times a year for the past five or six years. (My father, the loveliest man in the world, but not the most patient, said on the phone Saturday, "When is that book going to get published? Why don't you send it to the publishers who do Mary Oliver?" Good idea, Dad, why didn't I think of that?)

The fact is, the system of competing with 600 other aspiring poets to get a book published is humiliating, time-consuming and expensive, but there just aren't that many other outlets. Because poetry doesn't pay for itself, most small presses who publish it have resorted to this contest-entry-fee mode of soliciting manuscripts. SHWAF was a finalist in the Akron contest--it's been a finalist a few times, actually--but not yet a bride. So it's down to the copy shop again.

As for the play, I have five pages. Don't know if they are any good or not. The concept is fertile, but I don't really know the characters yet, or what they want from each other. I have to trust the process; also my brilliant, opinionated friends who will let me know what's working and what isn't.

Monday night I went to The Marsh in San Francisco, and saw my friend Colleen Tani Nakamoto perform her short one-woman piece "Soft Tissue" about her journey through vaginismus. It was such a courageous, graceful, poignant, funny, heartbreaking performance. She really pulled it off, with tremendous love and skill. Everyone reading this blog who lives in the S.F. Bay Area, go to the repeat of this show on October 1st, 7:30, at The Marsh, which is on Valencia and 21st or 22nd, in the Mission, and cheer her, and the other women solo performers on.

The trouble with California is that it's so beautiful, it's hard to hold global warming and ecological devastation in mind as we hike through redwood forests with the perfect temperature of air and sunlight and fresh cool breeze filtering through to our skin, talking and laughing and teasing each other.

It has been a time of so much beauty I am hard-pressed to take it all in. Simple easy things like reading the Times in bed together on Sunday morning, passing the sections back and forth and getting up to make more coffee. Long walks in the parks around here.

Talking to my Dad (my stepsister has a new beau, he's a subsistance fisherman and forager in Alaska,) and my sister, and going to Rosh Hashana services with Beth and then Tashlich with Beth and Ellen at Lake Chabot, where we saw groups of other Jews (the men wore yarmulkes) doing the same thing. Tashlich is a Jewish ceremony you do on the new year--casting bread crumbs which represent your sins into a body of moving water. We don't say sins exactly--Reconstructionists don't say sins--but things you want to shed. I said mess and clutter and numbness and distraction. Plop, plop. I want to be worthy of the beauty in my life.

Later I talked to my sister and she said she did Tashlich with her kids and Eli, age 7, cast away whining. Which struck me as very sweet and poignant. And C and I agreed we will buy a mezzuzah and hang it up and have a little ritual to signify our living together. There hasn't been one on the doorposts since Alina moved out, in 2001, since it was hers and she took it.

I showed up at the Code Pink demonstration yesterday, in front of the Federal Building in downtown Oakland. It was a raggle taggle bunch of Bay Area lefties, a lot of gray-haired women (among whom I'm rapidly beginning to number myself as I let my old dye job grow out...) We held signs and were a small, peaceful, anachronistic presence.

Most people--Federal employees on their lunch breaks--ignored us. A young cop kept reminding us to leave a clear pathway so people could get to lunch. A few cars honked and gave a peace signal. A man with a megaphone heckled us in a way I found so annoying I had to ask Penny to babysit me so I wouldn't hit him. All in all, a typical small demonstration, like countless others.

I don't know what good, if any, these things do. I went for Penny, and to show my solidarity, and in memory of the late great Grace Paley, whose brother-in-law said, "There isn't a scrap of pavement in New York City that Gracie hasn't sat in on or laid down on or been dragged away from/." She spent her long, productive and wonderful life engaging in political activity only to see war, greed, and the devastation of natural resources increase in her lifetime--can I do less?

Maybe there is a better way to change things. I'm sure there is. Maybe if I keep writing and thinking and talking and listening long enough I will find it. But meanwhile, the best I can do for myself and the country right now is to show up, so I did.

The day was bright and windy and afterwards I went to Borders and bought a great blank book, for the new year. And went to the Farmer's Market and bought organic kale and chard and basil. On the radio, a man who had been an economist under Clinton was talking about the inherent conflict between being a consumer who loves a good bargain--that would be me, guilty as charged--and being a good citizen who values the environment, justice, good living conditions and fair wages for everyone. It hit home.

Put simply, I love clothes. Even worse, I love shopping for them, finding great deals at Ross Dress for Less, and lugging home my catch. I've realized there's something insatiable about my bargain-hunting, something of the call of the wild. It's not benign. Maybe it could be channelled into something else--I want to channel that impulse into something else--creation, or even better, bringing into order. there's nothing noble about accumulating yet more stuff when i already have too much. But there you have it.

Today I played tennis with G, a hard good game. we both ran all over the court sweating. I played the best I ever have, which is amazing considering I hadn't played in weeks. It's gray and overcast and tonight is Rosh Hashana. I'm exhausted. I need a nap and a shower before i can go. I started a new poem but don't have enough brain cells operating to finish it. Bethie is saving me a seat.

