still believe

tuckovaLeave a comment

OKAY 10 MINUTES GO.

I went to see a show last night (singer-songwriter cafe type of thing). The singer is a friend, I guess we're friends at this point. He helped me through a particularly bad patch in my life, gave me some personal insight and clarity over two cups of coffee, and I think it was not a big deal to him but it was to me. So I go to his shows, clap till my hands hurt, sing along when he asks for it, dance. Try to bring new people. He's good, a showman, funny. And last night he had a drummer, box drum, which was great.

I had some thoughts at the show last night:
 
What do I think of people who clap with a song? Or pound the table, stamp their feet, sing along with the words they know, dance in their seats? I tend to think that those people are annoying. I tend to think, I came to see and hear HIM, not YOU. I tend to think it's attention-grabby and annoying. And yet I did dance last night, to the last song, got up and did the twist, and it was fun. So what does that mean?
I so like observational poetry (can I call it that?); Frank O'Hara seems to me so clean and beautiful, and yet I often feel like songwriters are stuck in a "write what you know" rut where what they know is… I don't know, it feels uncomfortable in a way I think it shouldn't. "Tom's Diner" is a perfect example of the sort of song I mean, except that it doesn't bother me the way that, say, "You're Beautiful" does (I was on the subway and I saw a pretty girl with another guy. THE END. Seriously?). So what makes the line between a simple and lovely observation and a trite one?
Why is it that when I so value originality, there are few things as guaranteed to delight me as a clever cover? Cake's "I Will Survive", the tragic, pathos-laden cover of  "I Kissed a Girl", or Chris's cover of "…One More Time", goosebumps and a grin every time.
AND: SCENE.

you’re good to go

tuckovaLeave a comment

A long time ago, we used to be friends

Well what is a long time ago? Less than half a lifetime. How we talked late into the night, stretched beside each other or whispering into the phone, or email with its glorious disregard for time and time zones. A friendship that ended and started and ended and started, each time sweeter, each time like finding something I'd given up as lost, my silver necklace returned to me on the tide, the sparkle through the water, the glint and hope and the waves pulling back to reveal what is more precious for having been lost.

But I haven't thought of you lately at all

This is a fallacy, since obviously I'm writing about you so I am thinking of you, lately. The late you, reverof enog. I think of you when you occur to me: hear you sooner or later on every eighties station, the smell of almonds from a roadside stand, hotel soap, the particular taste of coffee in the morning of a day that is not yet hot, but will be.  

If ever again a greeting I send to you

Don't worry I won't, though your birthday comes and goes and my lips itch with what I want to say, the words that would unlock you, the key I could pass with a kiss. The only way to get blood from a stone is to cut your hands on it and my hands have scars enough. I have been one to hang about graveyards, rubbing my name off the grave, pressing forehead to headstone, but those days are gone. I only visit what I've buried in my heart, now. The dead don't know you're there, anyway, and there's no point in talking to them unless you're asking them to keep a secret, and you already have mine.

Short and sweet to the soul I intend

And what would I say, anyway? That I loved you then and still? You knew it then and probably now, too, if you think of me where you are; I remain consistent. I said run away with me then and I meant it, but if you had said yes we wouldn't have been running away together, we would have been running away from home, badly packed suitcases thumping against our scabbed knees, and every time I thought of it the suitcases became heavier and filled with more abstractions: partner, child, mortgage, responsibility. Finally they couldn't be lifted at all and it became almost impossible for you to even talk to me until almost was perfectly.  

Come on now honey

Oh never mind I get it. All I ever have wanted to be was good and I am still practicing. It's just the times when someone puts their pillows in the window for the morning sun to freshen them, every time I use that bottle opener we bought for the wine, the afternoons when I want to use words like malinger and find I have nobody around to say them to, the way your neck smells just below your ear, how it feels to walk down the middle of the street at night, like when we were rockstars, remember me when.  

I nearly missed a rainbow

tuckovaLeave a comment

The recent New Yorker cover with the picture of Bert and Ernie cuddling on the couch in front of a black and white screen showing the Supreme Court Justices, which is intended to be a celebration of the end of DOMA and a cute nod to the idea that Bert and Ernie are a gay couple, is super offensive to me.

Sesame Street says they're not gay. Specifically, the Children's Television Workshop and the puppeteers themselves have responded on multiple occasions that (variously) they do not have sexual orientations, that they are puppets and not people, that they were based on the relationship between Jim Henson and Frank Oz and are thus a representation of friendship, not of romance, that they are meant to teach children that it is possible to get along with people who are different from us.

