New Poem

Scumble

Some nights the color is so clean you have to drive it down,
steadying your claim on the potential significance.
Holding the old linen up to the face, a little self-conscious:
one last hit burns like fiberglass in the lungs.
It can’t be self-preservation that accommodates
one need while setting another in motion,
how every obligation is inherent in its expression.
In the hallways of the storage locker there is no uncertainty
about indiscriminate clinging and letting go,
continuing to live so as to make sense of the living,
holding the oxygen inside until it turns to smoke.
The walls are black. Even the padlock falls away from the key
like oil on the skin. A coin of hair. Coppered blurs
dulled with bleach, stretching the shape of a body
across bed-sheets where there is no body,
no warmth steeled like coils beneath the foam
surrendering their shape just as the body surrenders heat.
Beneath the building's last cooling duct
there are limits to what the body can reconstruct,
to what is not yet marked on the map of grief
I’ve spent all year carefully folding and unfolding.

Five Birthdays

July 1, 2001 (Tangail, Bangladesh)

The morning of my second birthday in the Desh, Babul and I go to the meat market and choose the goat we want to cook. I have withdrawn several 500 taka notes from the bank. I hand across seven crisp, purple, over-sized bills, then watch the merchant butcher the animal and cube the meat. I don’t remember what we do with the organ meat; probably, Babul passes it along to one of his brothers. We make our way, via rickshaw, to the spice market. I buy several kilograms of long-grained rice, salt, turmeric, cumin, cardamom, cinnamon, oil, potatoes, onions, garlic, chilies. Babul borrows a giant cooking vat from his neighbor. At the video store, we pick up Evolution, just available on bootleg. Babul makes a fire behind his house and starts cooking the meat. I watch the movie and drink Tang. Babul’s kids and I fill cardboard boxes with oily rice, goat meat, raw onion, and green chili. Rachel and Eric come to town, although Eric gets stuck in Dhaka and doesn't make it up until the following morning. At the party, everyone takes a boxed dinner. We eat in the open room/balcony of my hostel. The wife of a local politician, who I tutor in English, brings a gold chain and several bolts of silk fabric. It is a very extravagant gift. Kartik, the art instructor, paints my portrait. The staff of the school gives me a few nice batik button-down shirts. The next morning, Eric, Rachel, and I leave for the forest. A few weeks later, I meet Katie at a British guest house in Saidpur. We are the only guests that weekend. As a birthday present, she brings the fixings to make a spaghetti dinner. We drink a box of red wine. When Katie would tell this story, she would always mention that I insisted that night on having ground cinnamon for the sauce, so she had gone out at some random hour of the night—out of the air-conditioning, away from the seclusion, the bideshi shell of a guest house—and bought about a nickel’s worth of cinnamon.

//

July 1, 2004 (Islamorada, FL)

For our honeymoon, Katie and I get PADI-certified in the Florida Keys. We spend five days in the Keys and a week in Miami, staying at a hotel, then with Sheila’s godfather and his family. Three days into our scuba coursework, Katie makes a reservation at Pierre’s, a five-star restaurant in Islamorada. Exhausted from two dives, we nap all afternoon and watch “About A Boy” on HBO. That evening, we put on our nicest clothes and make our way to the restaurant. I remember the menu pretty well. Katie: coconut curry soup, mesclun salad with goat cheese and vinegar, redfish with some spicy rub and small potatoes. Me: lobster bisque, heritage tomatoes with basil and mozzarella, ahi tuna served blue. It is the only restaurant we will ever visit by ourselves that employs a sommelier. We take the cork and label home, but I don’t remember the name of the wine. After dinner, we walk out to the bandstand by the beach, where a guy with a guitar is singing John Prine songs, “Angel From Montgomery” and “All The Best,” (two Katie favorites, especially the latter) as well as a few Leonard Cohen covers. Earlier that week, Katie hears “The Great Compromise” while driving to the grocery store, which she finds really amusing, given that it is our honeymoon. Having maxed out our food budget—recently unemployed, headed to graduate school—the rest of the week, we eat rice and beans, and fried plantains, take-out style from a small Cuban grocery near the dive shop. Certified, Katie decides she is not a big fan of scuba diving, and we only dive once more together, that following Thanksgiving, when Judy and John come down to Miami for a visit.

