Kate Moss: For JP

A couple of weeks ago, I went to the Surrey International Writers Conference, which is not the same as the Surrey Internal Writers Conference, which is what I keep typing and which sounds like something from a Catherynne Valente story and hence something that I would very much like to be part of and which also reminds me of some sort of shadowy grad-school memory of hearts autopsied to reveal gems embedded in them or little poems about Jesus. (Sometimes I sharply pine for those deeply odd Californian days, during which I would spend hours not surfing but wrestling with medieval oddities involving wombs and maps and saints and terror. Motherhood in the suburbs has, of course, only the terror to recommend it. I digress. BUT ONLY SORT OF. Read on.)

Back to Surrey.

In front of me at the Master Class led by Donald Maass was a woman who nearly made me lose control of my bladder. (Those of you under 40 or childless might not understand. The rest of you? Yeah, you know what I'm talking about.)

This woman, built like a cathedral, struck terror into my heart. Instantly. It was like love at first sight except for the part about it being a cold visceral chill. Hmmm. Maybe a lot like love at first sight. I'm actually fascinated by these "at first sight" moments, mostly because I'm pretty much always wrong. If I hate someone at first sight, I wind up marrying them (or promising to do so, another story for another time--or three) or realizing that they're the best friend a teenaged girl being threatened with boarding school could ever have. Love at first sight? That equals RUN RUN BRAVE HEART, RUN LIKE THE WIND.

Crap, I'm digressing again. It's little wonder I cannot write my way out of this novel in progress.

SO: buttress lady, terror. Why? you might ask.

It wasn't the way her chair kind of moaned "help me," not the pencils jabbed into her unkempt half-updo, not even the purple terrytowel sweatshirt that reminded me of the very late 1970s. Who doesn't have one of those?

It was because she reminded me of my homicidal grad-school stalker.

Here's the poop: UC Davis, California, 1989. I'm walking with my pal along one of the jasmine-scented pathways that make Davis its perfect hippie self when in a heartbeat I go from being a regular old just walking along minding her own business kind of person to a sprawled upon the pavement, all limbs akimbo plus also her neck, books strewn everywhere, and being looked down upon by common geese kind of person. That's quite the transition. The perp? A solidly built female, clad in a camoflage jacket, on an old-fashioned Garry bicycle. She didn't stop to see if I was okay. Val and I laughed it off and then went about our day of being very serious graduate students, scoffing at people's delusions about Foucault and grading very harshly those among our students who split their infinitives. Such were the preoccupations of the philosophically anxious.

I was to become more anxious still. Over the next five weeks, Lumpy McCycleston wiped me out four more times, all over campus. Rising groggily from the pavement, all I registered in each instance was a purposeful set of shoulders and air-fluffed hair that could have done with a foil treatment and maybe three inches off the ends.There was something about her determinedly pumping legs as seen from behind and from the ground that reminded me of animated dinosaurs--not the plant eaters, the big awful snarling rippers of bronto flesh kind. The fear I felt was cold and true--and the hilarity of the situation only intensified the sickness in my stomach; if she killed me, finally, or paralyzed me, or ruined my peaches and cream complexion with a road rash, it would be only a story sniggered in bars by beery undergrads. So much for intellectual ambition--I was marked as a campus footnote, a stain on a bike path where plastic flowers lay discarded for only a semester. I should go home now. I should buy a plane ticket home.

We never did discover who my stalker was. The beautiful blonde police girl couldn't stop laughing as I described my plight but dutifully went through the roster of my former students with me, trying to discern who among them might have gained 50 or 60 pounds and been dissatisfied with their grades. And then I got married and moved to Los Angeles, where the threats were more serious, if considerably more slender. Ever after I've wondered who she was, why she wanted me dead, and why she didn't look into some deep conditioner. 

And when I sat down at that Master Class, my eyes bright with purpose but slightly unfocused as middle-aged eyes tend to be, the first thing I registered once composed was: three inches of unkept hair, square shoulders, thighs built for terror. In an instant I was back on the pavement, contemplating winkie beetle pheremone trails and asking myself and the heavens again "Why me?" Suddenly I was feeling small and forgotten--this time, by a publishing industry who had never heard of me and never would. I should go home now.