I find it annoying that people, especially people who have so worked hard to have their sexual orientation accepted, would be so eager to co-opt somebody else's. It's not like they're in the closet and a certain amount of good-natured taunting is going to get them out. Asked and answered; move on. 

And then there is a part of this that I find really difficult, which is that while I absolutely support the idea that sexual orientation is not a "choice" and that people are "born this way" (whatever way), I do think that discussions of sexuality specifically in terms of children gets into an ugly little area really fast. Bert and Ernie should get to not talk about it, and children should know that this is okay for them too. To be open to the discussion with your own children and/or with other adults is one thing, but to go into the kids' room and start using their toys for your narrative is… well, tacky.

It is okay to be gay. It's okay to be straight. It's okay to be bisexual, asexual, whatever. It's okay to feel like those questions are nobody's business. In my opinion. 

The Jill Lepore article about Jane Franklin was pretty great, though. 

balcony scene

tuckovaLeave a comment

Good morning! (it is morning). The garbage trucks doing their stately roll down the street here at 7:30 a.m. Yesterday it was people mowing the little strips of grass in front of the building at 6 a.m. In both cases I was already awake, as the cat has not yet gotten the memo that SCHOOL'S OUT and we can all sleep late. No, she sees the sun come up and it is time to let her out on the balcony so she can watch all the world walking by like the old lady she is. I too enjoy watching the world from the balcony though I usually pretend I'm doing something other than swish my tail from side to side in an odd combination of hunger and detachment. The marigolds need to be deadheaded, for example, and the delicious-smelling tomato flowers are finally producing little green bursts of wonder. 

Summer in the city means, alternately, cleavage cleavage cleavage (Regina Spektor) and the back of my neck gettin' dirty and gritty (Lovin' Spoonful); sometimes both at once. This is my favorite season here. The girls in their summer dresses. The living is easy. etc. June was nearly continuous rain, I was wearing a leather jacket and boots and carrying an umbrella most days, and some days I stood on the balcony staring at gray skies, the water filling the gray gutters with gray sludge and I actually wept to be here, the air pressure so low I could feel my blood all: Oh, why bother even pumping at all. In the middle of the month there was a week when it was near 100 every day and we all wilted like overheated petunias, and if somebody had pulled my head off I would have been only mildly surprised. But now it seems to be hitting the Actual Summer.

Brno is a university town (a quarter of the population are students) and it clears out in the summer like whoa. The theaters close down, the beer gardens are half full at best, even on hot days when all you want is a shade umbrella and a frosted glass. The main square is like the scene before a gunfight (quiet. toooo quiet!), unless there's a busload of Japanese tourists coming through for their 3 hour tour (cheesy tourist "dragon", cabbage market, beer at the first brew pub in town with some overpriced fried cheese to trigger their lactose intolerance, and then back on the bus, sayonara gaijin). Maybe one girl loosely wrapped in gauzy bits of fabric running to the train station in sandals, graceful as Atalanta despite the incongrous backpack, doubtless filled with instant soups, Czech rum, a good book, and of course some golden apples. 

Anyway. Here all glorious summer, for the first time in a long while — no California, no Greece, no Croatia, no cottage for us this year. Weather is beautiful. Wish you were here. 

curiouser and curiouser

tuckovaLeave a comment

My mind is a constantly hungry acquisitive thing, wandering about in search of new and more information. It's nothing personal or not usually, it's just the desire for knowledge. When I was little you could be excused from the dinner table only to look something up, brussels sprouts turning cold while I turned the pages of the New Book of Knowledge to prove my point or, less satisfying, to have the chance to stop being wrong. 

It has always been hard for me to imagine what it is to not be curious, to not want to know more. Read all the books by an author, have all the albums by a band, know everything about anything. Now that we have the internet I really don't understand – you don't have to collect anything, because it's all at your fingertips all the time. Child's play. I do not understand video games but the thrill of looking up something obscure, the juvenelia, the B side, the cameo, is just… oh my.

Also of course the snooping, which you could call stalking but I would be hurt because it's really not about A person, it's about ALL people. I found the guy who stalked me in college, just to be sure I know where he is (unsurprised to read on ratemyprofessors that he still gives college girls the creeps), both of my closest high school friends (one more beautiful than photoshop and quite successful; the other almost as fat as I am now and on her second marriage), the girl who lived down the street from me growing up has adopted a Chinese orphan, etc. I have no desire to talk to almost anybody, I just get that weird little itch of "whatever happened to" and I scratch it. 

