Hollywood Ending

I was in the mortuary conference room with my siblings, my stepmother, her sister, and my stepsister. The O'Neill family has owned the mortuary since 1898. Mr. O'Neill running the meeting currently heads the family mortuary and is my age, probably. Our families went to church together, so I recognize the boy in him.

He goes on about his services, very thorough and thoughtful. I zone out for a few minutes, answering my phone when my own mother, who's babysitting Clara and Diego, calls to ask when I will be home because she wants to "go do something." Marco shoots me with his stare, "Turn that thing off!" he hisses. His own phone chimes constantly with text message notices, so I hiss back "it was MOM; I have CHILDREN." Death does not bring out the best in all of us.

Suddenly, I hear Mr. O'Neill say something about a "witness cremation."

"Wait. What are you talking about?" I ask.

"The witness cremation," he says. He explains the scenario. "The family can request to be there at the cremation. They are able to view the body and then watch as the body enters the furnace. They can remain in the cremation room as long as they like."

I imagine flames; I imagine a burst of flames enveloping my father's corpse: a pyre.

"Maybe I want to do that," I say. Everyone except Mr. O'Neill looks at me funny.

"I don't want to do that," says my sister.

"Me neither," says my brother.

"No way," says my stepmother. "You're on your own with that one."

"That's okay," I assure them, looking at Mr. O'Neill.

"It isn't like Hollywood," he says, not looking at me.

I'm embarrassed that he's read my mind. "Can I think about it?" I ask him.

"Of course!" he says. "Just let me know as soon as possible, so that I can make the arrangements. We won't do much, just try to make him look a little better. He will have been in the freezer for a few days. It takes a while for the State to create the death certificate, longer now that they have everything computerized."

The feeling in the room was one of generosity, so nothing sounded cold. Death sounded warm and inviting, in fact.

I decided to do the witness cremation. My uncle Pat met me at the mortuary on Wednesday morning. I'd dressed up a little, and I covered my hair -- because it was filthy -- with a scarf. As I left the house that morning, my mother laughed and told me I looked like aMuslim woman. When I arrived at the mortuary, my Uncle Pat laughed and said that when he saw me walk in, he thought I was a Muslim woman.

A different mortician led us into the back room. They brought my father out, his body covered with a white sheet, a terry cloth towel wrapped like turban around the hole in his head where thecraniectomy happened.

My uncle and I stood over him, quietly. Then my uncle said, "He looks like Santa Claus."

"He does," I said, and he did. His face was a little blue, like he'd been driving his sleigh through the north pole all night. A little red and frostbitten. I touched his stomach.

"I kissed my dad when I saw him dead," Uncle Pat said, "and he was so, so cold."

"I don't want to kiss him," I said. But I wanted to touch him one more time. I touched his forehead, whispered, "I love you, dad. Thank you for everything. I have no complaints whatsoever." Tears gushed from my eyes, gathered on the tip of my nose and fell on his body.

The attendants wearing dark suits looked at us with anticipation. We nodded to them. They took hold of the gurney and rolled it toward the furnace. One of them pushed a button and the door of the oven opened. The inside was a large metal
box, and I could see flames reflected in the metal's sheen. They pushed my father in, and the door closed. The attendant pushed another button, and the incinerator geared up and then ignited full force. We stood there for a few more moments, then we left the room. On the way out, I thought to myself, "His mustache looked perfect."

Row

Tonight putting Diego to bed is a chore with mixed blessings, or, rather, a blessing and a curse. It takes especially forever, tonight when one is tired and waiting patiently -- oh. so. patiently. -- for the end of the day to come, for a time when it's possible to be alone, or pseudo-alone. One has been waiting; that is, I have been waiting to sit down and listen to my mind for a few extended minutes, to be able to think my own thoughts for a while instead ofanother's, specifically a two year old and ten month old's thoughts.

At these kinds of moments, I imagine that life is a boat, put out to sea, and I am sitting in that boat. And I have a choice to jump boat or to sail on. And so I sail on.

Finally, I get Diego to settle down, to stop saying "Hi!" to everything: the cat, the trees outside, the ceiling. Finally, I am able to nurse him into quietude, to help him drop down into alpha state, to coax him toward sleep. I sing him his favorite song, over and over:


Row, Row, Row your boat,
Gently down the stream,
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,
Life is but a dream.