//


July 1, 2005 (North Miami, FL)

Kelly and Derek are moving out to California that 4^th of July weekend, so we offer to host them during their last few days, post-lease, in North Miami. That night, Katie and I order pizza and invite a bunch of FIU people over, including some incoming MFA students. Many of us drink a lot of beer. For dessert, Katie assembles a massive pile of various fresh berries, which, for those of you who don’t know her so well, well, Katie hated all varieties of berry, despised their very existence. How she withstood getting them into such a massive pile is beyond my understanding. She buys several cans of whipped cream. After dessert, we head out to North Beach and sit by the water playing guitar and singing songs. At the time, Kelly, Mike Creeden, and I are in the habit of playing music together, but the only songs we all three know are by the Gin Blossoms, Bob Dylan, John Prine, and John Cougar Mellencamp. We swim in the ocean. At some point, more friends join us. I remember an especially spirited cover of “Little Pink Houses.” On the drive back to our apartment, Jeff calls me on my cell phone and I remember telling him I can’t talk because we are listening to the new John Prine CD, which Katie has given me for my birthday.

//


July 1, 2006 (Istanbul, Turkey)

When we are planning the details of Katie’s then-internship in Bucharest, she asks me, if I could travel anywhere for my birthday, where would I go? I look over the map and shrug. “Istanbul.” A travel agency in Bucharest offers four-day/three-night tour packages, at every level of amenity. We spread out all of the brochures and spend way too long debating the merits of traveling 2-star versus 3-star. Katie arranges to take the weekend off. The deputy director of operations, visiting from the States, tells Katie that things are looking good for them to offer her a full-time job at the end of the internship. We spend much of the trip debating the pros and cons of taking the positions. Beyond what the job might entail, salary, her taking a job at a level of responsibility several rungs higher than entry-level, post-MPH, we talk out the possibility of living so far away from family, leaving my MFA program a year early, leaving Miami and friends, presumably, for good. On my birthday, we tour Topkapi Palace, walk out on the pier to eat fresh fish sandwiches for lunch, watch England lose a World Cup match while smoking a hookah and drinking draft beers. On our way back through the city, we stop at the Blue Mosque, to sit and watched the Friday evening call to prayer. The call reminds us of living in the Desh, except here it is louder and more frequent, the services more ornate and open to public witness. For dinner, we eat at Hamdi Et Lokantasi, which The Lonely Planet assures us serves the best mezes in Istanbul. Stuffed, sated, we walked back to our hotel, winding various back streets until we come out near Istanbul University, which serves as a kind of landmark for our hotel. At a nearby storefront, we buy a variety of helva to take back to the room, where we watch France win its World Cup semi-final against Brazil.

//


July 1, 2008 (Indianapolis, IN)