Esalen sparkled--the air, the sun, the people. Everyone looked beautiful to me, all one hundred and forty of the participants. It was a good weekend. I taught well, worked hard, laughed a lot (Theresa Williams got locked in the bathroom of our gorgeous room, and Sy Safransky, mild-mannered intellectual, kicked the door down--to everyone's delight--except, perhaps, for the maintenance people at Esalen.)

It was more people than we'd ever had, but the organization of events was tight as a drum, and there was one extra teacher, which made everything run more smoothly. This year the new teacher was Frances Lefkowitz, a feisty, street-smart writer who had a beautiful essay called Saturn is the Largest Planet on Earth in this month's SUN.

It's a high to be recongized for my work as a writer--after all, most of the time I spend just sitting in front of my computer, or getting parking tickets, or just generally feeling like a dork, so to get to meet readers face to face a few times a year is great. I was enjoying it, and allowing myself to feel, not that I've arrived, since I don't know where the destination is supposed to be--but just to feel, "Hey, I'm here." I wanted to be here, I wanted to get published, I wanted to be heard, I worked my butt off, and what do you know, something happened. I am sitting at the big kids' table. I am part of the cultural conversation of our time. Yippee!

Flash on the heels of this thought I heard my mother's voice from 40 years ago, saying "Alison just wants everyone to bow down in front of her open mouth." I heard those words inside my head and immediately felt shame, and fear--fear that I would become that publically insecure asshole who just loves to hear the sound of her own voice yapping away. Fear of being wrong, fear of being bad, and of being found out, and scorned and shamed for it--those are my worst terrors. I don't worry so much about malaria or parasites or plane crashes--alright, I worry a little about those things, but what really scares me is shame. Which is why, I guess, I try to out myself so regularly on this blog.

So, yes, my ego likes candy. And yes, I get a little sugar-high from all the people telling me they love my poetry, or that I'm a good teacher or whatever. I came home and confessed that to one of my roommates, a wise woman who has logged serious time in a twelve-step program, and she reminded me that the antidote to the sugar high (and its inevitable, subsequent crash) is service. Remembering that the point of the whole thing--duh!--is to serve the people who come to the retreat, and in a larger sense, the readership of The Sun, and in a larger sense, the world. My ego might get stroked in the process, but that is not actually the point of anything, just a side effect. (Got that, Grasshopper?)

There's a great value for us teachers in doing these retreats year after year, because we get to measure and see ourselves evolve. A little grayer, thinner one year, fatter the next, more serene or more troubled, in the flush of a new love, or painfully ending an old one, or just jogging along in a long-term partnership. More flexible, less ego-driven, hopefully; more experienced, certainly.

A new book, a new project, successes and disappointments, new beginnings and ongoing sagas. It's heartening to see life accrue, and the only way to see that is to stick to something. For better or for worse, I've stuck to writing, to The Sun, publishing there for fifteen years. And it piles up. I don't know how many poems and stories I've had in there, but it's over fifty, I know that--more than I ever would have expected. A good harvest.

When I got home, it was to the news that my wonderful lesbian-couple roommates found a great one-bedroom for themselves and their menagerie, which opens up a space for C to move in! Gulp. We are both excited and nervous, realizing what this means--a man with five pianos and a few marriages under his belt does not move in with a woman lightly. This means committment, the committment we have both been ready for from the beginning. Our relationship has been marked by directness, straightforwardness, and a lack of ambivalence--both of us were willing to say, "I want this," from the outset, thankfully. And we do. Which is not to say that there's not some trepidation.

I haven't lived with a partner since Alan. Hell, I haven't had a real partner since Alan, and we broke up in 1994. I am a whole new person now--or am I? Old fears resurface, the same basic underlying fear as always, fear of being unacceptable. I know there's nothing for it but to feel the fear and keep breathing and clear out a space in the garage where C can store his stuff, and make room in my psyche for this new transition, and that it's a time to be very gentle and very honest with myself and with him and that's what I'm trying for. And although there is too much to do and never enough time, we are using the time we do have as well as we can, and we are happy.

Yesterday and this morning the air was heavy, poisonous with smog fumes from two major fires. Now, a great wind is thrashing the trees, opening and slamming doors in the house, raging through the world.

I've got a bad headache and feel bloated, spacey and tired. Spent all day yesterday waiting for FedEx so I could get Masankho's luggage to him on Hawaii. He has lousy cell phone reception there so we had a number of frustrating phone calls that were basically a bunch of static, and "I can't hear you, your phone is cutting out!" shouted desperately into the void.

I still feel numb and cut off from my feelings about Jasch, (and Scott, and Michael.) It may be because of the medication I've been taking ever since Alan's death when I slipped into a major depression. Or maybe I'm just overwhelmed and scared to feel. At any rate, I can't feel right now--I want to, but it's not coming.

I confessed all this last night at an exformation (playing around) group with a couple of Interplay friends and it felt good to at least name what was going on. Just to say it. It's not just the deaths, its all the other big--and good--changes that have happened/are happening this year. Even moving from a single person to being a couple--and I have felt C and I move more and more into that shared mind-space over the last few weeks, that space where we are each thinking about the same things together--Alan and I had that, and it's wonderful, and scary.