I sing it to him over and over, as he stares at the shutters, blinking in the last light of the day. He stares, mewls, chuckles and swoons, smiling, toward dreaming.

I sing the song so many times, it takes on that sonorousness of a lesson. I see my father's life, so short. I realize that for the rest of my life, his life and my life with him will be a dream. Whether it be a shared dream, I know not. But I like to believe it will be.

I sing it so many times I start to cry. Life is but a dream. Is it possible to live merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, rowing our boats down the stream, toward the sea?

the misery and the happiness

We're back in Houston.

Conflicted, because of the weather, inside and outside, we rail against one another, trying to balance the weight of loss with the dream of loss.

It's hard all over.

All over, it's hard.

It's all overhard,

I could leave my feelings like that, all short, terse, oblique and resonant.

Or, I could expound (v.), expose (v.), exposition (v.).

Or, I could keep the energy wound up, coiled in my brain like a snake, swooning into a pounce.

My father died of an aneurysm. And a stroke. He died at 71 years old. 1000 people attended his funeral. The service consisted of a high mass, in the Mexican/Anglo spirit of the place. Mariachis provided the music liturgy, readings were chosen with care (I read the first reading from the Book of Job). Father Art's homily and Tony Moiso (current head of the family that bought the rancho from my family) eulogizing my father captured the girth of Tony's spirit, shared that spirit with all who were there. Truly the attendees formed a pageant of meaningful people from my father's life. It was a celebration of him and the of way he lived.

He was truly, without a doubt, the life of the party.

The California Highway Patrol closed the Ortega Hywy Exit on Interstate 5 for the funeral procession from the Mission Basilica in San Juan Capistrano to the old cemetery, where my father's ashes were buried between his mother and father's graves. The sun was bright. The sky was blue. It was the perfect California day: warm in the sun (almost hot), cool in the shade. With a breeze in the shade, one would be almost cold. After the graveside service, we walked down the hill with our children and extended family and with friends, walking back through town to the mission, or finding our pre-parked cars in one of the “shopping centers” at the bottom of the hill. My mother parked her Toyota Camry in the handicapped spot next to the old Forster Mansion. David and I sat and waited with Clara and Diego for 30 minutes, hoping to finally see my mom walking down the cemetery hill to open the car for us so that we could get going to the fiesta.

Following the funeral was the fiesta out Ortega Highway at Las Amantes Ranch, one of my father's favorite spots on the old Rancho Mission Viejo. Mariachis greeted the guests; picnic tables were dressed with table clothes and covered with shady tents. The beer truck, liquor wagon and Margarita stands served libations constantly and tirelessly. I had half a Margarita. I took two sips of it, set it down and came back to an empty cup. I couldn't eat any of the food because of my dietary restrictions; I drank a lot of water, and it felt like I was swimming in condolences. By the end of the day, I had a headache the size of Iowa.

Nevertheless, I appreciated everyone who came out to say goodbye to Tony and to share this loss with our family.

My father is proud of and grateful to his community. His family is, too.

Thank you.

The King is Dead. Long Live the King.

Tomas Antonio Forster, September 3, 1935 -- June 12, 2007.

And There Was Dancing and Music

And movin to the groovin.

I've been purging my books, my life really: going through books and CDs and papers. Jesus I have so many papers. I come from a line of packrats, most notably my father; the man has kept every single item that had any history for him personally, including the first bill he paid after graduating from college. WEST POINT. And don't you forget it.

Papers...what are all these papers? Poems, my own and other peoples, files of things that have personal history for me -- IBP postcards, teaching lessons, shit I don't know what it is nor what it's good for. I got to get rid of my shit.

By the way, we're having a garage sale, an estate sale, really because it's going to be inside our estate, the estate we're leaving for another, smaller, more economical estate. Smaller. Did I say smaller? Small-er-er-er-er. Last week, in preparation for the move, I proclaimed to David that I was only going to take 100 books to the new house, excluding my poetry collection; the entirety of which I refuse to part from. Well, I did give away my 1974 Anthology of Modern Hungarian Poetry. By give away I mean set aside. It'll be for sale on a Friday and Saturday very soon. Probably that's the only one I should keep. Who knows, I'll bet the Hungarians are going to break out as the next Superpoets of the world.