I learned a big lesson that night about story-telling. Some of it was from Mr Maass, an insightful person; most of it, though, was from re-experiencing terror, 20 years and 1500 miles later, thanks to the split ends and solid calves of a complete stranger. You might as well write for your own pleasure, because you have absolutely no way of knowing how anyone else is going to respond to what you put out there. To whom else do split ends and generous thighs spell soul-killing defeat, grazed elbows and the end of all ambition? 

Apart from Kate Moss, maybe.

Curiosity Cleaned the Kid

Bank lineups have never been Kid's finest milieu. He's a squirmer, a dasher, a smart-mouthed noter of other people's footwear flaws. He has made it clear that Russian accents drive him crazy; that the old lady with the long hair didn't brush her teeth that morning; that "Rufus" is a weird name; that the guy in the track suit is even fatter than Fat Albert; that what did they think he was, a midget bankrobber what with the teller's counter so high above his head? I shudder when we have to go in there together; if my bank wasn't in a kinda sketchy strip mall habituated by Timmy's devotees in pickups, I'd just lock him in the car and go in on my own. I would. I would do that.  Because it has been so bad that people might be given cause to think that we haven't beent trying even a little bit--even though we have been trying very very hard, and have the livers and wrinkles to prove it. But yesterday the slate was wiped clean (literally). Suffice it to say that Kid now knows not to stick his face into the business of how automatic hand sanitizers work, and 11 people in line at the Royal Bank on a Saturday morning got a good long belly laugh. Twelve.

New Pet

Haven't been around here much the last little while. We're renovating the kitchen, about which I'll never speak again because who cares, AND, AND we have a new pet. It takes a lot of hard work, and a lot of my time and energy to banish it from my thoughts. Is it because it is so very that much cute? Winsome in it ways? It is not. It is because it is this:

Meet "Slick," our mealworm.

CBE cuts must have been pretty drastic this year, because instead of a classroom hamster or duckling or even fish, each Grade 3 child at Kid's school was given a mealworm to keep in a plastic cup.

The first question I had was the most obvious one: What are they teaching kids these days? One look at Slick, and I knew she was Grace Slick...honestly-- honestly, now: have you ever seen a more feminine looking mealworm in your whle life? Me neither. It's not easy to find darling pet accessories for mealworms--not even a measly hair ribbon or a bedazzled collar. I worry about Grace Slick now, a lot. What if she wakes up one day and is gender confused? Not that it would bother me one way or another, I just want her to be in a loving relationship, but still: there might be a way to make life easier for her and I think it might be marabou. Yet, I don't think the teachers have even broached the subject of gender, which: HELLO? Is that not the first thing anyone of any age would wonder upon first laying eyes on a mealworm?

One day, sadly, Grace Slick will be turning into a beetle of some sort--or such is the nonsense with which they're filling Kid's head. I see her more as a Ramone or perhaps a Dandy Warhol. Although she would look smashing in this:

That there is a Victorian dress decorated in more than 1,000 beetle wings. It was once worn by Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth.

If you had been asked five minutes ago how to draw a logical line between Calgary Board of Education cutbacks, mealworms, Grace Slick and Lady Macbeth, you wouldn't have been able to do it, would you have?

My work here is done.

The Truth Hurts

Me: Why in the name of all that is good and decent, WHY WILL YOU NOT TO GO BED?
Kid: I don't want to miss all the fun!
Me: What do you think goes on around here once you're in bed?
Kid: Well, you check your chin for whiskers--but dad watches TV til midnight!

Certainty

Normally, I am not much for direct comments. I prefer a sort of sly and minky roundabout sarcasm. But I can say this, flat out: all things considered, I would have preferred to have been told about the dog eating a dead crow BEFORE I gave him his customary kiss in the face.