After the little group, I went to the car and called C and confessed all to him, and he was empathic and said all the right things. And it was still a hazy hot evening and I'm still in a numb, overwhelmed moment, but I can also be loved and okay. I know I've been eating too much sugar and playing too much online Sudoku and I want to stop doing that...it's just more ways to not feel, and it ends up making me sick.

I did find this poem this morning on Poetry Almanac, which made me think of Jasch's relationship with his daughter, Hana. I hope someone shows it to her:

For My Daughter

When I die choose a star
and name it after me
that you may know
I have not abandoned
or forgotten you.
You were such a star to me,
following you through birth
and childhood, my hand
in your hand.

When I die
choose a star and name it
after me so that I may shine
down on you, until you join
me in darkness and silence
together.

--David Ignatow

I also found a great poem by Kevin Young yesterday when I was cruising around on Poetry web sites. I love Kevin Young's work for its economy, music, and humor.

Ode to the Midwest
by Kevin Young

The country I come from
Is called the Midwest
—Bob Dylan
I want to be doused
in cheese

& fried. I want
to wander

the aisles, my heart's
supermarket stocked high

as cholesterol. I want to die
wearing a sweatsuit—

I want to live
forever in a Christmas sweater,

a teddy bear nursing
off the front. I want to write

a check in the express lane.
I want to scrape

my driveway clean

myself, early, before
anyone's awake—

that'll put em to shame—
I want to see what the sun

sees before it tells
the snow to go. I want to be

the only black person I know.

I want to throw
out my back & not

complain about it.
I wanta drive

two blocks. Why walk—

I want love, n stuff—

I want to cut
my sutures myself.

I want to jog
down to the river

& make it my bed—

I want to walk
its muddy banks

& make me a withdrawal.

I tried jumping in,
found it frozen—

I'll go home, I guess,
to my rooms where the moon

changes & shines
like television.

Okay, it's Wednesday, so I have two days to get buff and lose ten pounds before heading off to Esalen on Friday. Um...ain't gonna happen, I don't think. Not this year. Ah, two years ago, when I was in training to swim a mile for Women with Cancer and had read Potatoes Not Prozac and become a no-sugar zealot, then I was lean and mean and full of steam and could sit proudly in the hot tubs naked as a jaybird for God and everybody to see. But life has intervened since then, my nephew Noah turned me onto Sudoku, my gym, aka Mecca, closed, which has ruined my life, and here I sit in my nice soft pudding self again.

I did go to my new gym last night--10:30 p.m. at 24 Hour Fitness in Oakland--and the pool was full of kids! At 11:00 on a school night! What were their parents thinking? Mostly it looked like Asian young ones, very sweet, speaking Chinese and horsing around, having a good time. I tried to swim around them, but there were just too many bodies in the water, and I kept crashing into the damn styrofoam kickboards which they would bring into the water to play with and then abandon.

I thought of the pristine waters of Lake Malawi at sunrise with longing; how sweet to swim in a real lake, instead of murky over-chlorinated steamy rancid water.

I need to find a new gym. This one is close to my house, it's relatively cheap and convenient, but the locker rooms are gross, the pool is crowded and unsupervised, and it's virtually impossible to get a decent swim. I should go over to the Mills pool and check out their hours--though I'm a big fat baby about swimming in an outdoor pool in winter--and I hate being kept to set, short hours. I'm a hanger, I like to luxuriate. Maybe that posh expensive gym in Alameda, if I can justify the expense.

Meanwhile, I'm intrigued by this whole Larry Craig gay-arrest in the airport bathroom thing. I wrote my talented playwright friend S, a young gay man, and suggested he write a play about it, and he wrote back, very nicely, "Why don't you? You don't have to be gay to write about 'gay' material."

I watched a video clip of Craig's two adult children being interviewed by Diane Sawyer. They seemed so convinced that nothing at all had happened, that this was all a smear campaign designed to get their father. I want Republican hypocrites to fall on their asses as much as the next person, I suppose, but it's sad when it happens in this way. My ex-husband's uncle was also a closeted, married gay man who got arrested for soliciting an undercover cop in a Men's Room in a train station in Chicago. Uncle Alan was an old-line Communist, who used to argue (with a straight face,) that there was no homosexuality in the Soviet Union, because it was a decadent Capitalist disease. He was up to his eyeballs deep in denial, but he was also a human being with a family, and the whole incident was painful.

I asked C, "Has anyone ever bothered you in a public bathroom, asking for sex?" He said no.

I wonder what the foot signals were. I saw a photo of the undercover cop who arrested Craig and he looks like a young fallen angel, pretty in a bad boy way.

I'm mulling over the idea of making a play about this, but not sure how I would pull it off. Meanwhile, I'm reading a play S. wrote, about a contemproary gay man who rises from the dead and sparks a religious/medical furor all over the world. It's wonderful!

I also bought Albee's Zoo Story yesterday at the used bookstore, because I need to read that, and I bought 4 movies onsale at Silver Screen video--Babel, and Marie Antoinette, and Stranger Than Fiction, and Infamous, the other movie about Truman Capote. I justify all these purchases as research--I need tor ead the Albee because of my two-character one-act hot tub play; I am thinking of a play with Marie Antoinette as a character, and, well, the other two movies are about writers, and I'll always watch anything about a writer.