I wake up early, thankful to have slept a dream-less night. I go for my usual 70-odd minute bike loop, listening the whole time to one song, “Did I Tell You.” I have recently discovered Yo La Tengo, whose songs Rob Sheffield featured in the various mixes that introduce the chapters of Love Is A Mix Tape. While biking, I get lost in several Yo La Tengo-themed daydreams: forming a rock band and playing Yo La Tengo covers in bars all over San Francisco; listening to Yo La Tengo as I drive through the Dakota badlands; finding Yo La Tengo on the jukebox at Carol’s, in Chicago, at some past New Year’s throw-down. Coming back into the neighborhood, I pick up the mail. Netflix has sent season 2 of Battlestar Galactica. A local baker delivers a chocolate-chip cookie pie, with a note from my parents, which I enjoy with some Café Istria house blend coffee that Dave and Meghan have mailed. In my room, I fire up the disc and do my pilates routine. The colonials, yet again, barely manage to thwart an incoming Cylon attack. Post-pilates, I sit down to blog about favorite birthdays of the last seven years, and get to feeling pretty sad. Last year, I put the kebash on any birthday acknowledgment at all. This year, it feels good to invite as much conspicuous attention as possible. My door is closed, to keep the cats in. Twice, Chase and Chloe knock, and I tell them I am busy doing pilates but will be out soon enough (the surest way to prevent small children from entering your room unexpectedly is to dangle the prospect of their witnessing your holding, say, downward facing dog or active moving cat in a ratty pair of swim trunks). Sheila calls, I assume, to wish me a happy birthday. I don't pick up. I’ll get back to her later. Chloe and Chase come to the door a third time, this time with Beth, who asks me to let them all in. Annoyed, I put on some clothes and open the door, to find Sheila, Aidan, and Connor down from Chicago for an overnight birthday visit. We play on the swingset, go for a long walk to Starbuck’s, watch Phineas and Ferb. We order pizza, and after Sheila puts the boys down for the night, she and I sit out on the back porch, drinking wine and debriefing the last few weeks. The LaPlantes come back from the last swim meet of the summer, with some friends visiting from Arizona, which makes for 9 visitors in the house for one night. They order more pizza. Sheila and I watch the Cubs playing the Giants, a late game, in San Francisco, until everyone makes their way to bed.

Shiny Happy People

On Monday, we gathered in the nature preserve to acknowledge the one-year anniversary of Katie’s death. Everyone brought something to share. There were cartwheels, sing-alongs, banners, letters, a Sumerian poem (in translation), and herbal tea. The event was understated and full of love, witnessed by family and friends, a very Katie experience. Kayla has posted some nice pictures on her blog.

I finished reading Rob Sheffield’s Love Is A Mix Tape last night. This book is just amazing, fantastic, honest, especially his writing and thinking about being a young widow (from Ch. 13, “How I Got That Look,” through to the end). I’m glad that it took me so long to read this book, at least, in part, because many of the conclusions he arrives at felt very familiar. Either Rob Sheffield is a kindred soul or the things that young widows decide about grief and senseless death tend to be of a kind. Maybe both statements are true. He mentions, toward the end of the book, how in the eight years after his wife, Renee, died of a pulmonary embolism, he has met another young male widow exactly once, at a random party in New York City. Toward the end of the book, he laments the short and long-term life changes that Renee has not witnessed: all of the songs that Renee would like but will never hear; the eclipsing of mix tapes by mix CDs; the panic attacks, withdrawal, and not sleeping; the disappearance of powerful women from radio music; the contrast between the 90s and the current decade. I like best his extended riff on the word “widower,” a word toward which I have felt no small amount of hostility these last twelve months:

“Widow” was bad enough. widow, widower, widowest. Widow’s walk, widow’s weeds. Grieving, merry, professional, peak, golf, grass, black. When copyeditors at the magazine need to cut a word at the end of a paragraph because it wastes a whole line, they call it a widow. But “widower” has that nagging “er” to remind you that you’re not a bereaved spouse, but a failed husband. You failed your wife by not saving her, or not dying along with her or before her. You’re a widow with an asterisk. (p.161)

Recently, I read this interview/conversation between Ben Gibbard and Mark Kozelek, in which Kozelek talks about Katy, his ex-girlfriend and muse (his word), who died several years ago from cancer. Kozelek says that it’s a day-to-day challenge, deciding now how much he explains his new writing about Katy to fans and strangers who do and do not know his story. Kozelek has a beautiful ballad on his new album, “Moorestown,” that I’ve been listening to a lot, which captures that sense of how grief is often just finding a way to live simultaneously within old and new moments. This morning, I was writing a poem and I stopped when I got to this line, “Even the days have started repeating themselves.” A friend warned me recently that the second year isn’t any easier, that the second birthday, holiday, anniversary, etc., all tend to be as miserable as the first. I’m sure that that’s true, but right now I’m taking a little solace in feeling like getting through the first year is something.

