Thoughts Happen

Turtles, Tulips and Sh***y First Drafts

Our turtle, Littlefoot, was spotted in his enclosure the other day by Daughter. If you’re following this blog you’ll have heard of him. He’s a strange little guy, but I truly do love him. He hibernates every winter by digging himself into the ground, and comes out every spring, poking his head out like a periscope.

This is the first year I haven’t fretted about whether or not he made it through the winter. Usually by the middle of March I’m obsessing about whether this is the year that I’ve done it — killed him through neglect as a bad reptile momma. But he’s survived quite nicely the last two winters without any intervention from me, so I’m finally getting the hint that this is a system I can trust.

 Kind of like with my writing. Most every time I sit down to write, I generally think what I come up with at first is crap. And, frankly, a lot of times it is. But I’ve taken to heart Anne Lamott’s advice to write Shitty First Drafts (pardon my French), because if you don’t write a SFD, you can’t get any further than that. Sounds pretty commonsense, right? But it’s amazing how many times I can put off starting a project because I dread the SFD stage.

I should know by now that after the SFD, things start to hang together a bit more and that by the time I’ve worked with it a little, something decent emerges. This is also a system I’m learning to trust.

Like If you plant a tulip bulb, you’ll get a tulip. Tulip bulb + dirt + faith + (most importantly) getting out of the way for the system to do its thing = tulip. Every spring when the bulbs I planted a few years ago push their leaves up through the mulch, it makes me happy. Even when there's no flower, just knowing that the effort I put in caused something to grow makes it worth it. 

As another of my favorite writing sayings goes, “You can edit crap, but you can’t edit nothing.” No tulip without a bulb, but I'm trying not to worry too much over the outcome.

Rock Stars and Leprechauns

Wanna feel like an instant Rock Star? Play live music for a class full of elementary school kids. I brought my violin to my daughter’s school today, as I have every St. Patrick’s Day since she was in kindergarten, to play Irish music for some of the classes. There’s no more appreciative audience than a room full of squirrelly kids who get 15 minutes of something totally unexpected.

Of course it helps if you’re playing some of the world’s most recognized party music on a holiday marked by eating unnaturally colored foods and searching for invisible mischief-making men.

The kindergarteners are always my favorite, because when the teacher asks how many in the class know how to dance an Irish jig, over half of them raise their hands, and when she gives them the go-ahead to dance around the classroom while I’m playing, they throw their little bodies into improvised jigs with great abandon. When it’s question time I get queries like, “Do you play that music from Irish?” which is kind of existential, when you think about it.

The kids usually want to know how long I’ve been playing, and is it hard. I tell them that I started in the third grade and played through 12th grade, but then didn’t play for 18 years and then picked it up again as an adult. I tell them to learn an instrument, any instrument, when they are young and they will always have it with them.

I tell them not to get discouraged if they don’t like the first instrument they try, and that I played piano for a year when I was in the first grade and then my parents finally let me quit taking lessons because I hated it and would never practice, but then I tried violin in third grade and stuck with it and like it so much better.

I tell them that it is hard to learn at first, but you get better at it the more you do it, and that most things worth doing are kind of hard to begin with but then they get really fun.

When it’s almost time for me to go the teacher asks if they would like one more song and they scream “Yeesss!” so loud I feel like Joan Jett. I play “Irish Washerwoman” and they get a few more minutes to get their ya-ya’s out before I head out to the next classroom.

It doesn’t get any better than that.

Dishtowel Memorial—Goodbye, Amber

 My hand halted a fraction of a second over the stack of towels in my kitchen drawer. I was about to pull out the dull sage green dishtowel that matched the stripes in its cream-colored hand towel mate, but I hesitated. Because they found another girl this week. Or rather, they found her body. The one who had been missing for so long, eyes peering from behind a shock of glossy brown hair asking “Have You Seen Me?” for over a year, was finally heard, calling her seekers to a remote, rocky grave near the Pala Indian Reservation.

And I just couldn’t bear to pick up that drab dishtowel. It was too heavy.

Heavy with a parent’s grief, heavy with generations upon generations of brokenness that plays itself out in sickness and violence, heavy with the collective load of a community that wonders if it can absorb just one more sorrow.

So I reached beyond to its neighbor, red and orange, purple and green in its vibrancy. And the colors said, “Believe in me” and I realized that I did.

And I hung the dishtowel which was more than a dishtowel on the oven door next to the pale hand towel with its heavy sage-colored stripes, to remember.

And then I realized—her name was Amber.

Salt of the Earth—Goodbye, Chelsea

A 17-year-old girl, Chelsea King, went missing last week after leaving on a run from a neighborhood east of here; her parents were on TV, pleading for any information. Search parties went out for days, and then the headline in the paper. Arrest made—man charged with murder and rape, although they still didn’t know where the girl was.

The more I meditate, the more I feel things. And it’s damn uncomfortable. No wonder more people don’t do it.

In the past few months I’ve noticed a shift in my perception. I think my boundaries are starting to blur, like the salt paintings I remember doing as a kid. We’d wet a piece of paper, sprinkle salt all over it until it stuck, dab a moistened brush into our watercolors and lightly paint onto the salt surface. Any design we made would instantly expand, the colors wicking through the salt for a blurry kaleidoscopic effect.

I feel like I’ve got too much salt on me.

 I’m sick to my stomach. The girl is a straight-A student, plays French horn, is on the cross-country team. “The kind of girl who wants to change the world,” her father says on TV. I think of my own daughter, and I just can’t take it all in. The parents aren’t strangers, Those Poor People, but for a few moments, they are me, and she is my daughter. My daughter missing. Not as if she is my daughter. She is my daughter.

Other people are seeming less Other to me lately. We watched the closing ceremony of the Winter Olympics from Vancouver on TV, the day after the girl went missing, and a choir from Sochi, Russia, all tuxes and deep blue gowns, came out to sing their national anthem as part of the passing-the-flag ceremony. Before, I would have thought, “Look at those Russians,” but what went across my mind this time was, “Aren’t people interesting.” Their sapphire blue started to bleed all over me.

Yesterday, they find the body, buried in a shallow grave at the edge of a lake. Oh God, is all I can think. The Parents. But sadly, they have become Those Poor People again. My defenses have kicked in, and once again they are separate from me. What a loss.

Photo courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/katietegtmeyer/ / CC BY 2.0