So I'm waiting for Fed Ex to arrive and pick up Masankho's suitcase, which should be with him in Hawaii, but is not, because the airline screwed up. C is back at work, first week back teaching, after our lovely idyllic summer, and I'm adjusting to the new season. Five new poems about Malawi which are pretty good, another two scenes for the musical. And lesson plans. And doing push-ups.

C called and told me Ken Wilbur was being interviewed on KALW. I tuned in and listened--he's brilliant, yes, and what he has to say is important--but his interview was followed by an interview with Wangari Maathai (spelling?) the Kenyan woman who won a Nobel Peace prize a few years ago for inspiring her whole country (and the world) to plant trees.

Comparisons are odious, but I will make one anyway; Wilbur was talking excitedly, from his brilliant brain, about all the latest developments in our understanding of spirituality. Maathai was living spirit. When she spoke, it was with the deep rich voice of a tree.

She said, "It's hard work. You have to go down on your knees and plant the seed and water it and protect it." When she received the phone call from Sweden, telling her she had won the Nobel, that's what she did; rushed out to her yeard and planted a tree. It was the only way big enough for her to express her gratitude.

I was interested by Wilbur, but deeply moved by Maathai. She spoke to the questions I have about development in Africa, after coming back from Malawi, that is: if "development," offers an alienated, plastic-wrapped, credit-card driven existence, more convenient than the hard life of subsistence fishing and farming that people engage in, but less meaningful, I don't feel enthusiastic about helping fund it. If "development" means planting trees and honoring the environment, then I'll gladly give my money, time, and energy to the effort. That seems to me to be an unambiguously worthy thing to do.

After listening to that interview the phone rang again and it was David, my housemate, who is teaming up with two other guys to start a solar company. C and I agreed we'd put solar panels on the house as he moves in; David and company are ready to go. Next move is the garden--going out there and having the courage to break up the hard stony ground, and turn it over and plant greens in it--kale and chard, and other hardy plants.

I'll think of Jasch as I do it.

We saw No End in Sight yesterday, a powerful documentary about the mess in Iraq. The movie detailed the blunders that were made, some out of negligence, some out of arrogance, some out of corruption, laziness, greed, or ignorance, that led the military from bad idea to fiasco.

Everyone knows what a mistake Iraq was, but the film shows the many men and women of good will and intelligence, public servants, career military and civilians, American and Iraqi, who put thought, effort, and energy into trying to make something good happen there. It also shows how at every step of the way, these efforts were undermined, and disaster was deliberately courted, to the destruction of a whole people and culture.

When I see pictures of Iraqis screaming and howling over the corpses and coffin of their loved ones I see a whole culture driven mad with grief.

The destruction of museums which housed relics from 7,000 years of human history; of one of the best, most comprehensive libraries in the world...the scholars and historians who mourned those losses in the film touched my heart. And the Mexican-American soldier who said in halting English, "I need something good to happen in Iraq--to make me feel there is meaning in what I lost."

Today, C and I took a long wonderful hike in the woods and talked more about our play. We don't want it to run along partisan political lines at all, but we do want to explore this theme of service and sacrifice.

As I'm seeing it now, there are two kinds of sacrifice--that which is for the greater good, in which we relinquish selfishness in order to serve something higher, and meaningless, corrupted sacrifice, which is coerced, or extracted from people on false grounds, or which is made corrupted after the fact by the way the beneficiaries of the sacrifice abuse and mistreat it.

I believe we all long to make meaningful sacrifices in our lives, but have been conditioned to fear and mistrust sacrifice because of the many ways the gifts of artists, women, parents, humanitarians have been corrupted and co-opted in our society. The Republican party is still selling itself on the idea of sacrifice and good old-fashioned values of hard work and service, when, as the movie pointed out, none of the main architects of the Iraq fiasco had ever done military service except for Colin Powell, whose reservations about the whole escapade were disregarded.

Cranky, hot, hungry, headachey, and hormonal. God! The saving grace is that I am finally getting to the poems from Malawi and C and my other friends and family affirm that they're good. Like little snapshots--all the pictures I didn't take with a camera because I am a sucky photographer and there were many on the trip with better equipment and better shutter-clicking capabilities than I--every photo I took in my mind is swimming into focus as poetry.

I found out today that my friend Jasch Hamilton of Diamond Organics died last week. Jasch was endlessly curious, interested and interesting, energetic, delighted, intrigued, searching, questioning, but always in a positive way. I knew he had a brain tumor from the day I met him, in one of my writing workshops, but he was beating it back with green tea, T'ai Chi, meditation, chemo and radiation. He was even curious about his disease--marvelled at the new breakthroughs in medicine that allowed them to track and treat his illness, remained up-to-date, optimistic, and completely engaged.

I never thought he would die.

I did not get to take him to Esalen one more time as we had discussed and as I knew he wanted to.

I sent him my poems and plays, and he always was delighted in them, and often sent a box of food as if to say "Food for the mind, food for the body." It was always organic, exquisite, and fresh.

I will go to his memorial this Sunday. I will miss Scott's next Saturday, because of teaching at Esalen. I missed my friend Michael's in January because it was in Seattle.

Three vital, vibrant men, great guys all of them, all fathers of children who still need their presence, dead in their fifties. Of cancer.