In June, I downloaded from iTunes all of these happy, daffy songs, full of optimism and ecstasy, including “Shiny Happy People” by REM, which until recently I had assumed was all about, well, sparkly contented individuals. Then I watched the video again, read a little online. Turns out Michael Stipe kept the song off of REM’s Greatest Hits compilation because the song had become so wildly popular and misunderstood as a feel-good anthem, as to obscure the original intention of the song, which was to criticize the tendency of pop media propaganda to gloss over basic flaws in political institutions. The origin of the phrase “Shiny Happy People Holding Hands” is adapted from a Chinese propaganda poster from the early 90s, just after the Tiananmen Square Massacre, upon which Stipe meant the song as a kind of commentary. All the same, AOL Music ranked it the wussiest of the 111 Wussiest Songs of All Time, noting that “the finished product was no trenchant political statement from a human-rights warrior exercising the power of his celebrity. Instead, it was an anthemic lobotomy, precisely the kind of pop puffery the band meant to skewer.”

I like the video, and I get it, but I definitely needed more context, and to be at a different place in life (it came out when I was 14), to get it. REM’s appearance on Sesame Street, singing “Furry Happy Monsters” also works for me, both as a song about understanding feelings and as a gentle commentary on what other, lesser kid-positive media sometimes encourages. I’m posting both videos below.

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Cool Trivia Note: The female vocal in “Furry Happy Monsters” is sung by Stephanie D’Abruzzo, who originated the role of Kate Monster in the Broadway production of Avenue Q!

New Poem

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Katie Ghazals 36 - Upload a Document to Scribd

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Grief Wii

I bought my nifty green Prius last September. I learned last March that I bought the car two weeks before the federal tax rebate for buying hybrids expired. I received only a partial credit, because the quota for Priuses on the road was reached sometime in late 2007. The tax credit was created to encourage Americans to buy fuel-efficient vehicles, but various pressures, anticipated and unanticipated, have worked to make the Prius one of the most ubiquitous cars on the road today. Not only that, but man, you sure see a lot of them on the road.

I bought a Prius for two reasons: I needed reliable wheels (20% of my motivation) and I wanted a brand-new car with lots of bells and whistles that reminded me of Katie (80%). When we bought our Focus in 2006, we briefly looked at Priuses and hybrid Civics, before deciding that they were too expensive, and that the gas mileage trade-off was not significant enough to justify the sticker price differential. In Romania, we used to talk regularly about buying a Prius, as part of a general plan to eventually settle in or near Chicago. I don’t know that we would have actually ever done that. As Judy noted last summer, Katie and I eventually always found a reason to get on the road and move to a new place.

I like the idea of myself as someone who has the freedom to always uproot and relocate, while keeping strong ties in a couple of places. At the same time, much of my identity is wrapped up in traditional ideas of domesticity—settling down, settling in, growing old—that, in theory at least, have always seemed more attractive than being on the move. Any time I hear Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young’s “Our House,” I think of this mix that I made Katie right before she went to Romania for her (then) internship. The mix included a series of songs that I imagined would make the soundtrack of happy Miami domesticity among so much Eastern European relocation. If we never quite got to a place where either of us said “mortgage” or “babies” with much comfort, it was at least part of how we thought about ourselves, individually and together.

Some street toughs stole my wallet and CDs out of the Prius last night. It was in the driveway, I left the doors unlocked, so I left myself exposed. Four other neighbor's cars had items stolen from them, too, including laptops, iPods, and cell phones. Mostly, it’s just a major inconvenience to not have my Cubs wallet-and-money-clip, which is of significant sentimental value. Katie bought it for me in December 2006, as a shout-out to the Cubs and because it is easier to carry Romanian lei (each bill is a different size) with a clip rather than inside of a bi-fold. I want to work up a head of steam about the injustice done to me in Katie’s memory, and the awful timing, but self-pity is self-pity, no matter how you cut it. These things happen, and much worse is happening everywhere, all of the time.

