Song 2

[The following notes are from Crossroads Cafe in SoMA, during my writing group session. Going forward, this blog will be where I provide an hour's worth of fiction.]

My mother wanted to be a doctor. She graduated from one small brick building to a slightly larger brick building. The college that she attended looked massive to me in my high school years and a joke to me when I later moved to a bigger place in the world, a city contained in a space small enough to seemingly fit in a field from my youth.
My mother was in general education classes first and foremost. She tried biology, literature, math. She did all right but she didn't shine. All of her life that led to self-imposed stupidity. She had no wish to remain ignorant, but she didn't feel the knowledge she had would ever be wanted.
My mother faded out of the college and crossed the slate-colored, rounded country roads every day to travel through a succession of jobs: waitress, bank teller, even pet groomer at one point. She eventually skipped the roads and moved to town, moving in with a roommate who had a bird. The bird spent hours talking to her, and my mother spent hours asking the bird, or telling it, to shut up.
In those days my mother owned dresses in a trim style, like Jackie Kennedy. Her hair was long for the last time on her wedding day--on her wedding night her husband said he liked a woman with short hair and she went out the next day and had it cut like a boy's.
My hair started short like a boy's, and the first year my mother said that I could grow it out I started to grow it and only cut it in the stretch of summer. When I moved to the cold San Francisco summer I never cut it again.
Somewhere in the loss of time my mother shed the wanting to be a doctor and started to grow things. She started potatoes in glass jars. She planted cat grass in plastic two-liter soda bottle bases. She planted mint under the kitchen window and put kitchen scraps in an old enameled pan by the sink to start a compost heap.
The was a shift. My parents moved to the country, to a space the size of a postage stamp wedged between three fields. My mother wandered out to flat square feet of the spaces where gardens might fit--raised plateaus of the fingers that might be canyons of deep green ivy and creeks. The air was ripe with mosquitos in summer. She framed the house in stones and filled in the lines with flowers and plants. The roots sometimes fought with the stones and sometimes leaned on them. The flat plains hid nothing--my mother walked out through two pregnancies and consequential weight gain and stood in the corner of the lot farthest west and looked to a horizon and pondered how her body had been swallowed whole. She ached for a love of her children and saw them slipping away in growing size.
It was an inevitable fact that produced recoil.
No matter. The adjacent field to the north of her came up for sale and she put everything in hoc to tear down a wall of corn. The heights came down and the sun burned through the shattered window of fallen stalks. The ground there was worth less than shit--it had never been shat upon with anything save a polyeurathane tank full of bright green liquid.
My mother then started healing, healing a field.
Crops had never been rotated there, the corn reaching farther and farther down every year until it burned the water table. But that year the water table rested while she walked among the rows, taking down the burning stalks. Through the fall she took down stalks. The closest stalks to the house came down first, and then sunsets glowed gold-blue in the west, and then you could see the road to the north. The church on the corner went from steeple to full height. Rabbits, mice, and wild turkeys sprung from the encroaching emptiness like rats leaving a ship.
When the stalks were all down, she stacked them. She burned the stack and worried about neighbor complaints and wildfire--she watched the pile while soot came over her like a wave. When her husband came home from work that night he found a woman dipped in dry smoky ink, coughing. She drained the bathtub water three times, emerging pink and exhausted, and as she sent him to bed and she sipped tea on the couch, rain began to fall that turned to ice by morning, and the sky snuffed out the bonfire.
The field was scabby, furrowed in odd places, and full of stones. She hadn't expected the stones. She could even out earth with raking, but the strategically placed stone meant no power equipment in the field. Ten acres under assault of a tilling rake. She nearly wept.
A brief thaw three days before Thanksgiving drove her out to the dips and rises with a cart full of bags of winter wheat and rye. She sowed the whole thing in two days as if she were petting a cat or stroking out a chalk line on a giant canvas, switching out arms in broad sweeps until her fingertips cracked, tapered and numb. Her wedding bands frosted over in wheat chaff. When the bags were empty she walked to the house with the burlap draped in the cart, warm in Indian summer sun. When her husband came home that night in the four o'clock dark she was lost in the post-warning worry he suggested--it's winter, and every bird and seedeater would be crouching out there and feasting all night long.
The cover was thinned the next morning, but Thanksgiving Day brought a gentle rain that didn't turn to snow until the first week of December. Only then did she rest.

[And at that point, my hour was up.]

Song 1

[The following notes are from Crossroads Cafe in SoMA, during my writing group session. Going forward, this blog will be where I provide an hour's worth of writing, and, after this session, an hour's worth of fiction.

This post will grow over the coming week until I am done transferring it from ink on lines to type on a screen.]

Catching up again, on the Tuesday night writing group dollar. I brought my doubt and design to a table crowded with teacups and strainers, and a plate smeared with rapidly drying chocolate frosting. I got here super early after stopping by the Westfield for dinner and to pick up a book of verse by our new poet laureate, Kay Ryan. I said something insensitive to my ride home tonight and I nearly drowned in it, but then I remembered to just accept it and move on.
I try to think of my back. It hurts. I lean back and try again. I breathe deeply and drink tea and try again. I spread the muscles in my lower back and feel my spine relax a little. The most important thing is to settle in for the long haul.
That, and move to the next step.
I have two websites going to rot, one on poetry and one on fiction. Why not use these sessions to break them in. What could we call them? How I got here diaries are preferred by men like Che: The Motorcycle Diaries. "Sessions" usually pertains to music--but I like that idea for my writings. What could I name them after? The tea flavor? The Mango Sessions? Yeah.
I am currently drinking black currant tea, but the words "black currant" don't seem of distinctive and could be confused with "black current." I'm just giving a tie to the binding element--in this case the only constant being tea. Most of the time I choose mango, so this is the second binding constant. For instance, what is the constant in the bus line designation in the City? The street or thoroughfare name, going either way, where the bus dwells the longest. The Number 6 Parnassus, inbound or outbound. 44 O'Shaunessey. 43 Masonic, 38 Geary. 47 Van Ness. Either way, inbound or outbound, their marquees have the same name. Different destinations (Keith and Evans [destination of 44], Cal-Train), but the names are constant, lyrical in a sequence. The 71 Haight-Noriega. The names can be pronounced once and split into the folds of the mind forever.
So these are the Mango Sessions. Or, even better, I could bind them by tea, notebook and ink. The Mango Moleskein Retro Sessions.
NICE.
And the Lord said, "Let there be the Mango Moleskein Retro Sessions," and the tales began.
So the entries will be what I wrote here on a relaxed Tuesday in November of 2008...nay, late 2008, early 2009. There will be fantastic entries on Tuesday nights. They will allow me to sculpt a really great poem, or the first draft of a short story.

The Mango Moleskein Retro Sessions

Working on a new idea for this site and my sister site of Jo Bard. The idea dawned on me tonight while I was dragging my heels through the beginnings of the Shut Up & Write session. (Wasn't necessarily dragging my heels at the thought of the group--just suffering from a little battle fatigue from too much energy put into work.)

Stay tuned to this site and Jo Bard for insights into my writing development straight from the Shut Up & Write sessions...it gives me insight as well into how I grow as a writer.

Or...Skip it entirely. :) I won't be hurt, and I fully recognize all of these entries aren't pearls.

Sleep well, dear reader.

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