It's been a week since I've been back, a week of inarticulateness and resting, hearing about the death of a friend's lover, too young, from cancer, slowly unpacking, hanging out with C, with my roommates, easing back into this comfortable, foreign life.

My Dad wants me to send around an email about Malawi, something he can forward to his friends. I myself promised I would write about it. Of course I would write about it. I write about everything. Definitely I will write about it.

As soon as I figure out what the hell to say.

"Going to Africa" had always been on my list, that famous list of things you want to do before you die, a list I cajoled C into writing last night after yet another newspaper article extolled the virtues of setting such goals and then keeping them.

Ever since I was a child I drank in the stories of medical missionaries, brave doctors who brought medicines and vitamins to isolated peasants in far-off lands. There was a Dr. Dooley--is that right? Was that his name? Tom Dooley, I think, who brought medical care to Vietnam, back in the 50s--and others. Albert Schweitzer. In our own times, of my very own exact generation, Paul Farmer in Haiti.

So I wanted to go, and in the back of my mind, I think I imagined I'd find something useful to do with myself there. Feed orphans. Help somehow.

Although I love what I do, although teaching poetry and essay and memoir are worthwhile, good endeavors, and my writing and publishing are likewise worthwhile and make me feel Important to boot, I have questioned, these last years, how much I am really giving. If I were to die tomorrow I would feel I had not given enough away, not done enough to alleviate suffering in any way I could.

Being a writer has some aspects to it that are selfish. I like my private time, my down time, and my obsession time. I got precious little of any of those things on the trip; they are luxuries not found in African villages or large touring groups. I spend money on books and movies and entry fees to poetry contests--lots and lots of money, too much money, on those things. (I also buy too many clothes and eat too much junk food, but that's another story.)

I give to charity yes--a little. Not sacrificial giving--I don't give to the point where I am depriving myself of something I want. And I live in an uneasy kind of peace with all that, a fat American peace that is not really peace.

Then: Malawi. Busses with patched tires, patches on patches, tires that blew out every thirty miles. Kids with no shoes or with ragged shoes. Clay huts with thatched roofs, women nursing their babies on the beach where they wash, fish, and conduct their lives, asking my friend for kwatchas when she took their pictures. Beautiful women.

I came, I saw, I took notes, other people took pictures. We left. And now what?

I'll give more money to kudo, but money isn't it. I would like to be in some relationship to this other world, and not sure how yet.

Meanwhile, I'm preparing to teach at Esalen in a week and a half, I revised an essay called "Bad Words" which I think Shambhala Sun will publish, I fixed a flat tire on my car, with help from C and the nice people at Big O. It's so conveneint here. You get a flat, you drive to Big O, you whip out your credit card and magic! New tire!

I keep sleeping, but still feel tired and logey and my head hurts. Life is still a little out-of-focus, a little blurry. I feel 10,000 leagues under the sea. I just learned that a member of our party was hospitalized after she got home, with a lung infection.

I'm grateful to C for his kindness, for still being happy to hang out with me although I don't feel scintillating or fun this week.

I'm sad for my friend who died of cancer.

I'm wondering about the villagers we left in Malawi--what will become of them in the next decade, as development nibbles at the shore of Lake Malawi, then bites down hard. Will they get electricity and phone service, roofs that don't leak in the rain, decent education for the kids, and a good hospital? And will that bring with it trash and television and alienation?

I wanted to count myself as a global citizen, and I do. I want to be able to participate in these conversations, between over-developed (technologically) places, and poor countries, only the more I see the less I can summon anything resembling an opinion.

C and I talked last night about our relationship, how we want it to help both of us evolve. I need to develop myself, but how? Right now, my head aches terribly and I know that the only journey for me to take at this moment is an inward one, into silence.

I'm up at 5 a.m. my time. Two days after I arrived home with the drum I had bought from the musicians at Tukumbo, and the three little wooden chairs I had lugged in my ten-ton luggage, and the bright green and blue and yellow African cloths folded and stuffed into every odd corner of my carry-on and my memory of roasted mice on a stick by the side of the road (no, I didn't eat any), and the kids playing soccer with a "ball" made of plastic bags smushed together, wound round and round withy black string and C greeted me at the airport and took me home to my room where Ruth had lovingly left big purple orchids to greet me, jet lag has finally set in.

Thirty or more hours of traveling, airports in Lilongwe, Johannesberg, London, New York, and San Francisco. Phew! Last night I crawled into bed at 9:45 p.m. Up again at 3:30, wide awake. Okay, it's going to be like this for awhile. Try to go swimming as soon as possible.

I have greeted my roommates and made a few phone calls. I have showered and unpacked. I have walked on Alameda Beach in the moonlight and gone to Trader Joe's and had a cup of C's excellent strong coffee, and a big salad with feta cheese and black olives. I have eaten potato chips--too many potato chips. I have paid bills and deposited checks. I have laid out the presents I bought and tried to figure out who to give them to. I have lost track of time and forgotten my brother and sister-in-law's birthdays. I have written the first paragraph of an essay about Malawi. am going back to bed now, and will blog again later.

