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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Is he sad because Dede died?"

"Yes."

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

"Yes."

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

"That's right."

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

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

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

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

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

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

(The picture above was taken by my cousin Jessica)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Carla in the front row: her face.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Uh-huh," I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dear friends,

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So have some chocolate cake!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was great to see his passion. Inspiring.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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