the lengthening of the days

lost tooth

Each time a tooth loosens in Katherine's mouth, each time some fragment of her baby self dislodges and makes itself a gift, she places the piece of bone under her pillow and passes a restless night. She waits for wings or small lights, or maybe a bell. She waits to know if this part of her is worth a coin, or a book, or some magic, something to make a loss desired.

Yaakov / A Hole in the Sky

bubble and squeak

We are a family without strong food traditions, having inherited few and rejecting most of them. Tonight's dinner, cooked for a dinner guest from Israel: vegetarian bubble and squeak (British), spicy oyster, button and portabello mushrooms (Chinese), palmiers with fresh berries (French). Many of our dinners come from cookbooks like 1000 Vegetarian Recipes. We cook them once, then wander onwards to other tastes.

in a Chevy Chase coffee shop

as if we needed the reminder

As if we needed the reminder that
the world can at 4:53 fall in shards and
slabs, take to dust a school
(children at a blackboard, children at their desks).
As if we needed again that postcard
from above that he was elsewhere, that
he didn't see that corpse we're watching on the news
or the baby who died still waiting or
even the orphanage, now gone, and the director
and his children, gone, rubble.

reoriented

First faculty meeting in three and half years in which the chair at the table's head was not mine.

trouble being present

Each morning when I run the hill at Tenley looms, makes me weary even before its slope impends. One morning familiar fatigue hit just at its start, by the VW dealership where a sale is perpetual. I braced myself, but vanished into thoughts of days to come. When I arrived at the Metro station that is the hill's end I couldn't remember space in between.

Too many days have become Tenley hills, swift movement and vague memory and no world better for having lived within it. Trouble being present.

a small tradition

When someone begins a course of study with me (not in a large class, but in the intimacy of independent study), I give them on the first day a clementine. The gift marks the commencement of our learning together, and learning together is sweet.

warriors and graves

Today we visited the the terra cotta warriors exhibit at the National Geographic headquarters. Alex and his friend Carlos marveled at the preserved weaponry. Katherine waited for the figures to move, thinking them robots. I found the enormity of this trove against death sad: to believe that a life to come would be infinite extension of the world we already possess.

a house with music

My mother taught herself to play a portable organ, a gift to an unimpressed daughter. She knew one song especially well, and she played it happily, lilting of a bride and a bicycle. Her gift to me: a guitar and a teach yourself to play manual, but no lessons. It was like being given a book in Polish, or Urdu.

Two musical children inhabit this house. When they are not hammering melodies from the piano, they are listening to something, or asking. Both their tastes run, for the time being, to sugary pop. Coldplay and Lady Gaga are shared favorites, Black Eyed Peas not far behind.

Not the best music, maybe, but I love living in a house with music.

progress