I have been thinking about the night of Katie’s death regularly these last couple of weeks, and feeling no small amount of anxiety about her death anniversary, June 23rd. Katie’s death puts in perspective that old adage about the things you can control and the things you can’t—which is ironic, as Katie absolutely hated The Serenity Prayer. As a second grader, someone bought me a plaque of this prayer, which I have hung up in my various living spaces, before taking it down upon our moving into the apartment in Uptown in 2003. I’m still not sure that I really believe there are things you cannot change. It’s the hardest part of the night of Katie’s death, to think that the whole situation was helpless and hopeless, that there wasn’t something, still, that, had I acted differently, I could have done to change things. This thought runs over and over in my mind, as I replay that evening, and whatever the circumstance, however I categorize it—control freak, obsession, typical grief reaction—it’s a challenge.

I found, in the Romania boxes, a series of postcards that Katie had written from Busteni, and then never mailed, when she visited that same mountaintop in May 2006. It was the beginning of her internship, and I remember talking with her after the trip—her first away from Bucharest—and how she said that we would never need to go back to that city, because it was desolate and unattractive. Last June 23^rd, it was neither. The mountainside was in full bloom, after a long thunderstorm. We crossed waterfalls, rope bridges, and patches of fresh berries. There was even a stretch of rock, toward the top, that required us to climb hand over hand with these harnesses. Not dramatic climbing, but exhausting. I remember feeling, at that moment, in addition to intense pain in my arthritic toes, a kind of exhausted wonderment at the long haul up, that we were each separated, one by one, in our various efforts, but also bound by the collective experience of that day.

For me, the experience of grief is pretty much that day’s hike. Absurd and unsatisfying questions, the wrong questions, run through my mind constantly, as do some immediate and equally unsatisfying answers. Am I going to make it? (Sure looks like it—you were just playing Mario Kart with Chase an hour ago.) Why does it hurt so much? (It would suck more if it didn’t.) What does it all mean? (Why does it have to mean anything? How does a can opener work?) Then, the things you can ask people for don’t really do much to help with the central challenge of just withstanding and trusting that it will probably get better in a while. Ask someone for water, get a fresh pair of socks, put on some sun screen, take a rest—but ultimately, you gotta keep going up and no one can really help you do that (and, hey, no one’s going to carry a 6’6”, 250lb. man very far). Your feet hurt because you have arthritis, and anyway feet hurt when you hike. Everything makes a kind of logical sense, but intuitively is incredibly unsatisfying. The best that friends and family can offer is support, patience, and just a really wide margin of error—all of which I really need at the moment.

I read once where grief is a marathon, you gotta train for it and train for it, and then it still kicks your ass. That seems about right. I was going back and forth on whether to say something to the police officer this morning about the wallet. We were talking about my Barack Obama bumper sticker; he was a political science major in college, and a fellow election buff, and we got to talking about who his union would end up endorsing and why (“Man, this is Carmel. They’ll back McCain!”). It was enough of a connection that I felt okay mentioning that the wallet had sentimental value, that Katie had given it to me, and that if it turns up it would mean a lot to get it back, in whatever condition. He said they’d do their best, and mentioned that, in all likelihood, the kids who were stealing stuff out of cars had probably dumped the wallet elsewhere in the yard or neighborhood—that my best bet to recover it was just to do a careful search of the surrounding area, which Chloe and Beth immediately offered to do, while I left, already an hour late, to teach my last full week of classes at IUPUI.

Subdivisions

I took my bike out of storage last week and have been riding it around Carmel in an effort to get myself into reasonable aerobic shape. I haven’t been sleeping well the last few weeks, more so than usual, and so I figure that some physical exhaustion might also help me to wind down better the evenings. Reclaiming said bike required a lot of unpacking. My Giant Yukon had been shipped to Bucharest in 2006, ridden twice in 2007, and then shipped in 2008 to Indianapolis, where it sat in storage for several months, wrapped in brown packing paper, cardboard, and tape. It fared well for all of the travel. The people at the bike shop said it was in good condition, didn’t need any work, and so I should ride it around for the summer and bring it back in if anything doesn’t seem right. So far so good.

