There were also lobster rolls

There wasn’t just poetry. There were also lobster rolls. I ate lobster rolls from the day I landed in Boston to the day I left. I also ate whole lobster, and crab cakes, and fisherman’s stew, and fabulous egg dishes and homemade scones, and pizza by the slice while watching the tide come and go at Duck Creek. I had lattes in the afternoon with individual sized cherry cheesecakes while writing my poems for the next day. I had a beer now and then and, on one occasion, margaritas. (Several.) I ate constantly, wonderfully, deliciously. I ate and ate and ate. I ate much and well. Much more and much more well than usual. I love my boys, but sweet Foxy Brown they manage to take the sheer selfish sensual pleasure of eating from the dinner-time experience and my god how I loved stuffing myself with lobster and crab cakes.

I need more of that in my life. More food, more good food, more grown up food.

Football, American style. And boys.

There is an American football league in Switzerland and on Sunday I took Small Boy to see his first American football game. Judging from the amount of Small Boy mock tackling that went on immediately after kickoff, I may live to regret this, but it was kind of fun. I haven’t been to an American football game in – fifteen years? I went to a Big Ten university and went to some games in college, and at some point after I graduated but before I came to Switzerland I went to a Bears game with my brother, but  that’s been about it in the past twenty-odd years. So it’s been a long time.

It was surprisingly fun, sitting on the hill watching this little piece of Americana and trying to teach Small Boy about American football: my knowledge base was exhausted after about three minutes, for I have never been a football fan. I’m more of a hockey girl. I’ve been to my share of hockey games as a player and a fan, and practices, and Small Boy trainings and I know my way around a hockey rink. I don’t think anybody would say that hockey isn’t an intense game; I don’t think that anybody would say that hockey isn’t seriously physical. But I was struck by the difference between hockey players and football players. Don’t tell me hockey players don’t need to get geared up to play at top intensity for sixty minutes, but man, there is some sort of tribal testosterone-fueled intensity to football players, even these adult-league Swiss football players, that you just don’t see in other sports (and that I can’t say I’m all too keen on), including other hard-hitting sports like hockey. I’d forgotten that about football, that chest-thumping, ball-spiking (yes, even in Switzerland there was ball spiking), head-butting über-guy atmosphere. Even the fan culture was different, though that may have had more to do with the fact that the football game was being played in a public space with no security control (that bottle of Jim Beam would have been confiscated on the way into the hockey stadium): there was the alcohol in the plastic cups and there were the cheerleaders.* (They tried, bless their hearts, but I think I need to slip a copy of Bring it On into their warm-up gear at the next game.)

Small Boy was much taken with the tackling (to my credit I did at least see that coming) and after watching the game for about ten minutes he wanted to play. I play plenty of games with the boys that I’d really sort of rather not: I’ve logged a lot of hours in lawn hockey in all sorts of weather and I’ve gone “hunting” with bows and arrows, I’ll wrestle on the floor and pretend to be a dragon, but I draw the line at being tackled in the grass while wearing my only pair of jeans that doesn’t already have a hole in them as a result of all the aforementioned activities. I convinced Small Boy to play touch football with me, but he got bored with that pretty fast and he really wanted some tackling. I saw some boys playing further down the field and suggested to Small Boy that he see if he can play with them.

Bless him, and I don’t know where he gets this from because it sure doesn’t come from me, he walked right up to those boys and asked “Darf ig ou mit?” – can I play too? They said yeah, sure! (and I know it could have ended badly with a No) and the three of them spent the next 45 minutes throwing each other down on the grass (it seemed pretty no-holds barred stuff, too), chasing each other around, and playing some sort of game with knees and feet that from a distance looked a bit like “Let’s see who can break whose leg first.” They had a blast. 

Boys. I know by writing that I’m invoking all sorts of gender stereotypes and inviting comment on my invocation thereof (and comments are open as always), but seriously: boys. No, not every boy wrestles and I know some seriously dare-devil girls, but the more I watch the Small Boy with his peers, the more I watch him rough-house with his uncle and ask his grandfather to make him a bow and arrow, the more I find myself thinking about boy energy and how different it can be and how I don’t always know what to do with it, how very much these boys take me places I never imagined.

