Derby Girls

We'd been meaning to get to a roller derby night for, well, two years now. We got there an hour late, which was about right. The kids wouldn't have lasted through much more, probably.

In the middle there is the derby girl I was rooting for, "Pushycat," though, not knowing the rules, I didn't know what to root for her to do. She had the funniest name, though, so maybe I was rooting for no other skaters to have funnier names than she did.

I wonder if anyone there knew the rules for Roller Derby, assuming there are any. There were referees, but their signals just weren't convincing. I suspect it was all for show, their whistle blowing and penalty box banishments. The skating was all real, though, as were the falls.

This night out felt like we were trying to get in the last of our indoor winter entertainments. Soon, or already, rather, it will be all about not being inside. We seem to have skipped my favorite temperature this spring, 67 degrees, and headed straight from the 50's to the 80's. No fair.

First Meal Out

And then it got warm--there wasn't even time to prepare food. We were outside, suddenly, looking around and eating a meal. The birds make more sense when you hear them up close. There are so many motorcycles in this town.

Navratan Korma, Medium+, is my drug of choice, but tonight I said to the man on the phone who may or may not know my voice by now, "Hot, please," but even that didn't seem like enough. Maybe I should have said "Double Hot Plus," but no, they would have told me I was crazy, that it had never been done, and how would I have explained it to them, the extent of the powers conferred by the light when it is just like that, when your kid is twirling his tiny umbrella, arguing that "Smoke-ey" is a compound word, and your dog is deaf but not dead and just might make it to 13. You can see the dilemma I was in.

The Sweetest Sixteen

I don't write much about what goes on in the classroom here, but this week we had a much closer and entertaining final four than the one dominated by North Carolina, and it deserves some press. This here is the Eastern Regional for a competition we held to decide the coolest of the sixteen poems we've transcribed over the course of the past eight weeks.

And this is the Western Regional. I thought about seeding it so that the favorites wouldn't meet until the final four, but it was too hard to figure out. My personal favorites on this side are probably the Li Po up top and the Mary Oliver at the bottom, "Rain," and the Jim Moore poem "It is Not the Fact That I Will Die That I Mind."

In the East, though, I was pulling for Robert Desnos' "Infinitive," probably the most out there thing we've read this year.

At the end of a long process involving statistics tallied in box scores, alternating possessions and an evolving set of rules that I only half understood, three different classes picked winners. The Iraq veteran Brian Turner's poem "Here Bullet" emerged as an early favorite in all three classes, but didn't win in any of them. Two actually crowned the Jim Moore and one the Desnos!

I was so pleased with that, really, to see a poem that makes so little sense on the surface strike a chord when most people can't stand poems they don't "get." And another strong competitor turned out to be a somewhat less surreal poem by Robert Bly, "Surprised by Evening."

And this is what the area around my desk looks like in the morning sunlight. The morning light is the best thing about that room. Well, that and the students. The Bunsen burners and the eye washing station are also nice perks.

Rare movie plug

Oskar and Eli

I can't think of any other vampire movie I have really liked until Let the Right One In came in my Netflix queue. It's snowy and has lots of long, still takes of snow and buildings in the snow and the kind of neat, spare apartments that Swedish people put inside of those buildings. And the movie has these two child actors that are good, and one is a vampire, and by the end I was in love with them both.

I am far from the first person to speak up about this movie, but I wonder if there is enough of a buzz about it to turn on Nathan's contrarian instincts. I hope he lets us know.

So here's Eric layin' it down at this year's trip to Yoder's Sugarbush. He and Clare brought in the store-made batter, and it made these perfect circle pancakes. I ate them and they were good.

Mr. Yoder himself. After hearing his spiel about "how they make the syrup" for the last three years, I think I am ready to start my own operation using the various Catalpas and Ash trees in my yard.

A sweet mother and daughter moment in the sugar shack.Me and our more crepe-y batter. I likes the skinny pancakes.
Wes and Cash and Clare on the walk back to the car. You can tell by their faces that they are all about three pancakes happier than they were on the walk out.

now I believe a little

Eno

If there's one show on NPR that has always driven me nuts, it has to be "This I Believe," the weekly five minute segment of smug banality in which ordinary Americans (Hey, like me!) get to share with us all which cliched maxim they organize their lives around and explain it to us like they invented it.