There is something positively adolescent about donning a t-shirt, cargo shorts, and helmet, and setting out across the suburbs for a long ride. Fountains of Wayne plays on the mental soundtrack. The setting and associations suggest an oversized BMX dirt bike. I think this is why so many of my fellow adult male cyclists wear spandex (often with Italian racing endorsements patched across the body, and up and down the thighs). One rarely mistakes a middle-aged man in neon yellow and black Lycra, hunched forward and aerodynamically sipping water from a fluted plastic bladder, for a teenager. This is one difference I notice between living in the Midwest (which I’ve done most of my life) and visiting the Bay Area (which I’ve done twice). In the Midwest, there are fairly rigid ideas of fashion, which fall within reasonably conventional patterns of identity: hip mom, slacker dad, disaffected teenager, cyclist, etc. When we lived in Miami, I prided myself on wearing a “Transplanted Midwesterner” daily regimen of canvas shorts or linen drawstring pants, running shoes, a solid-colored t-shirt and a Cubs hat. In photos, the outfit suggests something between “Margaritaville!” and “Hey, I just got married—I’m gonna let myself go!” but at the time it seemed like a conscious rejection of high-end Miami fashion whatever. I guess you can take the boy out of Kansas, but the Kansas follows you wherever you shop.

Katie bought me the bike as a 2004 Christmas present. I had been riding around on her brother Richard’s old Cannondale, which was a great bike, but was also entirely too small for my prodigious frame. We had found these great mountain biking trails in North Miami, right near the FIU campus, where I undertook a daily habit of riding during my mid-afternoon writing breaks. There were only four or five actual trails, but accessing them via short-cut (rather than riding out onto Route 1, heading north a couple of miles, and looping back in at the entrance) was a great adventure: navigating a long gravel trail, passing a State Trooper station, winding through a brief stretch of mangrove, and finally trekking up a short hill, around a fence, and down a longer hill to where the “diamond” trail began. Katie once lent her bike to a guy we knew, who crashed it trying to navigate the diamonds, so I generally steered clear. I wasn’t much for the challenging trails, anyway, instead making the long outer loop, over and over again, until I felt exhausted enough to head home.

I love getting lost in the subdivisions of suburban Indianapolis. They are not nearly as complicated as they seem, which is a plus. Less to wizard out, more reason to sort of trick myself into thinking that I’ve gotten involved in more than I really have. I used to love this about biking Overland Park, KS, and then later, Rye, NY: setting out alongthe well-manicured lawns and impeccable driveways of a new stretch of repeating houses, following block after block as they gradually slope in one direction, then coming out, a mile or so later, right back where I started. Then, as now, it is the illusion of being lost that I can handle much better than the real deal.

Ben and I were walking around Chicago last weekend and we got to talking about how much Katie liked Cat Stevens. We went on for a while, arguing the relative merits of his songs, the incarnation as Yusef Islam, the soundtrack to “Harold and Maude” (also one of Katie’s favorites). We were up in Andersonville, and we tried to make a short-cut east from Clark St., back towards the Lake, when a car coming from the street caused us to jog down a different alley, so that we got turned around. Coming back out to Clark St. we passed a party going on from one of the balconies, four or so stories up. Some rock song ended, there was the usual party chatter, and then, clear as could be, “Moonshadow” started up. I know that it’s not like discussing Berlioz and then hearing the “Symphonie Fantastique”—it’s conceivable that Cat Stevens would be on the playlist for a Chicago shindig—but man was I glad that Ben was there to witness what was, for me, a meaningful synchronicity.