Boxcar Willie

Because my friends are all odd, and those in Minnesota odder still, I today found myself thinking about Boxcar Willie for the first time in 40 years. Boxcar was a regular companion on our long, hot trips to Saskatchewan in the stabby August heat--mom and dad smoking fiendishly up front while the three of us kids coped as best we could with the snarling and flatulent poodle, rogue grasshoppers sproinging desperately against the station wagon windows, and egg salad sandwiches on the turn. After Boxcar wailed for his allotted 2:46 about the Wabash Cannonball, our 8-track turned evilly to a song by George Hamilton IV, about a Saskatchewan farmer who has to shoot his horses during a winter storm because they were all starving to death anyhow. So: August fug, grasshoppers and their filthy tobacco spit, flatulent dog AND three weeping children snuffling into their mayonaissed sleeves. Good times.

But back to Boxcar: did you know he's the cousin of Tommy Lee Jones? YES.

Oh, and: the thing about Boxcar, "The World's Favorite Hobo"? He was in the US Air Force and was never, NOT EVEN FOR A SECOND, a hobo. Like, not at all. Never a hobo.

My favorite hobo is Rutger Hauer.

I don't even need to see "Hobo with a Shotgun" to know how much I love it. "When life gives you razorblades you make a bat covered with razorblades," someone says to Hobo+shotgun, which is pretty much the best quote in movie history. Except, maybe, for "I have to wash this guy's ass off my face," from the same work of genius.

I think we might have been happier little girls in the long run if we had had such alternate entertainment on those long-gone trips through the parched Canadian plains. Innocent shot-dead ponies in February prairie snowstorms made us think that God was mean, but guilty shot-dead corrupt cops, anti-hobo activists and snotty rich kids? There's your sense of divine justice right there, which is something we really could have used a sense of, what with that gassy poodle, the noxious clouds of cigarette smoke, and nothing but License Plate Bingo to divert our minds from our end-of-the-road doom: BORSCHT. The thought that, one day, someone was going to have to Answer to A Divine Authority  for pulling us out of our British Columbia lake and driving us 12 hours to a one-tree town that smelled of cabbage? That might have been the thought that would have sustained our now completely, irreparably sooty black souls.

Hey! Here's a good song about hobos, performed in a winery with a German name, just like Rutger's. I imagine you're amazed by how I did that, what with the multi-media pulling together of many hobo threads all blowin' in the wind. Worn Ragged, writing meaningfully of hobos since 2008.

Upon being 8

So as of a few days ago, my baby is 8 years old. We celebrated by touring a Liberty Ship in the San Francisco Harbor. My Canadian child knows this much about Americans: one salutes the flag.

"Mommy, why is a salute hitting your eyebrow with the side of your hand?"

I explained to him about the whole Roman thing, demonstrating that your right hand is free of weapons, and that it's also a mark of respect. One ought to stand about three feet from the superior being addressed and maintain an upright posture.

So for the next three hours, I am tailed at three feet by a small boy in a white sailor's hat, barking orders to himself, his hand glued to his new sailor's cap,  marching around as though his life depended upon the force with which his sneakers hit the ground.

The volunteers aboard the Jeremiah O'Brien were duly impressed. The man running the gift shop made hima birthday present, as did the sage 91-year-old Anglican vicar who sailed the O'Brien to Normandy and back twice, some 50 years apart.  Kid was told by this wise old man to listen to his mother and not to put anything in his body that he didn't know for sure would make him healthier and stronger. The chocolate chip cookie in his hand hit the dust. The long-held dream of cotton candy did the same.

So now I'm parenting an 8-year-old Canadian health-nut who wants to be an American navy officer when he grows up, and who has already memorized the lines to "Anchors Aweigh." He also criticized my consumption of chips, beer, and guacamole, which is completely irritating.


Next year I'm taking him to a law office so he can check out the Hugo Boss suits and the BlackBerries. It's either Freedome 85 or Nudge Kid into Extremely Lucrative Line of Work. Although it will, I confess, be hard to give up the salute. I quite like the salute.