MindSpinner

(Started Sunday)

Let’s shoot straight. The life of a single mother of teenagers can be challenging. There are drop-of-the-hat social arrangements requiring the services of a chauffeur, predictable struggles for independence, and midnight kitchen raids guaranteed to wake me up. There are last-minute projects and academic crises. Indeed there is one huge long-running academic crisis. There are monumental crushes and broken hearts. More essentially, one of the resident campers has some problems getting along with mom despite the fact that mom is really a pretty good mom and not a bitch after all (a fact which will probably come to light in a few years).

So, there are challenges, and there’s no partner at hand to strategize with or commiserate with or just carve out this separate mutually supportive and companionable grown up life with, to counterbalance these last few transitional years of parenting. (I compare them to transitional labor, you know, those hard contractions that do the business of getting a baby born. What transitional labor does to the female anatomy - rather violently reshaping a woman’s body in a matter of hours to widen a passage - adolescence does to the relationship between parent and soon-to-be adult. There’s a passageway to independence that has to be shaped, ties that have to stretch and loosen; the process is sometimes painful to everyone concerned.)

It’s enough to make a girl (that would be me - oh heck, humor me) wanna go dancing - even if I’ve mostly forgotten how. Even better, I could take lessons. Weekly lessons. I could steal back one night a week for a bit of fun, for my independent life. I did like to dance very much a long time ago, before I started to date the boy who didn’t. So Saturday night on the Web I checked out places offering dance lessons in the City by the River. I found a place that looked promising - I wouldn’t have to bring a dance partner - but it didn’t list prices right up front, just touted a free first lesson instead. When I did find prices, they were predictably steep. For a few seconds I envisioned showing up for a whole series of free first lessons in various disguises/personas. That would be twice the fun. But then I looked over at my yawning closet. It wasn’t yawning very widely because it isn’t very big. Judging from its contents, I could only dress as school teacher A, B, or C, glasses on or off. I don’t have a bevy of 100-pound short friends who keep vastly varied wardrobes and assortments of wigs either. Disguises would indeed cost more than the lessons.

Another good idea, like the goats, down for the count.

Today I went to the progressive church in the city for the first time in months, partly because the days seem empty and partly because the minister wrote me an email to see whether I might be coming back now that summer is here. Church, however, is not a social activity, unless one joins a Sunday School class, which one is most unlikely to do. One sits, one stands, one sings, one says “Peace of Christ” to one’s pew neighbors, one listens and sings again. Then there’s greeting the minister and back to the car. There is still something good about the experience. I like the singing together; I’m reminded that somewhere past all the crap that passes for Christianity nowadays there is a loving spirit abiding in all; the congregation is not all white; women share leadership roles; it’s an open-arms sort of place, whether you’re gay or a refugee from Sudan or a minister’s ex-wife. Besides, it doesn’t look like a Baptist church. It looks Romanesque. I’m irrationally grateful for that part.

(continued Monday AM)

The afternoon saw the kids off to their dad’s for a few hours - first time in three weeks. I didn’t know my son had taken with him the packet that came in the mail the other day for our state’s National Guard ChalleNGe Academy, but I soon found out. By the time he came home after dinner, he had decided to apply, to the cheers of the other household and even his military-connected grandparents in Virginia. His ultimate dream? A career in the Navy. I’m not sure the Navy will ultimately have a recruit with ADD and fibromyalgia, even if he knows the armaments of every naval force on the entire globe and is already something of a naval historian. (He’d make a fine naval historian.)

If he is admitted, when would he leave home, don a uniform, and undertake studies for his GED? Why, in less than three weeks. Will this actually happen? We’ll know soon enough. Suddenly the transitional years appear to have telescoped into a few weeks.

This is about as transitional as a catapult. Is it good? Is it bad? Given that he’s stalled in high school, it could be good; it could be a turn-around. Or it could be too much, given his physical challenges. Or it could be a first step on a road to a destiny I would have given anything to spare him. But it’s not up to parents to script their children’s destinies and decisions, so this will play out.

Emily Dickinson’s poems enchant me over and over because they are enacted on any summer’s day in any garden. A Robin still comes down the walk, an unlucky worm in its beak; bees still plunder blossoms. This particular poem just makes me happy, and so did spending an hour in the garden with the camera, capturing what I otherwise might not look closely enough to see. Both poem and garden bespeak faith in continuity, in life and its rituals that long outlast poets and gardeners.

Bees are Black, with Gilt Surcingles –
Buccaneers of Buzz.
Ride abroad in ostentation
And subsist on Fuzz.

Fuzz ordained — not Fuzz contingent –
Marrows of the Hill.
Jugs — a Universe’s fracture
Could not jar or spill.

I had never eaten a parsnip, nor indeed taken a good look at one until just the other day. As a child, I misspelled the word once a long time ago in a spelling bee down South; the woman who read the word ladeled it out as “paahshnip.” My California-trained ears were then no match for a Georgia drawl. But this past week I was looking into vegetables that, with a little protection, can be grown through the winter, and parsnips are among these. The parsnip was a staple in European diets, I read, before the potato supplanted it. It sounded like a vegetable that needed to be given a second chance. So when I saw parsnips at the grocery store a few afternoons ago in the produce section, I picked out two of the fresher looking ones. Most were a bit rubbery. They looked like long, tan carrots with little root hairs here and there. At home I cut the smaller one up, cooked it with an onion and a bit of sugar, salt, pepper, and basil, and gave it a try. It tasted as if (sugar, onion, and basil aside) one could distill paint thinner from it. Ugh. Little wonder the potato replaced it. I ate all the yummy buttery onion bits off the plate and left the parsnip slices. Then I cut up the second parsnip, collected peelings and cooked bits, and fed the lot to the compost bin. Being able to feed stuff to the compost bin happily disguises waste as investment and assuages parsnip guilt.

I’ve had to change my WordPress options today to require registration and log-in before readers can comment here. I usually have to delete 50-100 comments a day queued fairly harmlessly in “moderation,” but when I get 2365 instances of comment spam in a day, such that my browser crashes in the attempt to select them for deletion, measures must be taken :->. Those who occasionally post genuine comments, know that your responses are always appreciated here. I hate to have to put up an extra hurdle for you to jump through in order to make a comment, but the only other alternative right now is turning off comments altogether.

I’ve been nibbling on that bag of almonds
we bought together when you came.
I counted today: seven left, lined up
end to end at the bottom of the bag.
No more small handfuls.
Maybe I will eat only one tomorrow.
Maybe I will eat the last one not at all.