I’ve been cycling through iTunes, trying to find new and/or overlooked songs that remind me of Katie, sort of like a “Greatest Hits Vol. 2” or one of those re-release compilations that got Willie Nelson out of hoc with the IRS. Katie received an iTunes gift certificate at the beginning of last June, and we used it to download “Free To Be You and Me” and “The Judds Greatest Hits.” The former is closely associated, for me, with the memorial services of last July, and of the latter I really only know “Mama He’s Crazy,” which Katie used to play around the apartment. In many of the songs that Katie loved, there is optimism and a heartfelt, if guarded, romanticism, which is quite endearing. I’m thinking of songs like Randy Travis’s “Forever and Ever, Amen,” John Prine’s “All The Best,” Iris Dement’s “Let the Mystery Be,” and Susan Werner’s “Barbed-Wire Boys.”

Last week, I was looking through some boxes that came back from Romania, and I found this Sudoku book where Katie had worked most of the puzzles. Whenever she finished one quickly, or finished a challenging one, she would write all over the puzzle in this exuberant, loping script, things like, “YES! TWO DAYS!” and “FINISHED!!!” She would also write messages around the puzzles, when we were in the apartment, passing them over my way, if I was really caught up in writing, if she was off doing her own thing, if one of us was talking on Skype, etc. Finding those puzzles was like writing a poem and coming upon a really good metaphor for what was great about being married to Katie. It’s one of the great things about writing poetry: you write and write the lines until, eventually, a few clear and precise images (or even one) carry a multitude of meanings. In grief, I’ve found so many extreme moments to settle my mind on—fights or trips, job stress or movie marathons, big nights out or quiet nights in—trying to make sense of a senseless event, trying to understand how one enormous, tragic moment can make sense in the context of the years of a life. Maybe time quiets these louder moments, lets the smaller ones slowly come out. The representation of a life can’t really be the collection of a few anecdotes, any more than it can be one thing we want to see in exclusion of everything else. I used to find finished Sudoku pages torn out of the book, all over the apartment. We even used them for scrap paper.

I came up with this haiku a couple of months ago, which I wanted to use for my “12 Months” poem, but recently I’ve undertaken something I like more, that may or may not bear out by the 23^rd. Thank goodness, I guess, for ambitious projects that distract from the day-to-day. Anyway, here's that haiku:

Green apples—

are you fucking kidding me?

Green apples.

"This Is It, Joel."

Last night, I dreamt that Katie needed the aerial off of our old Focus. I wrote the whole thing out as soon as I woke up, but I still couldn’t remember enough to make much sense of it. In the dream it was winter but not cold. I felt a kind of gnawing panic at our interaction, which involved basically standing in a parking lot long enough for me to jimmy the joint of the aerial and hand it to Katie. According to my notes, Katie was impressed by my ingenuity and gave me a big hug, and when I hugged her back my fingers stretched the whole around her back. So, maybe my dream took place in a Michael Gondry movie. I woke suddenly, realized I was in Indy, and felt weirded out enough to get up, write for a while, make a first cup of coffee. After a couple of hours, I crawled back into bed and slept through the late morning, and when I woke up again, I had forgotten I’d had the dream at all until I saw it written out on the computer screen.

Last Sunday, I drove up to the nature preserve. When we spread Katie’s ashes last July, I didn’t realize that when I turned over the box, the ashes would fall out all in one magnificent clump, which they did. The moment turned out to be an endearing and memorable one, as Judy then invited everyone to come forward and take turns scooping handfuls and scattering them further into the preserve. Eleven months on, I can still spot the spaces where some of the piles hardened on the topsoil. On Sunday, I spent a good while trying to break down the clumps into dirt. They were like concrete on top but surprisingly soft underneath. I sat down next to the path and figured I’d zone out a while, listening to iTunes and thinking about Katie, when Sara McKelvey called on the cell phone. She had read on the blog that I was going back to Romania for a visit, and so was calling to ask if I had indeed lost my mind.

I was trying to explain to the Chicago doctor last night that the timing of my being in the preserve and receiving Sara’s phone call at the exact moment of my sitting down was remarkable for me. I used the phrase “a religious experience” to try to convey the sense of complete shock (and, okay, awe) that accompanied my answering her call. I remember only checking who was calling because Judy and I had been playing phone tag. I don’t want to drag Sara much further into my blog world, so I’ll just say that it was wonderful to hear her voice, and to talk through some of the thoughts and feelings related to Katie’s death and its anniversary, as well as to explain to her that I won't be making the trip to Bucharest after all: too much, too soon, even for something I want very much to do. It's just not the right time.

