Chef

I watch the silicone spread through the mold. Seeing the thick fluid ripple out of the container I can't help but remember being small and watching mom cooking. Egg and flour batter, whisked up to a high viscosity every Sunday morning in the plastic mix & pour bowl, descended into a thick liquid onto the grittle and spread out in neat circles. Cake mix would emerge from the electric mixer after the noise was over and fill in the waiting baking pan. I was at her elbow, waiting for tastes, a bowl to lick, and watching the powders and eggs and milky liquids become spongy, consumable solids.

And here I stand in my bathroom. There's no one to make birthday cakes for. No one is there for a Sunday breakfast. It's just me and in my mixer is silicone rubber. After combining silicone with hardener the thick fluid takes on a dried blood color. At the end there is no bowl to lick and the stains up my arms look like those of a demented surgeon. All the finger prints I leave are anonymous glove smears. The garbage of casting paraphernalia looks like something fowl and bloody has just happened. But it's just me, mixing up the solitary recipe for what I make to bring some happiness into the world. Mom cooked eggs and milk and flour and sugar. I cook chemicals into art snacks.

Life is a 4-letter word with a big 'if' in the middle.

Plastics packaging dumps endocrine inhibiting chemicals into our children. Fragrances fatten with pthalates. Soap phospates in Chicago that deaden the Gulf of Mexico. Less fresh water draining into our oceans. Bears swim too much, their bulk drowning in pursuit of a meal. Coal from China rains acid over the midwest.

For what? So we can continue the inertia of our consumptive lives - pushing the present moment to a cushioned distance? Our cushion fluffs itself to the great discomfort of our future.

Why was I born into this world? I wish I could just absent myself from this craziness, I swear. Put on my sneakers and just run right off the edge of the whole thing to some better, cleaner, less fucked up place. Why am I here? Why do we do these things?

But yet, here I am. Not to judge it, not to pity it at all, but to love and revere the life even as the life is a mess. This life as it has been handed to us is a four letter word with a big 'if' in the middle.

Slowly, maybe first heeding the call of fad and fashion, minds pull themselves from the sludge of craving. Like first seeds maybe they will turn to the light and grow in a new way. It's a start. Every day must start at midnight. Even Earth day.

Girl with horn

The cleaning kit finally arrived and, finding myself with a pocket of time, I plunged Dad's coronet into hot bath water. We used to get into all sorts of trouble for playing these things when we found them in the basement. Now, it's MINE! I pull apart the one valve and yank out the tuning slide. Snaking the cleaner through pipes I watched as dark green clouds of old filth billow out. The valve is still missing a spring so it won't work to shift the key. This instrument is caked with slide grease and valve oil that have gone sticky and picked up basement gunk. The surface is dull and just looks like neglect. Soap. never had to soap a horn before but this needs it.

Then, it's time to put it together. At first I wonder if the horn is still dirty inside as it's tough to get air through. Then, I realize it might be my lungs that are out of shape. I figure out its intervals and briefly contemplate waking my party animal neighbors with a reveille at 5 am after their next late night fete.

As I take a cloth and polish the sediment off its surface a lovely silvery horn emerges. Like loosing the genie from the lamp I know I'm not alone in the room. Dad smiles over my shoulder. The brighter the horn shines the more clearly I can see his face. I put the new mouthpiece in and make sounds, experimenting with the few bugle calls I remember, and he plugs his ethereal ears.

After a few shots, my breathing comes back, my mouth remembers its "oo" arbrasure and the sound gets clear. "Next time you go home," he whispers "find my trumpet."

the spring merit badge

I look down at my arms and notice the scratches around wrist and elbows have turned red. By tomorrow these lines will fade down to small scabs looking like they were drawn with a ruler. But I know what they are. These are my merit badge that spring has started.

Crouched close to the dirt, clipping away at dead grass and pulling out leaves, I listen to the sound of a plane going overhead and the children playing at the adjoining park. Basketball, screams, games of interpersonal chance float in percussive syllables over the soft spring air. The smell of melted dirt fills my nostrils. For a split second it clicks back into place. This is the garden. Five months of snow and persistent cold have kept me away, but here it is again.

I see the garden as it was last season. The day lilies which towered and bloomed persistently until October are now just a few dried leaves and husks on the ground. The marigolds which insisted on growing into bushes make ecru skeletons clutching the dirt. The rose bushes, ah my precious wild roses, are a mange and chaos that cannot be ignored. The discipline of my clippers is met with thorny protest. The beauty I've wrestled with has left me looking mauled as though by a beast. Last season was indeed lovely. But it's done. Spent bushes and plants left to seed must be removed. Dead leaves applied for winter warmth must be raked away. Dead grasses clipped. It was beautiful. And now it's just time to start again.