Life is slower here. People are used to waiting for things. Men and boys go out very early in the morning--or late at night--to fish in Lake Malawi. It sounds idyllic, but the lake has been badly overfished, so it's hard to get a good catch.

Women cultivate cassava, groundnuts (peanuts), spinach and other greens, tomatoes, onions, bananas, and rice. The nicer houses are brick. They make the bricks themselves, out of the clay soil, and bake them in brick ovens, which they also make themselves.

The ingenuity is amazing.

I've seen children playing with bicycle rims and straw. They use the rim as a hoop, and the straw as a stick, to keep it rolling. It's the only toy I've seen here, although the men carve wood incessantly. But everything the men carve is to sell to the tourists.

I've got a piece of African cloth wrapped around my waist in a skirt, the way the women do here. I'm going to buy a lot more pieces of cloth and bring them back. Cloth and wood.

One of our group saw a man carving using the broken neck of a Coke bottle for a knife.

I ate flies last night. They catch them in a basket or a net, a whole swarm of them, and smush them into little balls and cook them. It didn't taste good or bad--just neutral. Dipping my fingers into the bowl of raw chopped flies felt like touching a bowl of feathers--very soft.

Day after day we have eaten the same food--sema or rice--the sema is made from either cassava flour or maize flour. Neither has any protein, vitamins, minerals or roughage--just starch. It's the staple food. Red sauce, made from tomatoes. Fish or chicken. The chickens here are small, much smaller than the U.S. They roam freely around the village, pecking and scratching, but return to their own roosts at night. They build the hen houses out of straw and elevate them onto a platform made from sticks, to protect the hens from the hyenas that used to be a problem here.

There are no longer wild hyenas roaming, but there are still sometimes hippos who come in the rainy season and demolish the cassava gardens. It's illegal to kill the hippos, but sometimes people do.

Women have very little economic power here even though they do the work that keeps life going--hauling water (on their heads), hauling firewood, also on their heads, ending the gardens, cultivating the food, gathering and cooking it, birthing and raising the children. Women's work.

I want to put my money into a woman's hands, but it is the men who interface most with the tourists, selling their carved wooden objects--salt cellars and salad spoons, tiny chairs decorated with hippos and rhinos and elephants and lions, decorated bowls, paintings of Lake Malawi.

I am so grateful that so far, knock wood, my health has held up well. At least half of our group has gotten sick with some kind of flu which is also passing through the viullage--hacking bronchial coughs, and fever. It looks miserable. I've been eating a lot of protein and taking sleeping pills so that I can sleep through the sound of drunken young Australians partying at this campground.

I've brought three books and not read a single sentence of any of them. I have two blank books and haven't written anything except to take notes, and in this blog and in emails home. I'm just absorbing like a sponge. I don't even know what I'm thinking about, except that it is the girls and women who touch me most deeply.

Today six of us rented a leaky falling-apart rowboat and rowed out to a little rocky island on Lake Malawi to dive off the rocks, snorkel and swim. Before I left I promised I would not swim in Lake Malawi because of parasites, but it is so sparklinbg and pristine here I couldn't resist. It was such a good feeling to stretch my body out in the water, and snorkelling I saw angel fish striped pale blue and black and other tropical fish.

Last night Masankho's father, Alekey Banda, arrived and spoke to us about the history of Malawi since it got its independence from the British in 1964. I forget all the details but I have a sheet of paper with the salient facts and will put them here later.

Meanwhile, I just feel in bliss. I want to stay in Africa forever, want to drink mango beer and learn to play bao and just wear a bright cloth knotted around my waist the way the village women do. I feel so sorry for the members of our group who are sick--it's a nasty flu-like bug. So far no one has bad diarrhea (that I know of.) I'm eating as much protein as I can, and taking drops of grapefruit seed extract in my water and I feel fine. My period started yesterday, so I am deliciously relaxed now. It helps that I boycotted the rattley old bus--half-hour rides from our sleeping accomodations at Kande Beach and Masankho's family home in the village where we all gather for meals and Interplay and to travel around and see the aid projects.

We are in the village, Tukombo. It's very poor. People eat cassava three times a day. Cassava is a white root vegetable, covered with a dark brown skin--mostly starch. They soak it and ferment it, and scrape it and bake it into a hard fluffy gluey ball and eat it rolled in their hands, dipped in sauce, or with meat and vegetables. We, the foreigners, have meat and fruit and vegetables with every meal, but the villagers don't.

My intestines are pretty well glued together with cassava at this point. 'Nuff said.

They greeted us singing and dancing. A whole troupe, moving together, singing, "Thank you, Masankho, thank you for bringing the visitors from America." It was overhwelming. They had been dancing and singing for hours, with an accompanying drum. We were overhwelmed, but then, everywhere we've gone, we've been greeted by a singing and dancing contingent. The Africans redefine graciousness.

The women wear bright cloths wrapped around their waists for a skirt, and a shirt--any shirt. They carry huge burdens on their heads; buckets of laundry, bundles of firewood, baskets piled with cassava. The men wear shirts and pants. They make wood carvings. They should be fishermen, but for complex political reasons, in this region they have not been supported to fish. Almost everyone is ragged and dusty and many people are very skinny.

