sad sad sign

'preface to a twenty volume suicide note'

Lately, I've become accustomed to the way
The ground opens up and envelopes me
Each time I go out to walk the dog.
Or the broad edged silly music the wind
Makes when I run for a bus...

Things have come to that.

And now, each night I count the stars.
And each night I get the same number.
And when they will not come to be counted,
I count the holes they leave.

Nobody sings anymore.

And then last night I tiptoed up
To my daughter's room and heard her
Talking to someone, and when I opened
The door, there was no one there...
Only she on her knees, peeking into

Her own clasped hands.

(Amiri Baraka)

ode to miss pig

It's been a bad year for the McNeil cats, beginning and now also ending with their loss.

Miss Pig, presumably, is dead. There is no physical evidence, only her unprecedented failure to appear at my mother's kitchen door last Wednesday morning, mewling her ridiculous little mew in the hopes of obtaining foodish delights.

There are coyotes in Anacortes and, on occasion, they have been known to nab unwary felines. My mother fears the worst.

Miss Pig (also known affectionately as just Pig, as in, "Where's the Pig? It's breakfast time!" or, "Oh Pig, what have you got into now?") was a homeless cat, a raggedy muffin stray of a cat, who adopted Mom and Paul five or six years back. She quickly squiggled her way into their hearts through her furriness and funniness and sweetness. She earned her name not by her size, as one might imagine (she was big, no doubt, but much of that was mere fluff), but by her propensity for rolling around in the dirt. Literally. No one was happier during Mom and Paul's house renovations than Miss Pig, who rapturously took advantage of the dirt piles scattered over the lawn. Rumor has it that cats are fastidious in nature, but Pig put that rumor to bed.

She was a funny cat, and made the oddest little chirpy noises, and had the softest (if also the knottiest) fur of any cat I ever knew, and we'll miss her. And for all the horribleness of being eaten, presumably, by a coyote (or perhaps more mundanely, if less colorfully, hit by a car), I am glad that she got to run around in the sunshine, and roll around in the dirt (even if Mom and Paul's comforter sometimes bore the brunt of this slovenliness), and live a life she loved, even a life cut short.

lounging llama

playground, amsterdam avenue

received

Two mysterious text messages of unknown origin arrived this morning. My hope is that the sender figures out why the recipient may not be replying in a timely fashion. And I am reminded, in trying to decipher their meaning (a diminutive Rosetta stone to the next generation), that I am in some ways too old for such things. I find it difficult, even within the confines of texting, to eschew the grammatically required apostrophes, and am loath to disembowel words of their lovely vowels or silent consonants. One might argue, I suppose, that they embody a certain innate poetry, a quickness of thought, of key stroke, that captures an undulating vocal linguistic style to which we are not often exposed in print. But one also might not.

Itz jess y u at da hospital bri told me

Ima hit u up when i get home do nt txt dis num ite ma 1

a shout out to my fellow whedonites

Venice Diaries, fantasizing about Our First Geek President, postulates that Obama may secretly have been joking on the campaign trail about McCain being a 'wee puppet man.'

In other geek news, a team of Columbia Libraries student employees took this year's grand prize at, yes, the one and only Pimp My Bookcart Contest

loyalties

As all you loyal readers know, I tend to drink a cup of coffee of a morning. And as you also know, I've developed a bit of a camaraderie with my coffee suppliers, those sweet men who work at the various places from which I purchase said coffee.

Which is a lovely thing, and something that I truly adore about this great, seething, teeming city of mine. But it also leads to divided loyalties.

I've been going to the stand on 116th & Broadway for awhile now, though I couldn't really tell you why. I think it's because he remembers to put only one sugar in my coffee, instead of the three heaping spoonfuls that generally equals a 'regular' in this town.

But this morning I decided to go to Hamilton Deli instead, though again I couldn't really tell you why. And when I got up to the counter, my deli man glanced up, did a double-take, rubbed his eyes, looked at me again, and crowed, "Emily! Where have you been??"

Needless to say, it was with more than a little guilt that I handed over my dollar bill and a quarter before heading back up the stairs into the winter cold.

the birds and the bees, or, just one of the differences between the girls and the boys

Lauren and I were sharing an evening last Friday of lounging around my living room, eating pizza, talking, having a couple drinks. Our wide-ranging discussion jumped from marriages to gay rights to biracial presidents to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints to identity politics to felony-convicted congressmen to our desire to have or to not have children.

Suddenly she turned to me and said, "How old would it be now?"

It took me a moment to understand what she was asking, and then it took me a moment to absorb her question, to appreciate her awareness of my life and the role she's played in it. She was one of the first people I told about the pregnancy and sat with me on the lawn outside of work one afternoon, our hands curled around cups of coffee, listening patiently as I talked myself in circles about how best to proceed.