But then they mixed it up a bit by giving time to not an ordinary American but an exceptional Englishman, Brian Eno. And his segment is so good. It's all about singing, together, with other people. And sure, I've heard about singing before, but the way he describes the experience makes it sound like such a new and good idea. Everyone should be singing together, but we won't.

* * *

I can't think about Eno without remembering the time I first listened to his Music for Films. It was the summer after I graduated as an enthusiastic and directionless English major. I had no idea what I was going to do with my life, the next year, or the next week, so my friend Bruce and I went car camping on the beach, Whitefish Point up on Lake Superior. All I had to do was read.

We were both fascinated by the Lake Superior Shipwreck Museum just up the road, so most days we went back there, came back to read on the sand, ate something with sand in it, and then read until it got dark, when we listened to Music for Films on this tiny stereo and then out on Lake Superior the freighters sounded their deep horns. The idea of a freighter on Lake Superior still sounds so quaint to me as to be absurd, but there they were, empty for all I know, pushing through the largest freshwater lake on the power of maritime nostalgia. When they rounded the Point, we stopped reading to look up at their lights.

Anyway, that Eno record was perfect for that setting. If you've heard it, you probably know what I mean.

snowstalgia

Usually the point of the whole "street" photography thing is that you don't get caught taking the picture, but sometimes it's fun to just click the camera right in some stranger's face and see what happens. Here, I think I just made someone mad, but oh well. I snapped the picture because of the map, mainly, but her response is kind of funny, too.

But I took this two weekends ago while we were up in Michigan taking the kids skiing for the first time. I thought it would go like this: (1) spend more than you want to for tiny skis; (2) kids fall down on snow; (3) kids want to go home.

What a pleasant surprise, then, to see that it actually went like this: (1) spend more than you want to for tiny skis; (2) have fun falling in snow and skiing and whatever. So, snow, thank you and we will miss you. It is getting warm now, 60's even, though it is the early March kind of warm that simply oozes a cold winter sweat up from the earth and out from your lawn and even the sidewalks, too, somehow.

So I, for one, am that kind of person that could do with another snow. Look how pretty it was to drive around up there--slow and mindful the driving was. It's so democratic, the big snow storms, something we all have in common for a day or two. Then when it is warm outside we all go our separate ways.

So, snow to May, maybe, and then let the azaleas bloom and okay tulips but even better let's get on to the dry, high summer stuff like the bergamot and the cone flower, oh, and that small plot of delphineum that is hanging in there, too.

My new sign.

Never in my whole life had I ever wanted to own a neon sign. But then, one day, I did. True story. Isn't it cute, tho? And how it sits in the fireplace as though it's a fire, isn't that cute, too? It's a bike. I love that it's a bike. So, this is my new sign.

And this was my contribution to Show 'n Tell Club. I have been thinking for awhile about the separate but similar lives my wife and I spent growing up on different sides of southern and northern Michigan. Did you know that we both have memories of the same marionette troupe that came to our elementary schools and that featured a dragon named "Applesauce"? No, how could you have--but, nevertheless, it is true. So this is the beginning of an imagined story of those lives.

This is me, and I think the look on his face captures the little me pretty well.

And this is C, holding still for a quick portrait. This is all I have so far, two pages. I'll probably do a few more and leave the rest in my imagination.

Show 'n' Tell Club, Valentine's Edition

Eric and Clare hosted the Show 'n' Tell Club on Valentine's Day this past weekend, and that means it was a good weekend. And it was romantic, too, from Eric telling us about how much he "loves" the movie Man on Wire, to Catherine reading the embarrassing bits from her journal the summer we met to Sarah Jane's embroidered highlights of life with Wes. Our little b recited something, even. Sometimes he refers to it as his "notes" but lately it has been his "poem." It is about dinosaurs, one of the most profound kinds of love little boys know how to express: Dinosaurs eat other dinosaurs/Dinosaurs stomp their feet/ Dinosaurs eat meat/ Some dinosaurs eat plants.

For their wedding, Marie and David collaborated on this incredible puzzle--the guests found the pieces and then put it together as a group. So we reenacted the assembly part of the wedding ceremony. All of the "guests" in the image, from "Idea Bear" to "the Invisible Man" (not pictured), reside with David and Marie in their home.

b walked up just as we finished putting it together and pronounced "that's a pretty cool puzzle." At 4, he is already a man with an aesthetic sense.