Warren Zevon chronicles misfortune with more sincerity and honesty than most songwriters (and, for that matter, poets). “The French Inhaler,” “Searching for a Heart,” and “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner” are among the best of many unusual songs written and performed by this former student of Stravinsky and devotee of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Kelly put “Dirty Life and Times” on a mix she sent along last July. I would walk around town feeling oddly hopeful whenever I heard the first two lines of that song: “Some days I feel like my shadow’s casting me. / Some days the sun don’t shine.” The song is from The Wind, an album that Zevon wrote and recorded after being diagnosed with terminal cancer in 2003. At the time, he refused treatment, fearing it would incapacitate him too greatly to appreciate what little life he had left to live; instead, he went into the studio and got to work. I like two other songs from that album very much, the headlong-tumbling-into-oblivion “Disorder in the House” and the elegiac “Keep Me In Your Heart.” I was listening to the latter this afternoon, driving back from teaching at IUPUI. It’s a song that means a lot to me, that makes me feel very happy and very sad, and that reminds me of Katie, although I get all self-conscious whenever I put it on. Like running through a blizzard with no clothes on, you gotta really want to feel it to listen to that song, and then you’ve got no one to blame but yourself when you catch cold.

Katie being taken away has forced many of us to be different people, to rearrange our various interdependencies, and to be dependent sometimes on people we might never otherwise have needed (or wanted to need). I believe that this restructuring for more complexity is a kind of blessing, that if there has to be a net change in the balance of things, then it’s toward the positive. The last memory (framed, hysterically, by the dysfunctional back-and-forth of David Cross and Jane Addams) to get erased in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is the moment that Joel and Clementine meet, at a barbecue among mutual friends on the beaches of Montauk, NJ. Having spent the entire movie witnessing his memory being wiped clean (in reverse chronological order) of their relationship (as revenge for her having previously done the same), Clementine meta-reminds Joel that their knowing each other is about to be lost, and they agree to try to enjoy the moment of undoing. But even this doesn’t quite work out: Joel keeps doubling back to the insecurities he felt the first time through, and wishing he had acted differently, while Clementine barrels forward, impressive and oblivious.

The brain is a savvy and fickle organ. It protects us, I think, more than we realize, in so many creative ways, allowing us to get through a lot that might otherwise fry the circuitry. Last summer, I would sit down, put on some sad music, think about Katie, cry a lot, and try to write. Like working out, I needed to feel like I could quantify grief in very definite terms: 2 hours today, 105 minutes yesterday, etc. It was the right thing for me, but I always felt very self-conscious about the ritual, how it was so intentional an experience of grief, which I always thought should be more organic. Now, I understand that it was what I could handle: a lot of flicking the switch on and off. In Antioch, last July, someone said to me, kindly, “In a couple of years, you’ll be able to say her name without crying,” and I remember thinking, “Oh yeah, watch this: Katie, Katie, Katie, Katie, Katie, Katie.”

I need to believe that there is continuity to life, not that things happen for a reason, but that something happens next, and that sometimes that next thing in the sequence is good. Last night, Emma asked me to field her volleyball serves. In the backyard, she worked her overhands from the property line near where Chloe, Beth, and Ed planted a garden last weekend. It had just rained, so the grass was wet, there was a late spring chill in the air, and everything smelled like clean earth. I remember thinking that I didn’t want to try to do too much, just grab the serve and toss it back over the net, which we did until it got too dark. I got to thinking of Katie, and how the first reason I get to be here at all is because of her. It felt like as much of a theology as I could handle in the moment, sad and happy, poignant and understated, simple and eternally complicated. I know that being a good person doesn’t make life any easier, but being alive at least makes it possible to bear witness.