It, that boy or girl child that I chose not to have back in June of 2002, would be going on six years old now. I do not often wonder about this boy or girl child, this wholly unknown creature, and I do not regret the decision that we made. But I do wonder, sometimes, about motherhood, especially as I watch more and more of my friends starting families. I wonder what we might have been like as parents together. Not back then, which would have been a tragedy, but now, as I find myself grounded in the world in a way that was hard to imagine six years ago. I wonder because I never wanted children, from the time I was a small girl myself, until I met this man and fell in love and suddenly, shockingly, found myself wanting it all. Marriage, babies, intermingled family Christmases, an entire life I had never wanted, never even dreamed of wanting, before.

I was trying to explain some of this to Lauren, this ongoing struggle to figure out how much of what this man and I shared was mine, is mine, to bring forward into a future without him. I got tangled up in words, a blizzard of words, until finally Lauren brought me back to earth again, laughingly saying, "Well, thank God, because I deal with enough first graders at school every day!"

The next evening I was having dinner with two couples, four men who are dear to me, warm and wonderful and kind. But tension crept in when one of them, in the framework of a "You won't believe what so-and-so said!" story, told us how his grandmother had recently asked his stepmother if she had ever considered aborting her child. It was supposed to be a gotcha kind of moment (to steal another phrase from the recent media), and I suppose it was, at least to the guys around the dinner table.

But to me, it felt like a revelation, a moment of openness and connection between two grown women wondering about each other's histories and feeling close enough, intimate enough, to ask.

bridge, 11.13.08

lost, one shoe, 120th & broadway

nick

'human skin can be hard to live in...'

I've been pre-occupied with yet another Icelandic band lately, by the odd name of Seabear (at least odd if you're from Anacortes and are more familiar with this other Seabear).

arms
singing arc
i sing i swim

and just for good measure, a little more mum

letters

Erica teases me on a regular basis about letters. In that I write a lot of them. And then I go to work and complain or regale her with stories about whatever politician or celebrity or newspaper article or friend or relative most recently inspired or aggravated me into writing another letter. At which point she rolls her eyes and says, "Oh, McNeil, of course you did." Chuckling good-naturedly, thank God.

John McCain's campaign, for example, received a rather irate missive earlier this fall about McCain's claims that his campaign website had proof that Obama actually wanted kindergarten children to learn about sex. (I never found it and I never heard back).

Governor Paterson received a heartfelt thank you last summer for being as supportive of gay rights as he is (generic response posted here) and a more recent plea to push through same-sex marriage rights here in New York now that California, Arkansas, Florida, and Arizona have, for the moment at least, fallen by the wayside when it comes to equality.

Last Monday almost-President-elect Barack Obama received a somewhat grumbly email in response to his less than full-throated opposition to California's Proposition 8. In an interview with MTV, Obama was brave enough to admit that he opposed the notion of amending a state constitution to remove rights from a select group of American citizens. But he also clarified that he believes marriage should be between a man and a woman and that he is in fact opposed to gay marriage. I asked why he couldn't have stopped after the first part. (I got an automated response from the Obama-Biden Transition Team on Thursday thanking me for my support. In all fairness to the team, they have the most inclusive non-discriminatory hiring policy I've ever seen. But still, this was disappointing.)

Not quite in the same vein, but I recently stumbled across a letter from one Democratic Candidate for U.S. Senate, published in the Windy City Times, and dated February 11th, 2004. It's quite a letter ("As a state Senator, I have taken on the issue of civil rights for the LGBT community as if they were my own struggle because I believe strongly that the infringement of rights for any one group eventually endangers the rights enjoyed under law by the entire population.") and I can only hope that this former senate candidate, after his January Presidential inauguration, lives up to his earlier self.

Lastly, feeling both inspired and demoralized after finally reaching the end of a long, long campaign season, I sent my 91-year-old grandmother a letter yesterday morning:

Dear Grandma,
I've been thinking about you a lot this week, in the wake of Barack Obama's election Tuesday night, but also in the wake of gay rights being so soundly defeated. It's a heartbreaking thing, that America is so ready to move forward in some ways and yet still so ready to oppress in other ways. But what I've been thinking is how very lucky Nathan and I, and all of your grandchildren, are to have had you all these years as a role model. I know that, were you in California, you would have been among the tragically small number of older people to vote against Proposition 8, to see the immorality of taking away human rights and human dignity. And so I wanted to write to you, to tell you how grateful I've always felt to have you as my grandmother, a woman so committed to common sense and simple human decency that in some ways you're a woman generations ahead of your time. I love you, Grandma Mac. Thank you for being you.
Love,
Emily