Yes, reading is, of course, awesome, but reading at the same time that you are parenting is something on a different level. It just does not happen that often. This is me finishing A Passage to India, and parenting.

I can't believe I'd never read an E.M. Forster novel, though I did see the movie for this one back in high school. At the time I thought that I would impress the girl I was seeing by choosing this video at the store--demonstrating my sophisticated taste or something. I can't remember if it worked, and I don't remember the movie, either, except that I think it was kind of slow, slower than the original.

But the novel is pretty wonderful. Long live the intrusive narrator.

And here is a valentine-themed comic for our chalkboard wall, the first episode in the adventures of "mouse."

One good thing about having chalkboard paint is that I have finally been able to hang some of the old pictures of my ancestors on the walls. They are sour and surly looking lot, but they're all I have. This guy's eyes follow me all around the room and I can't help feeling like he's trying to get me to pour him a drink.

This picture here is of an old spinster great-aunt of mine who always claimed to have posed for Edward Gorey's book The Gashlycrumb Tinies, or so family lore has it. I wish I knew which letter she was.

So I just read somewhere that chalkboard paint is "out," but we went ahead and put it up anyway and we're glad of it, fashion be darned. Today is a snow day and so I decided to add the elephant from the cover of my copy of A Passage to India. I made sure to draw him high on the wall so the kids' puerile scratchings don't mar him immediately.I mean look at the spelling here, really. Four bars on a capital "E"? I hope she writes them that way for the rest of her life.

The Game of Life

I had an idea today to make a game to play while you are just walking around, living, or whatever, and you would get or lose points for things things that you saw or that happened to you.

So far, the only rule I've thought of is "see a dog in a car: 5 pts."


Right now, my score is 5.

EDIT:

Possible snow: 2 pts.

Jame's Wright's "The Jewel," a surprise paint-job on my car by a student in the school parking lot this morning. The snow got to it before I could get home, though, a bummer; I wanted to drive Wright around town for a bit see if anyone read him at stoplights.

On the driver-side, another student's copy of Li Po's "High in the Mountains, I Fail to Find the Wise Man" (in blue paint) fared even worse. Li Po would have laughed at the thought of the snow erasing his poetry, probably, but then, Li Po would probably be drunk, and likely to laugh at lots of things.

Here is the first poem, to rescue it from the hoary eraser:

The Jewel

There is this cave
In the air behind my body
That nobody is going to touch:
A cloister, a silence
Closing around a blossom of fire.
When I stand upright in the wind
My bones turn to dark emeralds.

--James Wright

The Li Po is awesome, too, but I can't find a cut and past version online. Maybe I'll tap it out later.

crazy cold!

We had the worst ice storm in the last eight years I've lived here on Friday and it sucks. All day I listened to the trees in my yard and in the park across the street fall apart and hit the earth like . . . like tree bombs. They sound louder than you think. But they don't explode like bombs.

We have enough limbs down that the bonfire we have in the spring is going to be the best ever. The city only allows small fires, but they won't let me have chickens either, so I think I get to choose to have at least one of them.

It was windy today, so ice has been flinging off the trees. It's like the trees in Wizard of Oz that throw apples except today they are chucking ice at our windows. Trees!!

But see, not all trees are evil. Lookit this cute Doug Fir behind me. Best tree we've had in a long time. Only $35, which is good for these parts. And look at my hands, too: total blur! I had no idea I was that fast! Really, though, I'm terrible.

Saddest Christmas dog ever. Cath: "Put your ears up, Smokey! Put your ears up!"

And garden Buddha just takes it all in. Nothing fazes him.

Oh, and the house I lived in during law school burned down. Thanks to Travis for sending me the cell phone snap here. Cath hated that place, but it was my last bachelor pad, and I loved it, even though it rained in the bedroom. Seriously. My landlord's house was worse, so I didn't think it was my place to complain. One of the great bathtubs was in there, too. I took a lot of baths in there one summer on account of breaking my wrist during (well, actually before) a mtn bike race, and I always swore "I am going to keep taking baths after my cast comes off" and I haven't taken one since. Maybe it's time to start listing resolutions for 2009 . . .