Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes....

It is time to face the strange changes....

Small Child turned nine years old yesterday.

As I watched her run and ride and twirl with her friends I realized she was no longer Small Child.

So three cheers and nine candles to Young Girl, in all her glory.

Making Beautiful Music

If a blood-sucking, buzzing bitch is in the same county, she will find me. And feast.

No, this is not the first line in my new lesbian vampire novel.

I am a mosquito all-you-can-eat buffet. A smorgasbord. A slop-trough.  You get the idea. But, as a new article in the journal Science explains, I have the metaphors all wrong.

I am a symphony hall; a dim, romantic piano bar; a frenetic 80s disco dance floor on ladies' night.

You see, for mosquitoes  it truly don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing. 

A receptive female mosquito ito emits a tone, say a G; an interested male emits a tone a perfect fifth higher, a D. When the notes align and the pitch is right, they create an audible (to those with wings or fancy recording equipment) overtone. 

Mosquitoes mate only when this overtone is present.

Males without perfect pitch don't get to play.

It just goes to show you, guys: your pick-up line better be pitch perfect.

Learn more about this fascinating story here.

photo credit: Visuals Unlimited/Corbis via npr.org

We Can Build a Dream With Love

Beautiful image by Jen Lemen* used with artist's permission

Come on people! Sons and mothers! 

Keep the dream of the two young brothers. 

Gonna take that dream and ride that dove.

We could build the dream with love, 

We could build the dream with love.

I got fury in my soul, fury's gonna take me to the glory goal. 

In my mind I can't study war no more.

(Lyrics by Laura Nyro)

Today I drove Small Child to school on a bright, cool Texas morning...the best possible weather. In yesterday's mail, we'd received a copy of a long lost CD, a mix I'd made to celebrate the first birthdays of a mess-o-babies born in our Oregon town in the year 2000. We rolled through the flat, sere pastures, rediscovering old favorites and singing along with everyone from Sinatra to Smash Mouth when the gentle acoustic strums of Roseanne Cash's cover of "Save The Country" broke through like  Hand-of-God-Through-The-Clouds-Sunshine.

About half way through, when I heard the lyrics I've copied above, I hit repeat.

And again.

And again.

And then it hit me in the gut.

On January 20, our nation will have kept that dream.

And if, as I fervently hope, the older brother's brilliant daughter is seated in the United States Senate, we will have built it with love.

Godspeed, Barack and Caroline, as you approach your glory goals.

A nation is behind you, fury in our soul.

*Jen Lemen is an amazing blogger, artist, doula, mother, NPR contributor, and advocate for the girls and women of Africa. Please visit her blog for information on her work, both written and visual.

I Embark

After my daughter was born, I decided I would conquer my "math block." I resolved, at age 41, to complete a calculus course before I turned 50.

One obstacle lay in my path: my last math instruction, trigonometry, had taken place when I was 17. Truth was, I could no longer factor an equation.

Finally I had a reason to be thankful for the sad state of public education. I enrolled in the easiest developmental math course at the university where I worked. While on maternity leave, I factored and solved while my baby slept. I loved it. Putting numbers in neat columns and arriving at finite, correct answer was the perfect counterbalance to the chaos of first-time motherhood.

I breezed through the three "pre-credit" courses once I got my number legs back; the hardest part was using that newfangled graphing calculator. In the old days, such wonders didn't exist and the dinosaur versions were so expensive - even though TI was a 20 minute drive from our school - that we had one per classroom and had to take turns. Yes, Virginia, we used slide rules. Google the term.

My return to work coincided with my entry into "College Algebra." I was doing fine, but the combination of math, child care, sorting out the adminstrivia of six months' absence, and finding time to sleep was not working and I put numeracy aside.  And I never resumed, even after I resigned and returned to Texas.

So 50 came and went last month with nary a bit of calculus. No big.

But I have decided that something else absolutely must come to pass this year. I owe it to myself and to one amazing teacher in my past and colleague and friend in the present, Carol Daeley.

I've never read a novel by Charles Dickens. 

It's a long story, but over the years it's become a point of perverse pride, a literary party-fact: "Why, yes, I'm an aborted-doctor-of literature and you know what? I've never read Dickens. Take THAT."

But in my sixth decade, it's time to shit or get off the pot. My education is incomplete. 

I have chosen Bleak House, and just clicked the checkout button on amazon. The die is cast. 