Yesterday we were taken by bus to seven of the hundred and something projects that Masankho's family funds and organizes through their organization, Kudo. The visits included a trip to a girls' school, a trip to an elementary school, a piggery, an orphanage, to see the cassava wells where the women soak and clean the cassava, skill-building centers where students learn to use tools and a market where we bought crafts. On the bus, off the bus.

The old cassava wells are in a muddy swampy area, where women have to stand up to their ankles in filthy water, where leeches, snakes and crocodiles are a danger, as well as predatory men who lie in wait. With funds that Masankho#s aunt helped raise, they have built some new clean cassava wells from concrete, which are safe and protected and raised up.

The rest of Malawi eats maize, which is more nutritious than cassava, but for political reasons, this region, Khata Bay, has not been given seed for maize.

The orphanage was the hardest place. The children there looked hungry--they were skinny, with old eyes. I asked how old one little girl was--I would have guessed four. She was seven. Another I thought was ten was fourteen. They clustered around us hopefully, but we didn't have anything for them. We give cash to the foundation, some of which should come down to them. But those kids--to see kids literally in rags, and all dirty, some with eyes swollen and red from conjunctivitis, the bigger ones carrying the smaller ones around on their hips, just out there in the middle of the woods. The adults who worked there looked as skinny and ragged and exhausted as the children. I wished so much for something to give them. I want to go back there.

The weather is beautiful, warm, not too hot. I haven't had to use insect repellant once, although I am faithfully taking my malaria pills. The land is gentle and inviting, leafy, green, and African. I love this land!! I can understand how homesick an African would feel for it--the air is gentle here, we are on the shores of Lake Malawi, which is so big it feels more like being at the shore of an ocean. It even has waves.

For all its problems, the village is a beautiful place, with little paths connecting everything. We've seen plenty of chickens, some monkeys in the trees, African cattle, which are much smaller than genetically engineered American ones. Because of the weather, people mostly live outside. They have thatched-roof hits, some with one or two or three rooms. The children play with toys made out of straw and sticks and a stray wheel, or an empty plastic bottle. There is no trash. Nothing is wasted.

I feel completely at home here, drinking Nescafe with powdered milk, eating rice porridge for breakfast, holding babies on my hips, trying to learn the rudiments of Chichewa, practicing the dances. For me, the pain and fatigue of the journey to get here have dissipated and I feel good, but about a third of our group is complaining of congestion, head colds, or other ailments. I feel like I want to stay and stay, helping out in the kitchen, holding babies, doing whatever I can to make myself useful.

First impressions of Malawi: the faint smell of smoke from cook-fires hangs in the air. It smells like Haiti. This morning, from my window, I saw a boy with a load of sticks on his head.

I thought it would be hot and full of mosquitoes. It's cool and rainy. I haven't got one mosquito bite yet.

I'm typing this wearing my jeans, a white t-shirt, a shirt over that, and a sweater. That's all I have with me right now. My luggage never arrived from Heathrow. Eight others in our party are in a similar boat.

It doesn't matter. Other people are giving me sunscreen and insect repellant, I have my malaria tablets, and my glasses and toothbrush. I washed my underwear out in the sink last night and wore it again this morning.

Last night we went to a family friend of Masankho's for a feast. His father was there, elegant in a three-piece suit. We were all in various stages of falling-down exhaustion. Malawi is called "the warm heart of Africa" because the people are so warm and gracious. And they are. Hospitality is a religion for them. There were platters of food, which we Westerners approached with trepidation because of all the warnings the travel doctors had given us. It would be hard to be a vegetarian traveling here. Not that there aren't vegetables, but I'm reluctant to eat the raw ones and there's only so much breadfruit and potatoes you can eat.

After dinner a troupe of dancers and drummers came and danced for us and that was amazing. Sheer raw physical joy and grace and power, sharp vertical pelvic thrusts, wide-hipped stance, arched back, the kundalini energy traveling up and down forcefully, rhythmically, deliberately...

There was a dance which women dance for the young men's initiation ceremony. A dance for girls as they are initiated into becoming women. There was a dance they had made up after African soldiers returned from the first world war and the second world war. The men danced their part in military khakis with colored sashes. Their movements showed how they had to clean and load their rifles and other things. The women danced around them in African dresses, signing and chanting and shouting. It was almost like a homecoming, healing ritual for the returning soldiers.

Beautiful drums in a deep black night. I had heard about the darkness of an African night, that it is more dark than in the West, and it is. A soft black blanket.

Im in the lobby of a Marriott Hotel after having "slept" sitting up on a Virgin Atlantic red-eye flight last night. Some of our group went to see art Museums--the Tate and the Modern. Some went to just tour around downtown London. I knew I didn't have enough energy for either. For six pounds (about twelve dollars) you can use the pool at this Marriott. I swam a little, then collapsed in a chair and fell asleep. A hot shower, and I feel semi-human--with another all-night plane flight in front of me.

This settles it. I am not going to be Angelina Jolie when I grow up. I don't have the stamina.

But the really great news is that I found out a poem of mine won the Writer's Digest award for unrhymed poetry. I get money--always welcome--and more importantly, a chance to meet with editors and agents. This is what I've been waiting and working so intensely for--a week after I was feeling that nothing was happening, it was all at a standstill.