If I do know you in person you have had me listen to you with what may have seemed like half attention, but I promise I was recording. Storing, cross-referencing, remembering. Over time you have an archive in my mind, and I build an idea of you that is as close to you as I can be, not a mask of who I wish you were but truly what I see, collectively, together, layers. I have been told that for some people it is unpleasant to be seen this way, past and present together, that I should only see the beautifully plated self before me at the moment. I have also been told that it is unfair to have your past repeated to you, like someone trying to squeeze you into baby clothes (though this is my metaphor, but I am trying to understand what is unpleasant, truly). But I think most people like it, this being seen, the charcoal pencil of my mind tracing over your outline, filling in the shadows from your eyelashes, the curve of your cheek, the little birthmark on the back of your neck, the small constellation of freckles. 

I am sometimes surprised to be reminded that not everybody is like me. Not for everyone this endless acquisition, the storage, the desire for more so absolute it feels like need. But it does seem that very few people think about things like this to the extent that I do, and learning to understand and respect that one woman's exhaustive is another man's exhausting may be a thing that I also have to acquire, one of this year's "better living through empathy" triad I'm working on. I'm not planning to change who I am, and I'm still probably going to memorize poems and read your back catalog, but I will try to keep it to myself a little more.

Brno murders

tuckovaLeave a comment

A family of four Brno citizens was murdered about 10 days ago. The funeral was on Saturday. Brno is a small town, so while I didn't know any of the victims personally, I know their neighbors and friends. A kid who played in the ukulele band with the father and son used to attend drama class with my son. The mother taught at a school with one of my friends. Their neighbors have been to my house.  

It's not certain who killed them, but the primary suspect is a US citizen, a young man who is a cousin of the family. He came in April and was advertising for work as an English teacher. Like any small community, we took him in. Had a beer with him, tried to help him find a job, opened doors and homes. I didn't meet him, but I could have. I didn't have him in my home, but I could have. This is how we live, here. This could have happened to someone I know; this could have happened to my family.  

Less than a month after he came, the family — a father, a mother, two sons — was dead, and their American guest was on a plane back to the US, having left abruptly, before the police could question him. Maybe he did it; maybe he just knows something. Maybe not. As long as he's in the US, though, nobody is going to find out.

As a person living in Brno, I feel frightened and violated. This is my community. As a person from the same town where this young man is from, I feel responsible and guilty. That was my home. 

Now he is in custody in Virginia. The Czech government has about a month to put together a request for extradition, and then the US Department of Justice and the State Department decide whether to send him back here. It could take years, and some cases never get resolved — the suspects go free in cases that the OIA says "fell through the cracks" as if they just had a badly installed floor. The US has never extradited a citizen to the Czech Republic, and it doesn't try people for crimes committed abroad, so if they don't send him back, he will go free in the US, this man who may have killed a family that welcomed him into their home. Meanwhile my town weeps and the ukulele band is silent, mourning. 

I think that having people aware of this and pressuring the US government to send him back would be useful. I created a petition to raise awareness and to hopefully ensure that if and when the Czech government has a reason to ask him to return, the US government will extradite him. Please, if you could take two minutes to sign this, I would be so grateful. 

CHANGE.ORG: Petition for the extradition of Kevin Dahlgren

twenty-first century fox

tuckovaLeave a comment

Once upon a time there was a fox. Foxes are awesome because they have all the playful bounce of dogs with an insouciant "don't need you" splash of cat-attitude (catitude? whatever). The fox is all, as long as I'm not living in England where the people have terrible teeth and hunt me, life is fine. Bouncy fox.

Foxes are omnivores so this fox ate a bunch of different things. Fruit, bread, bird food; even some chickens. Yeah I know about the unfortunate incident with the henhouse but we're actually going to be dealing with a different idiom here. 

So in the course of the merry bouncy life of this fox, lots of food. Some fantastic things. There was a bush of berries so sweet that it took some time to move away from it, and even though the berries were sweet only most of the time, and were in season only some of the time, still the fox stayed and ate them, mouth stained red with pleasure. Another period spent living near a farmhouse, eating mice, the excitement of chasing them, catching them, the fast gulp of consummation. A long time spent almost tame, living off what scraps were thrown its way, until the scraps turned from bits of tender fresh meat that could be ripped from the bone to dinner scraps to moldy bits begged from the back of the fridge and the fox knew it was time to move on.

And now the fox is out again, roaming. It's made a few poor food choices in life, shivering and heaving in the forest that runs alongside the houses, eating leaves to calm its stomach and thinking that anything that looks too good is bound to hurt. Thinking it would be better to never eat again than to feel this pain. Better to shrivel up.