What do you think? Is there a “boy-energy,” am I gender-stereotyping, or is there a little bit of both going on? And what do you do when your kids’ favorite thing to do/play/read/watch (Thomas the Train, anyone?) makes your teeth itch?

* Okay, our hockey team has cheerleaders too.

We now return to our regularly scheduled programming

I spoke too soon. I always do. The first warm day always does this, the first buds, the first bees. We saw bees on Monday, bees greedily visiting our pocket of crocuses by the rose bushes, and my mind turned to spring, turned sharp and sudden. It couldn’t last, of course, this is March in Switzerland; we can get – have gotten – snow on Easter, after all. I know that, after all these years I know that a warm day can be followed by snow. But that first day, that first post card from spring, always sets my head spinning.

I’ll take it

2009 was the year I decided to take myself seriously as a poet. 2009 was the year I gave myself permission to try. 2009 was the year I made some writing goals, made them specific and public the better to hold myself accountable to myself.

By my reckoning I made a good year of it. I did not write fifty-two poems but I wrote forty-six things that I am able to call poems under my bizarre internal standards and I’ll take that. I wrote a lot of things that went nowhere, and I’ll take that too, and in the process I learned something about saving the two lines that seem worth saving and moving on and I’ll take that most of all. I sent out fifteen packages and in the end had eight poems published in five journals (with two submissions still pending): my novice self will very much take that, thank you. I subscribed to or requested sample copies of a few new journals, and though I’d love for it to be journals-a-palooza around here, the logistics of the back-and-forth communication about how much extra the journals cost when shipped overseas (because I know journals run on tight budgets and want to be sensitive to this point), and the growing on-line availability of back issues, made it easy for this one to slip by the wayside. I lost count of the poets I added to my collection and am too lazy to go to my studio shelves to figure it out. Suffice it to say I am better read now than I was one year ago. I did not attend a writers’ workshop.

Now it is 2010 and my writing goals are much the same:

• Write (at least) fifty-two poems this year
• Send out (at least) twelve packages
• Attend a writers’ workshop (I’m already registered for this one am applying to one very ambitious one and one slightly less ambitious one Stateside). 
• Continue to read, read, read. Read more, read more widely, read more critically, read more openly. Read more stuff I never thought I’d read. Read more stuff I’ve already read. Read more stuff I don’t like. Read.

My writing life had a good year. My writing life passed the test I had set up for myself: give it a year and if at the end of the year something from the year is still glimmering, then give it another year. And things are glimmering. I’ve published some pieces that I’m proud of, pieces I think I’ll still be proud to have my name attached to a year from now and a year from then. I’m reading more poetry, and that’s just good for a person’s heart. I’ve found a thing outside of me, outside of my small boys, that is hard and shiny and good. That is mine. This is me, now, this fresh-baked stumbling poet. Maybe not, as Bethany so perfectly put it, for a living, but for a life, yes. For a life, this stumbling poet is me, and I’ll take that.

Mortar and pestle

Last night Small Boy and Boychen were taking turns smashing crackers in my mortar and pestle – I was not cooking anything that required the mortar and pestle but they wanted to use it, so I put some crackers in for them – when Small Boy asked me which was the mortar and which was the pestle. In twenty years of using a mortar and pestle, it never occurred to me to wonder this, though somehow I knew, when I thought about it for a second, that the bowl is the mortar and the stick is the pestle. But I have never actively considered it: it has always simply been my “mortar and pestle” and I use it to make pesto and crush walnuts and grind up a masala.

But of course the Small Boy would ask: there are two words, and there are two things, and he wants to know which noun belongs to which object. He wants to know these things. And so he makes me slow down and look actively at the objects around me and name them. With precision. Which is what I am supposed to do as a poet; yet it takes a four-and-a-half year old to make me look down at my moss-green mortar and pestle set that came across the ocean with me, really look down at it, and make sure that I have a clear picture in my head of which is the mortar, and which is the pestle.