But the dancing and the music, that's what I wanted to talk about. I used to listen to a lot of music, used to purchase these things called CDs. They were more expensive than tapes, but better for some reason...maybe because they never wear out. Right? Or do they? Mine are all worn out, tired and lonely and dusty and slapped all up together with other lonely, dusty CDs. I have music on my ipod now or in my computer or in my distant memory. Do I really need these CDs? No. I do not. So why can't I just wipe them off the shelves into the boxes for the garage sale, I mean estate sale? Because each CD holds at least one memory which is tied to either a song or a mood that dominated during the time I was listening to the CD; and memory is seductive, it requires your time. And I don't have the time to listen to all the music in the world, especially because now I live with three other people who not only compete for my time, but also compete with me for music listening space. Mostly, my children win. I listen to decent children's music (it's catchy!), but I used to listen to good adult music. "Adult music" sounds like it nasty but it's not nasty. I still listen to Bob Dylan; I let Clara listen to a Bob Dylan mix every night for 15 months as her bedtime music. I had to make sure she had his patterns measured into her brain. But after Bob Dylan, the fidelities start to muddy up, the waters get murky. Do I want this Moby? NO. But then I have to listen to it to try and figure out why the fuck I bought it in the first place. There was a song tied to a memory, I'm sure. What about these Joni Mitchells? YES, but she's one of those people that I have to wait for, it's harder to make time for her admist the Reggae Playground or Carol King's Really Rosie. And, really, how many more times am I going to have to listen to Joni Mitchell in my lifetime? I may have listened to her enough. And anyway, I already transferred her to my computer, so she's on my ipod. The ipod takes up a ridiculously less amount of space; therefore, I can get rid of the Joni CDs. But then there are those CDs that I haven't burned yet, like "Tom and Elis" by Antonio Carlos Joabim. Like Coltrane's "A Love Supreme". Like Wilco's double album. Like a bunch of other ones.

But I want to get rid of stuff; I'm interested in travelling light.

I Want To

I want to say goodbye to Zorca, our gypsy neighbor who's put down roots in the townhouse on the corner of Travis and Stuart: Our psychic friend, our comrade. I will miss her. She has this amazing voice, amazing. It sounds exactly what a crazy old lady's voice should sound like, shrieking and urgent, near-hysterical, yet wise beyond its whelps.

This house we're leaving, it is haunted; we said goodbye to the ghosts. We'd heard about one ghost from a previous tenant who stopped by one evening with his lover because they'd been walking on the sidewalk in front of the house and run into David who was taking out the trash. The previous tenant came upstairs to look around the old place, and he told us the story of the ghost who hurled one of his floor lamps across the room, or something equally catastrophic, when he'd lived here.

We had no episodes like that one. But in fact, we had not-so-subtle catastrophes that could not be attributed per se to ghosts. Like the time the fleas infested, or the time it poured buckets of rain down through the attic door into our bedroom on Memorial Day two years ago. Like the lead paint, the nails sticking out of the warping hardwoods, the general decay everpresent -- from the shedding shingles of white paint adorning the outside, to the squirrel corpses that, while they rot, infuse the air we've had to breathe with the pungent, unmistakable odor of death. Hard to escape that smell; it creeps into everything. Both times our children were just home from being born, an animal rotted beneath the floorboards under the bed I nursed them in.

My father still lies in a drug-induced coma in Mission Hospital in California. They, the doctors, are afraid to allow his brain any stimulation. His brain needs rest, they say. Yes, we say to one another; he needs rest. And he does. My father needs a lot of rest. He has lived hard the past 71 years, a charmed life, as my brother Marco dubs it. He deserves to die a hero in his own mind, my father, which is what he worked his whole life to be: a hero in his own mind.

Is he big enough to be a hero in my mind? If you know more than a little about my father, more than a little about me, you know that the decision for me to consider my father a hero is one that must be made with the purest love, because my father and I? We fought. Always and consistently: to the death. We fought so hard, we actually hated one another truly and purely at times. But always within that hatred lived the ghost of love, bright love, true love. Real love, no matter what shape it chose to show up in. And I don't even feel bad about romanticizing my father because, in fact, he is a hero in my mind. He lived up to me, to the largeness I required of him. That is no small feat. I'm proud of him.

What I miss most right now is his voice -- the boom and bust of it, his whimsy, his self-satisfied delight in his own observations. In the last five years, most every time I called him (and it was only maybe three times a month), I'd catch him potting his plants, his flowers specifically, around his patio overlooking San Clemente and the Pacific Ocean. He'd tell me what he was doing, and what a perfect day it was. "It's another perfect day here in Southern California," he'd say accusingly.