Yesterday the air was so poisonous that I ended up not going into the city. It was as if a big gray-white sponge were stuck to the sky. Hot, muggy, smoggy and still. Today seems a little fresher.

Random notes on race: Oakland and the Bay Area are diverse--that's why I love living there. And Massachusetts is not. I didn't notice that so much growing up--it was just the way things were--black people were mostly in Roxbury, there were only a handful in Lexington, except for the Metco kids who got bussed in to our suburban school where they ate at their own lunch table and were seldom (never) in my A.P. classes.

We had a great time in Massachusetts this trip with my family, but saw very few black people--or any kind of people of color. And at this point in my life, I notice. At the train station, waiting for Amtrak we even caught ourselves counting--"Okay, there's one." "There's another one--but he's working as a janitor."

This phenomemon of segregation is a weird, silent disease--it's just an absence of color, a sea of white and pink and blonde and red hair, which we blend into seamlessly. After spending years in inter-racial couples I notice it especially. When we got to New York, of course, we were back in diversity-land--and what a beautiful rainbow it is. We both noticed, not just that there were a lot more black people--but there were tons of well-dressed, professional-looking black people, visible in every walk of life. In the museums, in the tony 5th Avenue shops, everywhere. It felt good.

Meanwhile, C flew home yesterday to find someone text-messaging him from my missing (now presumed stolen) cell phone. The messages were obscene and anti-Semitic. He made an executive decision to suspend service for which I am very grateful. I had just assumed the phone was under the bed somewhere and I would find it when I got back, and wasn't it stupid of me to have mislaid it just before traveling, but no, someone must have picked my pocket, or...I can't imagine. Scary.

The juvenile tone of the nasty messages makes us think it was a kid, but whomever the thief was also used the word "schmeckle," a Yiddish word for penis; how would they know that? C has been reading the new T.C. Boyle novel called "Talk Talk" which is about identity theft and the book is putting the fear of God into him about all the bad things creative miscreants can do if they put their minds to it.

I also found out that a lama named John--I forget his last name--used my poem "At the Corner Store" in his new book. Can't wait to read it. And I want to read "Eat, Pray, Love," by Elizabeth Gilbert (maybe use it the next time I teach Memoir) which my friend Carla says is amazing, and a book by a woman physicist, Lisa Randall, about Unravelling the Mysteries of the Universe or something. I've been dreaming on the new play(s) while I'm here--it's a very creative place. C and I could see spending a few months in N.Y. someday, if we could swing it--maybe an apartment-swap of some kind...

It has been a most amazing week, and I have been a lame correspondant. Amazing times with my family, all 100,000 of them--siblings, spouses, step-siblings, step-siblings-in-law, nephews, nieces, and my Dad and stepmother whose new Buddhist name is Samayadevi. Everyone healthy and doing well, and so loving, it's hard to put into words. I am lucky. Lucky, lucky, lucky!

For the last three days we've been at a little hotel close to JFK airport in NYC. Everyday we've taken a shuttle to an airtrain to a subway and tramped all over NY in the 95 degree heat. I am beginning to get a grasp of the subway system. I now understand the differences between downtown (the Village), midtown (all the expensive stuff, plus Central park, plus the big museums,) and uptown (Harlem.)

Today we went to the MOMA to see the Richard Serra installation. He has these huge sheets of iron that make curved round walls you walk through and around, like a labrynth, or a ship listing at sea. C commented that he felt like a paramecium crawling through the sculpture. I felt like a bit of food being passed through the small intestine of a giant. It was a parasite's eye-view.

I couldn't help thinking of the incredible expense--in all ways--monetary, time, effort--to make these monumental pieces and then somehow ship them and install them. It's inconceivable. It's like the Pyramids or Stonehenge or something. What nkind of ego would you have to have to conceive of such an artwork and then be confident that the resources would be there to help you execute it and exhibit it? I'm not sure how I feel about that but I'm glad we saw the sculptures. They were inspiring and humbling.

There were also six floors of other paintings at the MOMA--everything from Monet's Water Lilies--I hadn't realized it was so big--to Les Desmoiselles d'Avignon by Picasso, a bunch of paintings by Miro, by Chagall, by Jaspar Johns, by Joan Mitchell (my favorite), by Jackson Pollack. and Matisse, and dozens more which I am neglecting to mention.

The women are so well-dressed in this city I was constantly gaping and appreciating. I am embarrassed to say how much I love fashion. It's not politically correct, it's completely weird given that I am on my way to one of the poorest countries in Africa, but the sight of all those well-constructed flouncy skirts and interesting drapey tops, and colors and patterns and textures made me happy. The women were like walking works of art themselves.

In fact, I've been blown away by the beauty of New Yokers in general. I don't know if it is because I am in love and seeing everything through rosy-colored glasses, but the average Joe or Jane on the street just glows to me. And the city is beautiful, even in the stifling August heat. It's amazingly clean and user-friendly, probably one of the best-organized places I've ever been. Central Park is like Paradise. Tomorrow I say good-bye to C early in the a.m. as he gets on sa plane and goes back to California. And then I'm going to go back to the Park and just sit on the grass and people-watch and write all day. And then tomorrow night--the plane to London--and then onward to Malawi!