I Still Love the Modernists

I've been out of the crosshairs of the literary canon for quite a good long time. During my most recent enmeshment, the writers I "specialized in" during graduate school - The Modernists -  had fallen out of favor. Their deadwhitemale corpses were the cannibal feasts of fierce young Xinists and Xicists who, ironically, had adopted one of the great Modernist mottoes:

Make It New

Everyone was chasing after some new writer and some new angle to (dare I say) fetishize, and being Dead and White and Male pretty much meant a writer was Going To Pay. 

Given, the new writers were mostly wonderful; granted, the old writers (they weren't all men though they were all dead and they pretty much were all white) were not always on the fashionable side of the political fence. They drank, smoke, and screwed with abandon. Some were not very nice to each other or anyone else.

But they wrote with the angels. 

The angels.

I could go off on a rant here about how anyone who still thinks Hemingway is a misogynist needs to go on a very long retreat with a copy of The Sun Also Rises and anyone who thinks Faulkner is a racist should do the same with The Sound and The Fury, but I'll spare you.

Instead, I just want to tease you with a tiny bit of light. This isn't the happiest poem, but glory how it sings.

Take it away, Mr. Eliot.....

1. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

(T.S. Eliot 1888-1965)


S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero,
Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.


LET us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats 
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question … 
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.

...

If you would like to read on, click here.

Turning Over a New Lexicon

Those who know me will back me up on this one: I am not stodgy. I will say just about anything to anyone anywhere at anytime.

That said, however, I also believe that certain niceties should be observed, and right at the top of the list is Standard English When Appropriate. I toss around slang and, um, colorful diction all the time but I do my best to be cognizant of my audience. And one thing I guard against is the linguistic equivalent of “mutton dressed as lamb.” Nothing is more cringe-worthy than a middle-aged teacher trying to hang with the peeps. 

Writ small, u will not c me l8er. 

As a neophyte texter, I faced a dilemma every time I whipped out my thumbs. Character limits forced me to send three messages to every student’s one. And since it took me forever to figure out how to coax an apostrophe from my non-QWERTY device, I wrote without contractions for months.

Eventually I loosened up a bit, but only to a small circle.

My peeps, u no.

When I teach, my students are usually veterans of the AP wars; they write shell-shocked, stilted, voiceless prose and I must help them loosen not tighten their diction. But I still want things right, damn it.

So when I finally became a mother, those who’d known me for big chunks of the 41 years it took me to breed braced themselves for the birth not only of a girl child but also of a fire-breathing perfectionist bitch of a mother… Joan Crawford with The MLA Handbook.

But just as ligaments and tendons loosen to allow a baby’s body to pass through a small space, my rigidity collapsed in the presence of my daughter’s linguistic development. While an adult mispronouncing a word usually sends me running for the Xanax, I was fascinated by the organic process in which she sussed out verb tenses and found her "r" and "l." But I’m still a perfectionist on the inside, and her spelling is another story altogether. Maybe I’ll come back to that in another post, after enduring homework thanks to a couple of glasses of Oregon pinot noir. A commentator on NPR recently urged listeners to accept the reality that “thru” and “nite” may well become standard spellings in 10 years.

ROFLMAO!!! No wA.

But motherhood has relaxed me. It’s made me a more patient, process oriented teacher and a more self-forgiving writer (which is a good thing, considering that this post ended up in Chicago when I was headed for Providence, but oh, well…). My daughter has taught me more about Being, Impermanence, Suffering, and Life than any wall of texts could. She’s also inspired me and made me laugh.

And she’s a princess of neology.

I’d refer to her as a “neologist,” but Merriam-Webster Unabridged hasn’t extended its definition yet. So as my initial contribution to Lithia Writers’ Collective, I offer you two new words, courtesy of Small Child, age eight for six more days.

Snoreful: one who snores noticeably. “Mommy, Kaiser's such a snoreful dog.”
Braggative: someone (most often a third grade girl, but you never know….) who seems to think she’s awfully special. “Mommy, Narcissa’s nice, but she’s kind of braggative sometimes.”

Use these with pleasure, and happiest of Januarys to you all.

Starting The New Year Right

Today, a secret fantasy came true. No, Alan Rickman did not whisk me away to a remote windswept island.

My Oregon writing group, The Lithia Writers' Collective, invited me to fill the Friday blogging spot recently vacated by Julie Inada, a writer and writing teacher from whom I have stolen so many tips I should be locked away under the "Three Strikes" rules of most states. I have missed these women so much for so long that I can't wait to be part of the group, even if I'm 2000+ miles away. I only hope I can keep up, especially since I must follow Christy.

If I can overcome my mounting performance anxiety, you can read me tomorrow at LWC. 

Unless Alan shows up.

Then, dear friends, find yourselves another girl.