"It's hot here," I'd say. Or "it's raining," or "it's sorta cold here."

"I don't know why anyone would choose to live in fucking Houston," he'd say. "I live in Paradise."

"It's complicated," I would say sometimes, although rarely. Mostly, I'd just say, "Yeah...."

I wish I had a recording of my father's voice. I have a recording of my brother Marco imitating him, and it's scary, the verisimilitude Marco can capture. He knows how to dramatize my father's gross humanity with expertly observed examples. He's genius, my brother, and I'm grateful for him.

Today, while talking to Marco on the phone, I could hear the ghost of my father in him, and I realized that the ghost of my father has been there, here, with us forever; and therefore, he will be with us forever. And that is enough.

The Seventh Thing

The last thing in this meme streak that you may not know about me is that I am currently in California because my dear, dear dad had an aneurysm yesterday, May 29, and is currently in a coma. I'm here with my siblings and extended family.

I trust that things will be what they will be.

The Sixth Thing

I pray.

The Fifth Thing

I have never read Moby Dick.

The Fourth Thing

I have a 1948 Martin guitar that I never play anymore, and it plays beautifully. I am terrified to sell it, although I fantasize about how much money I could get for it.

The Third Thing

I learned grammar from teaching grammar. Before that, I wrote by ear. I still write by ear, more than by eye. But now my grammar is better. Not perfect, but good enough.

The Second Thing

The Second Thing people may not know about me is that my favorite contemporary book of poems is Jelly Roll by Kevin Young. And my favorite poem in Jelly Roll is called "Boogie Woogie".

Boogie Woogie
(c) 2003
by Kevin Young

I'll be your lunch
date, your party

favorite--wind
up & watch me run

down--ten
nine eight--

I'm your New
Year's Eve hat

with the propeller
on it--confetti

& kiss me
I'm kazoo for you

fool, counting
down the days

like those numbers
before films, a glimpse

that once, before Abbot
& Costello

a screen test
lady winked & was

gone--spliced in,
us laughing.

The First Thing

Robin, of The Other Mother, tagged me with a meme: 7 things people may not know about me.

The first thing is that I was in a band, a rock band, for seven years. Lead singer, lead songwriter, shitty guitarist. We played at several Houston clubs regularly: Rudyards, Mary Janes, the Edge, the Ale House. Our band was called Shag, and it was born before the movie Austin Powers was born, so it wasn't a geeky cliche at the time, or at least we didn't think so. We chose it for the entendres: it is a haircut (I had a shag in third grade), a baseball play, a dance, a carpet, a fuck. Before I was with Shag, I was in a band called Shiksa -- comprised of two Jewish brothers and me. For Shiksa, I sang and played the bass SO INCREDIBLY BADLY. Shiksa had many, many rehearsals, but only one show, which took place in the living room of the band leader's house. There were at least 27 people there. We had some good songs.

Gomez

After church on Sundays when I was a little girl, our family ritual was to drive around the San Juan Capistrano valley gomezing, as my dad called it.

To my dad, "to gomez" means to be a busy body. A guy in my dad's high school class named Gomez was always getting into other people's business; hence, the term was born.

For example, when I was little, my dad would often take detours on the way home from Thrifty's or the horse stables, driving through the Kinoshita's snow pea fields, or into some new housing development, around the back roads and side streets of our town, always in an idle sort of way, just to see what was going on, even though nothing was going on usually. When, exasperated, I'd ask him what he was doing, he'd say, "I'm being a gomez; shut up." Likewise, if one of his children seemed too nosy or intrusive regarding his property or doings, he would tell us to stop being such a gomez.

Nostalgia, noun

When I lived in Spain, in Salamanca, on Calle de Espiritu, I fell ill in the fall and was ill all through the wretchedly cold winter. The illness, so mysterious, never named, sprang upon me with a vengeance, and then settled in, hosted itself in my body, a comfortable guest there I suppose because my body was brittle from starvation, self-imposed. My mind, fuzzed by fever, could not grip the reality of what was happening, and I lived so much a spectator of myself, that I might as well have been watching the movie of my life: a depressing one, at that.