One day the fox passes a vineyard, and remembers the taste of grapes. Some sweet, a bit of mold on them, the heady tail-chasing dance of that night. Some with seeds that crunched in the teeth and the juice ran down, sugar matted fur, the feeling of being completely sated. But the last grapes were a bad batch, sweet on the tongue but with a retching sour aftertaste, and now the fox isn't sure. Standing hesitant before the tidy rows of vines, and the fox doesn't know with certainty if the gnawing feeling is hunger or just curiosity, what it wants or if it even wants anything at all. 

between the bars

tuckovaLeave a comment

Sometimes I think I'm going to see you and I prepare fun stories in my head and then I realize that I'm not going to see you, that we're not like that now, and my whole little speech about how a diagnosis reads like a poem is totally shot, like our love of an/unspecified nature/suggestive/of malignancy.

I don't think I'm going to die today or even soon and sometimes I think that I have done some pretty poor planning in terms of my potential failure to die. Like the last time I did some life planning it was more like death planning and I was smoking a pack a day and drinking until the walk home was at best vague and now I'm hardly saintly but it occurs to me that retirement planning is like a real thing, like I am past the "good-looking corpse" clause if you know what I mean.

When Squire was wee he had a total meltdown on a plane where he was sure we were going to crash and die a fiery death. There was nothing to reassure him, and I felt then how empty such reassurance was, because this is exactly what you cannot prepare for, the surprise. Fat fear tears rolling down his cheeks, but he was brave and he was ready, even while he was beyond consolation. I might have turned around and gone home if we could have gotten home without flying. And yet what could I say: relax, you're not going to die. It's exactly what everybody says. It is exactly a lie.

I bought shampoo for gray hair today. I will probably never stop missing you. 

like a drunk but not

tuckovaLeave a comment

On Wednesday it felt like a really truly spring day and I decided to resume walking, which I used to do in great gulps and enjoy, but I like it much less when the streets are icy, which they have been for about a year now I think. But now it is sunny again, and it is fun to prowl the streets watching things and listening to podcasts. I walked down my street where a young couple stood in the middle of the sidewalk kissing while people walked around them, her arm extended behind her to hold the leash of her unwatched dog and his hand resting on her breast. Spring oblivion.

I went to Cejl, the Poor Part of Town, where a family stood on opposite sides of the street shouting at each other, one finally darting across the traffic to shout more effectively close up and then they hugged, with the conciliatory rubbing of shoulders and laughing. I got a massage as part of my quest to find the best reasonably priced massage in town (at least one a month until I find it; this is the best grail hunt I have set myself since the quest for the perfect martini). This was good but not great, a chalice but not the grail.

Then I went to the post office to pick up the only kinds of package they let me get now without complication, which is books. Yay for books, I know everybody loves a Kindle but I am too old for that specific technology. When there are teleportation devices I swear I will figure them out, yea though I am seventy, but I need books with pages or I don't feel like I'm reading. The line was longish, though it moved surprisingly briskly for a Czech line, and the couple in front of me with his chin resting atop her head, arms entwined, were able to maintain a steady elephant walk sway as they moved towards the window.

Walked up the hill through downtown and had an ice cream. I saw one couple making out on the new park benches on the main square. One homeless type with his hands down his pants. An older and much younger man, jaunty as if from a boat, apparently a couple, circling a billboard, reading all the upcoming events, not talking but standing too close to be strangers. I saw children chasing pigeons and the fountain hasn't been turned on yet so there were students sitting on the rings inside, backpacks flung aside, heliotropic faces tilted to the sun.

Stopped in at the new pub to say hi but not to eat, and then walked home, and part of me was all YEAH FOR ME AND MY LEGS and the other part was like ow ow ow ow ow. 

This weekend I opened the balcony windows and sat on the floor in a sunbeam reading about Anne Shirley. One of the pleasures of my youth was re-reading, and I almost never do it now, but it feels like a thing that one could re-learn to do, to be interested in the plot precisely because you know where it's going, like walking all over the town you've lived in for almost twenty years, or thinking that public displays of affection are a nice sign of spring.

my little town

tuckovaLeave a comment

Brno is a VILLAGE. Sometimes I forget, because there are a hundred cafes and pubs and restaurants. An opera and several theaters. Nightclubs and bars with live music every night of the week. Four new places opened up this week, including the best one. To me these are all things you go to The City for. So I get to thinking that Brno is a city (albeit population under half a million) and then boom I slam up against the town green of it, the two degrees of separation. 

Anyway, that was what I was thinking last night when I went to see a concert and ran into about 10 people I knew in 10 minutes, tapping out our crude rhythms of bear dance tunes. If you want to go to a place where everybody knows your name, it is sufficient to walk out onto the street, or send a message via the woman who does your pedicure, or turn e-mail into coffee, tap tap tap.