* * *

In other news, Small Boy has crafted his first couplet:
Fly away
bird of prey
He got meter and rhyme in one fell swoop.

Down on the farm

It didn’t take long before we were in each others’ pockets; it’s the boys, mostly, who promote this by running up Grossmütti’s walk and through her front door at all hours. They want to play with Grossmütti, and they want to play with her dog, and they have made their grandparents’ house an extension of their own.

I see my brother-in-law J more than ever, just about every day in fact, and hear myself inviting him to dinner. The Boychen has fallen utterly and completely in love with his uncle’s horses (the first words out of his mouth in the morning, after his brother’s name, are “Lay-dee. App-uh.” and he will not rest until we have brought apples to the horses) and J is kind and patient and gentle explaining the horses, showing the boys how to hold out an apple flat on your palm with your fingers close together and bending towards the ground. The boys sit on the steps and watch their uncle lead the horses from their stalls to the pasture to graze; they help him give them their hay in the evenings. They become part of his routine and he accepts these little boys running tag behind him.

But it’s not just the boys knitting these houses together. It’s me, too. Half-way through cooking dinner one night I discover that I don’t have any tomato paste and I send R over to his parents’ house to borrow some. When my mother-in-law goes away for a weekend, I invite my father-in-law to dinner. Sometimes the boys and I eat lunch over there. This morning I sat in their living room and watched the Bundesratswahl (election of a new member of the seven-member cabinet that heads the Swiss Parliament) with them. They knock on our door for something, I go in search of J about a truck that has arrived to pick up a construction container. We borrow their car when I break the driver’s side rear-view mirror on ours, I ask them if they need anything when I make a dash to the grocery.

I’m enjoying this, this being part of an extended family, learning how to do it for the first time in my life. I like getting to know my brother-in-law. After being married to R for a few weeks shy of ten years now, I feel like I am finally getting to know his brother. I’ve seen him nearly weekly for years, at Sunday dinner or Sunday brunch, but this is different somehow, this calling out hello as The Boychen and I take our morning tour around the farm, this watching him muck out the stalls, drive the fork-lift back and forth to organize the barn, this seeing him come and go and live his life. 

I love seeing my sons with their grandparents. I love that they can have this, their grandparents across the drive, their uncle a huge part of their lives, and through them a connection to the rest of R’s family – cousins in his mother’s home village – that I would never, on my own, cultivate. Two weeks ago I sat with my mother-in-law in the garden of R’s aunt, with one of R’s cousins and her children, and Small Boy played with his first cousins and chattered happily in Swiss and I was happy to be there, part of this big messy family. To my great surprise, I am having such a good time getting all tangled up with this big messy family.

Blue paint

Outside it is raining, the sky grey and compressed by low-lying clouds. Inside I am painting the walls the color of my childhood, the color of my heart, the color of my father, the color that comes as close as I could find to the “high blue windless skies”* of an early Idaho autumn without flying to Ketchum and cutting a swatch from the sky to bring to the paint shop.

I am painting the walls of the room that will be my private studio in the house that will be our home in two weeks. We are moving to the countryside, to the farming village where R’s parents live, to a second house on the farm property. It has been a long time coming, this move, something R and I have walked around slowly, circling closer each time it comes up for discussion. I have loved this neighborhood, this city, these views; I have loved this urban life but it is time for a change.

I am excited: excited to paint, to decorate, to have my own studio. Excited to have a garden. Excited to have space, inside and out, to breathe. I am anxious: I have been an urban creature for so many years now. Before this Swiss life, I lived here and here. I will miss things, I know, I will miss this city I have come to love. But the move will be good.

And my walls will be the color of an Idaho sky.

* Ernest Hemingway

Well how about that

I found a little notebook today. Actually Boychen found it, pulling it out of a desk drawer along with a roll of clear tape, a black binder clip, a sheet of labels, some correction tape, and a 2008 agenda. I don’t remember when I used this notebook – I didn’t date it – but it was inspired by this post, so it would have been some time after that. So May or June of last year, maybe. I spent about a month listing each day a small handful of things that I really, really wanted. The very first line in the notebook?