Every day at the comida, the family I lived with, talked around me to one another about the minutia of their lives, catching up, even though they lived on top of one another in a palatial five bedroom apartment that could not have been larger than 1000 square feet. Sometimes, I sat silent throughout the meal. They talked about me to one another, weighing in their opinions about what was wrong with me, as if I were not there. One afternoon, the lady of the house, La Senora, told the family that I was muriendo de nostalgia, dying of nostalgia.

I was only 21, and I translated her diagnosis, this nostalgia, as loneliness. I was dying of loneliness.

Years later, a man who was pursuing me although I had a boyfriend, lived with him even, diagnosed me with the same illness. "You know what your problem is?" he said, a little laughingly. "Your just lonely."

"How can I be lonely," I answered, "when I'm surrounded by people?"

"You don't understand," he said, "do you?"

Years after that, another man, a friend named Christian, told me that he described me to his friends as a beautiful cynic. I took it as a compliment because of the beautiful part. But tonight, I thought of that description as I sat alone on our balcony, not lonely, just alone, and I thought about how this description, which was probably right at the time he said it, was no longer right. Or that I no longer wanted it to be right. To be a cynical person is a way to distance oneself from the fray of life as it happens, to sit outside of one's life, to judge it and dismiss it with a carefully crafted sentence, tossed out lightly, but weighted with sarcasm and defeat tucked inside the sentence's syntax like stones sewn inside the hem of a coat. What is meant to be a terse quip is actually an admission of the incredible longing for connection, for a feeling of fullness and grace. Cynicism can become a mental stone, a heaviness that results in a coldness of being.

Nostalgia is like that, too. Defined as "the condition of homesickness", or "a yearning for situations, people and places in the past" (www.dictionary.com), nostalgia eats away at one's consciousness so that the grace that exists every moment in the present sits like a specter at the banquet table, the same table where one sits, also, surrounded by people, still lonely as a stone.

Favorite Teen Movies

The Breakfast Club (My mom's best friend in college was Anthony Michael Hall's kindergarten teacher. That guy looked like he was still in kindergarten when he did that movie.)

Pretty in Pink (Psychedelic Furs!)

Valley Girl (Nicholas Cage at his best -- except for Adaptation was awesome, too, and that Vampire movie where he eats the roach, and Moonstruck.... Also, the Plimsouls singing "A Million Miles Away")

Grease (every single part of it)

St. Elmo's Fire (Rob Lowe.)

Awakening

My friends Christopher and Rachel and I drove back over the Golden Gate
Bridge after spending a day hiking to a beach at the foot of MountTamalpais. We were cranky from the tension of it being the end of a summer, a
long one, in which I'd been leaving for months, on my way to Houston,
TX via Orange County, California. The era hadn't ended yet, but it was
ending, and we didn't want to talk about it. The tension ensued because
our age, then early 20s, was a time when we had no idea what we were
doing nor where we were going next. And because we wanted to speak our
minds to one another, we talked a lot about the meaning of life and
stuff like that. And our earnestness helped us tolerate each other's recklessness.

I was obsessing about a man, a sculptor named Chico, who made robots and installed them in the Exploratorium Museum, where I worked designing an ever elusive group vistor
program, answering phones, and sorting mail. Rachel worked in Group
Benefits there. She and I were there together on days when the public
wasn't, when people like SteveBuscemi were visiting because his wife, the artist Jo Andres, was in residence at the museum.

Christopher and I are close friends from college in Los Angeles,
and when we were in our early 20s, we lived in San Francisco as
struggling young writers, the two of us. And although we weren't living
together (I was a nanny in the Richmond district), we hung out every
day together as friends, struggling young writer friends. And although
Rachel and I worked right next to each other, we never really talked
until the day Chris and I happened upon her wandering alone through the
crowd at the free BonnieRaitt and Jackson Brown Day of the Dead concert at City Hall. From that day, we three were one unit.

And while I was in love with the two of them, and while they were (and still are) two of my best friends, they were SO not supportive of my obsession with Chico, the robot sculptor. And in retrospect, this is how best friends should act -- concerned about you! -- when you are acting all stark and nearly raving mad. And we're crossing the bridge, and I'm chattering on about how I hope torun into the robot sculptor in Seattle, because I'm going there soon to see my friends Ed and Lee and maybe we'll go to his art opening.

"Does he even know you're gonna be in Seattle?" Rachel asks.

"No" I say.

"What are you? Like Fatal Attraction?" Chris says.

"What. Maybe metaphorically." I say.