Each year I start this process hoping to head off any weedy chaos at the pass. But tending this patch is nothing like cleaning a kitchen counter. It would seem the same rules apply, to set up a system of organization, to create clean surfaces, but it doesn't. There's too much letting go and waiting in the process for it to be anything like neat and easy. I know what I'm doing - setting myself up for more work! I spend 4 hours clipping and raking and hauling. And I know as I do this that there is no guarantee in this act of preventing work later on. I'll be here, playing catch-up with nature, every week, all season. I already know what I have to do when I come back next week.

Gathering clouds part for a bit and I see the flower bed, now flat and bare save for the first few patches of plants coming up. There's the daffodils, ringed by day lily, some bearded iris, the poppies, the dianthus, the holly hocks, and the roses. Other surprises await. Will the marigolds and zinnias I let go to seed come back? In a month so much more life will have exploded from the dirt you'd be hard pressed to say its the same place. In two months the day lily will start blooming and the roses will be out. Sounds a bit like I know what will happen. But I don't. The blooming is like a christmas present I get to open over and over. I can barely wait.

Water normal

In the wind whipping off the lake this morning, the water works itself into foamy waves that march toward the the shore like rows of shark teeth. You'd think the land didn't stand a chance. But, at the last second each icy peak shatters and sprays into a million pieces like angels falling to earth.

The taste of water in my mouth. Neutral, wet, even and unthreatening, like a constant to come back and visit after so many visits to countries sweet and acidic. The water pretends to offer no answers and has no agenda of results. It just is for the consuming for anyone wanting to come home. Much like love.

We've talked for hours on the phone. We finally met f2f and while on one hand I enjoyed myself, I couldn't help but suppose afterward that I'd screwed everything up. Signals, men want signals. What does a signal look like? Where is the instruction manual for all of these feminine wiles I'm supposed to wield? Is that what all of those men who decided I wasn't for them wanted?

What did they want? Why didn't they stay? Or was it me? How many times did I hop off the rolling train when it passed through a tunnel? Was I supposed to want something? get something? Marry someone? The tide of self doubt comes in again, nibbling at my shore. I always come back here, to gnawing doubt and a subtle but pervasive unworthiness. The waves roll back to reveal what detritus lives under every life tide: suicidal depression.

Self pity comes easy. Just because that derelict of mental crashes remains in the deep sand doesn't mean I need to go excavating. I could. But today I keep it at a distance. I keep at a distance the way he asks so many questions and how many long pauses fill the conversation. I keep at a distance that line I've heard so many times "I'm not ready for a relationship." I won't dive in there, today, but keep running.

People wonder why I spend so much time alone. It's just that it's like water - a formless sense of normal that seeps in and where I don't feel expected to be anything. I just can't help but drink.

Winter relapse

I can't tell if it's about to happen or if I've already missed it. I stare into the yellow glow on the horizon, trying to pick out the round form this morning's haze might conceal. Just as I turn to keep running the sun sneaks over the horizon in a blaze. The yellow ball burning through clouds is the same color as amber LED's on the front of a bus. Here she is, driving over the horizon on a west bound route, the #1 vehicle upon which we all hitch a ride through space.

On a whim I asked how she's doing and got back a flooding response. In the middle of a divorce, anyone who asks such a thing is a welcome chance to unload. Anyone who asks better be willing to show up for the whole story. You don't ask a soldier how they are and expect to run off. And she is a veteran of the heart wars. So this is what marriage and children can look like. It doesn't have to, but this is the picture I bolster myself with when too many popular voices upbraid me for staying single. You may say I'm selfish, but I'm quite happy.

Patches of snow remaining from winter's relapse remain like frozen sundials on the east side of trees and hills. The sun didn't come out yesterday until after leaving its zenith. All through the pounding wind, sleet and snow I was amazed at the sounds of birdsong, as if they were trying to keep the trees awake and reassure them that spring was not a joke. Would that they could wake us all up.

Meeting him today. After how long? A month? 3 weeks? of nothing but phone calls. "No pressure no pressure" became "dammit when are we going to meet?" Somebody got frisky, maybe. This should be interesting. Will it be a lecture on TM or a conversation about sex? I could use a nap. "Don't kid yourself" I say. exchanging words isn't knowing. Don't try too hard. Look good enough to feel happy about yourself but not too..sexy.

Feet don't want to move as fast today. Darn it. Must need more sleep. Push through. Seagull screeches leak through the audio fill of new ipod. Hop over melt off rivers. I thought we were done with seeing these weeks ago. Spring is back at step one, trying it again.

Metallic carnage that sustains our life starts to clang and thump to life. Arterial highways carry corpuscules of steel and rubber into the city. Is this really life? Are we really living if our actions enslave? We could be seeing the decline of human dominance. Soon we will negotiate our treaties not with cultures of other countries but of other species. Dolphins will tell us where we can go in the ocean and birds will discipline us in the forest. Will we be left to the cities or will our cities cease? What if there were fewer of us?

Coming through the door at home I see the full buds on branches, days, maybe minutes, from exploding. Hey birdies, it worked.