“I want to publish my poetry.”

And here I am, one year later, with two poems in an on-line journal, four more coming out later in the year, and six currently under consideration.

Tonight, when the boys are asleep, I’m going to flip through the book and see what else I asked for. See what else I got.

Budding

New writers are often called “emerging writers.” I like the term; it makes me think of a butterfly breaking out of its chrysalis. But that image is too dramatic, the transformation too complete, to apply to what’s happening to my writing, to my writing self. I like to think of myself as a budding poet. I have had four poems accepted this year (two of them were published here, the other four are coming out later in the year). It’s not enough to call myself a professional poet, it’s not enough to turn into a book. It is not the sudden transformation of pupa to butterfly overnight. It is more like a budding, the slow greening of spring when suddenly you wake up and there are blossoms everywhere and you’re not quite sure when it happened. It is like that. Slow. Gradual. Subtle. But irrevocable. Once spring starts, you can’t close the door on it. That’s what this feels like. There is no closing the door on this writing life, this budding writing life.

December wrap-up (updated)

I set some goals for myself this month, wrote them down and put them out there on the internet for anybody to see, goals that were, for me, pretty ambitious. The month is drawing to a close now and it’s time to check in and see how I did.

1. I’ve got a poetry submission still pending – as of December 8 I’m allowed to inquire as to the status. I need to find a secondary market for this package so that if it’s rejected by the people holding it now I can turn it right around and get it out the door the next day. I’ve found the next journal for these poems, but I haven’t followed up on their status. I’ve never done that before and I’m not sure how to word the request.
2. I have two poems that sit nicely together. They need a market and a companion. (Two poems is generally too few for a submission). I think I’ve found the market, but I haven’t found/written a companion piece. Updated to add: Actually, I think I do have a complete package here.
3. I have a submission package ready to go out the door. I need a good cover letter and I need to just send it already. I’m holding back because I think this is a journal I have a good chance with – I mean, we feel like a really good fit – and I’d love to know about that pending submission I mentioned so that, if it’s an acceptance, I can put that in my cover letter. The fact that this journal’s reading period is open until May is not helping my inner procrastinator. I didn’t send this package out; still waiting to hear about some poems and now waiting until a prose piece that’s been accepted is actually published.
4. I’m revising a prose piece to submit to Brevity. This, my friends, is hugely ambitious but it’s a good piece. A really good piece. Discretion is the better part of valor. This was an overly ambitious choice and I decided not to burn any bridges. Perhaps next year.
5. I’m working on a prose piece to send here. Their deadline is 15 December. I sent it. And they’re going to publish it. I’ll let you know when it’s out.
6. I want another poetry submission out the door by the end of the month. New or newly revised I don’t care. That would make a total of three packages out this month, which is low for somebody who actually wants to publish, but it’s three more than zero as my father would say. Didn’t happen.
7. I have got to organize my market research. I’ve got lists and excel spreadsheets and journals and piles of sample pages from on-line archives scattered between desk and filing cabinet and computer. I did a lot of market research and organizing and it will make my goals for 2009 that much easier.
8. I want to order sample copies from five or six journals, now that I have straightened out the disaster that was my US bank merging, or being acquired, and setting my account to “dormant” without, as far as I’ve been able to determine, actually telling me, resulting in my bouncing checks to no fewer than five literary magazines. Can you begin to imagine the horror of bouncing checks written to the very journals with which I hope to place my work? Can you? I straightened out my banking mess, wrote new checks to the journals I’d ordered off of the old checks, and sent for some additional journals as well.

A modestly successful month. I could make excuses, like the holidays, or the fact that my entire family threw up more than once in the week leading up to and including Christmas. Even the cat! But instead I’m just going to say that for somebody who is still new to all of this, for somebody who is still figuring out the writer-mother-wife-self balance, for somebody as thin-skinned and thrown off stride by “thanks but your work is not for us” letters as I am, I did fine.

I’m doing fine.