"Christa! The world is NOT A METAPHOR," Rachel says.

"But it is to me," I practically whimper.

And it was. And I knew then, as we rode together over the Golden Gate Bridge, that living according to the ways and means of the metaphorical world would not be an easy thing.

The Way it Was

I grew up in the OC, which in the current parlance stands for a decadent ennui, a suburban nonchalance, a foyer in a side palace of Hell.

Tonight, Vernon and Adam are younger than we are, in their 20s, and they live in a fantastic old Spanish apartment complex on Main, very Tennesse Williams, very Camino Real. They are visiting us and are outside right now telling stories with David. When Adam asked me if I grew up in Houston, I tell him, sadly, no. I answer Orange County, California, when he asks where I did grow up. "The OC," he says as if he knows something about the place without having ever been there, a common result of the show on ABC or whatever channel it's on. I've never seen the show. But having lived in the real thing, I don't need to see it. I know what it was like to grow up there: awful and awesome. Totally. Simultaneously.

Braindrain #1

My friend Lucy created a film about her obsession (now past) with Ed Norton, Jr. I think it's called My Obsession with Ed. Norton, Jr. She asked me to participate, because apparently when she first confided in me about her crush on Ed Norton, asking what she should do about it, I told her to ask the universe for help. She wanted me to relate that part of her story to her audience.

I'd actually forgotten about saying that to her, although it did sound like something I probably said. Like when I was drunk or something.

But no, actually, the more I thought about it, the more I knew that not only did I say that to her, but also I said it to her in earnest. At the time of her film-making, It was not clear to me whether or not she had taken my advice literally, except for the fact that she did make a film about her obsession, and she did show that film to her now-husband Jeff on one of their first dates, which I happened to be there for; I happened to be there for their initial crush evening, too, and I remember Lucy's thrill at the end of the evening. "I have a crush on Jeff," she said, "and we're going out next weekend."

Now they're married. So maybe she did petition the universe, and instead of meeting Ed Norton, she met her husband; and maybe just ONE of the reasons he fell in love with her was because of her film about her obsession with Ed Norton, her husband an artist and therefore prone to falling in love with talent. And besides, Ed Norton was dating Salma Hayek, so he was already taken.

What is love? Tamarie Cooper explores this in her most recent show -- 20 Love Songs at Infernal Bridegroom Productions. Daniel Adame does this hilarious and heartwrenching dance to "What is Love? (Baby Don't Hurt Me)." And I've heard that Amy Bruce and George Parker's thing called "A Woman's Complex Relationship with her Vibrator" is flat out hysterical. I created a piece called MAW about mother love. It's gonna go up the first two weekends in June. If you've seen any of Tamarie's work, for example her Tamalalia series, you know that she creates shows that are poingnant and hilarious, the kind of comedy that draws us all in, that reminds us of our humanity and, also, of our godliness. She, herself, reads from her teenage journals about, for example, how she decided in 9th grade to become a "cutter" and how she used a pebble to draw first blood from her arm, giving the audience an insider's view into how Tamarie, and the phenomenon that is Tamarie Cooper, came into existence. 20 Love Songs is a show is not to be missed, dear readers. Not to be missed.

===

How many lightbulbs would it take to change the world?

One per household. David heard Michael Bloomberg speak the other day at a Greater Houston Partnership luncheon. Mayor Bloomberg sighted a statistic about how if everyone in New York City replaced one incandescent lightbulb with one fluorescent lightbulb, they could reduce this country's energy costs dramatically [or was it significantly?]. Bloomberg then said that the energy saved this way could power the empire state building for an entire year.

I've been dreaming about green. I want a green house, as in a house that impacts the earth minimally, and that does not emit toxic gasses, fumes and particles into our living space. I want the artist Mara Adamitz Scrupe to design a solar energy system for our house that is also an art installation. I want her to do this on the ranch that I want to own on the Central Coast of California. I plan to own this ranch one day. A medium-size ranch. A place for people I love to come and live and rest. And play. And work, if they want to. I dream sometimes of living in an extended family compound on the ranch that I plan on owning. I probably dream this because I'm away from them so much and I can't remember how miserable I let them make me. Sometimes.

The randomness of tonight's post reminds me of how I write in my notebook. It's what I used to call a "braindrain" with my high school students, a term I stole from my husband David's father, David, before I ever knew my husband David.

The universe works in mysterious and methodical ways.